Human value in the advanced technological world we find ourselves in
I wanted to comment on this specific quote from the article:
"“Humans are valuable.” You can just say it. As a human yourself, I advise you to. You do not need to qualify it. This is a robust statement that is not conditional on a point-in-time snapshot of the leading frontier model’s score on some recent benchmark."
In the last ~20 years or so, we have become much more secular as a society. When I was growing up, most of my peers were dragged to church every Sunday. Many of them went through Confirmation. But as adults, almost none of them still attends church. Even their parents, who dutifully made my peers attend church every week, no longer attend.
It used to be that the presidential candidates had to demonstrate how religious they were, and had to belong to the right religious sects to be taken seriously. It was a big deal that John Kerry (2004) was Catholic and that Bernie Sanders (2016) was Jewish. Let's not get started on the disputed religious faith of Barack Obama, who was regularly accused of being Muslim.
All that to say, no one has cared about anyone's religion for a long time now.
But without a spiritual framework, people struggle to say that human life has inherent value. In the abortion debate, pro-choice arguments (not commenting on my personal opinion on abortion) often trivialize the value that human life has. If a fetus is "just a clump of cells" then what are humans at other stages in development? Technically, we are all just clumps of cells, but some of us are more capable than others.
In the past we could look at human achievements, compared to literally any other creature on the planet, and know that we were fundamentally special. We were doing science, making music and art, solving complex math, writing literature, building cathedrals and skyscrapers - and we did it better than any other species on the planet.
But now, AI can design and do a lot of that for us. Sure, people will still create art for their own gratification, but AI can create more.
Which leaves us with an existential question: what are humans valuable for now?
This now requires a return to a spiritual, religious framework. We can no longer look at the material world to measure human value.