The Subversion of Humanistic Significance in Intelligent Society and Its Development Approach ^†

Abstract

This paper discusses the slow and unbalanced development dilemma of humanistic significance in intelligent society. The emergence of this development dilemma stems from the fact that people’s living space is being dominated and squeezed by data, networks, and information in modern society. To solve this problem, this paper proposes three aspects to promote the cultivation of humanistic significance in intelligent society, which are: the flexible transformation of information acquisition and reprocessing, the transformation of the meaning output mode under intelligent cooperation, and the innovation of the function mode of humanistic significance on people.

1. Introduction

Intelligent society is a social form of human beings, and it is a new stage of the rapid development of human society. Since industrialization, mankind has stepped into an intelligent society. At present, people are moving forward along the path of intelligence. In the future intelligent society, human intelligence will be developed infinitely, and with the help of machine intelligence, we will explore the new leap development of human beings. People can fully use the technologies being developed, such as the Internet, computers, artificial intelligence, perception systems, the internet of things, mobile communication, spatial geographic information, quantum technology, new materials, new energy, new life science, brain-like nervous systems, cloud computing, unmanned machines, e-commerce, the industrial internet, digital government, intelligent education, intelligent medical treatment, and intelligent finance. Additionally, people’s lives will be more convenient.

On the other hand, people coexist with science, technology, information, and intelligence. People’s meaning and construction of self-life is bound to be related and integrated with the characteristic factors of intelligent society. This requires people to take into account two aspects of development:

Information 1: To promote the progress of intelligent society along with intelligent elements;

Information 2: To balance the development of humanistic significance that is being squeezed in time.

2. Humanistic Significance in Intelligent Society and Its Development Dilemma

The meaning of life nurtured by humanities depends on people’s understanding of the limitations of self-brain cognition. Self-cognition allows people to construct content that cannot be observed by experience by way of imagination and fiction. For example, people have successfully created a powerful “god” and constructed a “heart” that dominates people’s consciousness. People shape social order and regulate people’s words and deeds with the help of “god” and the “heart”. Humanities follow people’s feelings, emotions, and desires and then use them to maintain the stability of social values. Under the influence of perceptual elements, humanities have developed many concepts and values. They can meet people’s emotional needs and rationalize people’s emotional expression and settlement.

The humanities also pay attention to the maintenance of relationships between people. People have long realized the limitations of individual ability, so the maintenance of relationships between people is a basic practical content. Relationships between people cannot be maintained without the common perceptual needs and the conception of life. We are familiar with familial affection, love, and friendship. They are all important forces connecting people’s relations.

Modern society has already entered intelligent society. The slow-paced innovation speed is far slower than the development speed of information, data, and intelligence. Generally speaking, the subversion of humanistic meaning by intelligent society is highlighted in the rejection of the meaning creation chain. At the same time, information and data absorb human perceptual elements and a meaning generation mechanism into a wide range of intelligent systems. In this situation, the independent creation of humanistic meaning is facing the dilemma of being dispelled and subverted under the intervention of social intelligence factors.

The ancients conceived the mysteries in the brain in a perceptual way. When they constructed meaning, they relied on curiosity about the unknown and their own imagination. Intelligent society is different. People regard data and algorithms as the main path to understand everything in the world and regard the occurrence of people’s feelings, emotion, intuition, and imagination as the externality of the computing process. Similarly, the conclusions drawn from people’s analysis in the brain are also classified as the performance of calculation results [1]. It can be said that intelligent factors are objectifying and calculating the perceptual factors leading to humanistic meaning and promoting algorithms to replace people’s independent meaning creation. In this case, the traditional humanistic meaning is facing the development of a chain broken under the action of intelligent information.

Life in intelligent society may operate in a quantitative and controllable way. For a long time, people’s cognition and exploration of foreign objects have been centered on their own development needs. People continue to pay attention to all kinds of life in nature, pay attention to the development of life science and medicine, and consider maintaining physical health and extending the length of one’s life to be important goals. Reality shows that people’s average life is indeed much longer than in ancient times. However, in order to improve human life expectancy, we also need to face up to a problem. That is: the length of life that modern people are proud of is not unique to modern people. Some ancients could achieve it in a natural way. In other words, the achievements of modern medicine and life science are only to make human natural life reach the length they could have achieved [2]. Information, data, and intelligence, as the core elements of an intelligent society, still have a long space for development. Perhaps, one day in the future, medicine with the help of intelligence can overcome all diseases and enable people to successfully realize the maximum length of natural life. If this is true, will people stop pursuing the length of life? Obviously, the answer is no. For human beings, even if the maximum length of life at the physical level is realized, no one will be willing to accept the arrival of death. Therefore, people will continue to think about how to prolong their life. Then, it becomes thinking about how to use the power of science and technology to change physical life and completely open human arms to intelligence. At that time, people may use science and technology to reshape the human body structure, change the operation mode of the human body, and promote the coordinated evolution of life and science and technology. If people really do, or even realize human immortality, human life will become a semi biological and semi technological existence. At this time, is it necessary for us to pursue the eternal meaning of life? Perhaps, at that time, with the transformation of human natural life to semi biology and semi technology, the traditional construction of life meaning will lose the carrier of attachment.

In addition, humanistic significance has a social attribute, which is based on individual imagination and group common imagination [3]. In traditional society, the construction of a meaning network at the social and cultural level is inseparable from the maintenance of common imagination between people. Now, in the process of constructing interpersonal relationships, we rely on mobile phones and networks and rely on the analysis of various data. Under their intervention, the co-construction of meaning and face-to-face emotional sharing between people ends, because, with the information contained in network data becoming more and more comprehensive, people’s dependence on them is increasing. For example, people will set the intelligent communication in their hands as an automatic reply and an independent reply. At this time, the interaction between people in communication will be transformed into the interaction between people and intelligent information. In this interpersonal interaction, people’s individual imagination and common imagination between people are completely replaced by intelligence and abandoned by society. At the same time, the network of meaning between people will change with the maintenance mode of the relationship between subjects, giving way to the mathematical conclusions drawn from data information and intelligent analysis.

3. Humanistic Significance’s Continuation Path in Intelligent Society

Human beings can integrate their biological characteristics with data information. However, the need for biological characteristics will never disappear. In the future, it is difficult to predict how the proportion of scientific rationality and perceptual factors acting on people will change. If all human perceptual factors disappear, then, human beings will become no different from machines. Therefore, many scholars and experts believe that it is unlikely that human beings will completely create themselves into machines. As long as the significance and mode of perceptual development fits the human life structure, its force and influence will still have the possibility to expand. Another possibility is that people may encounter confusion when shaping themselves in a rational way. At this time, they will reflect on the necessity of the need for perceptual meaning. Although modern people are busy developing economy, creating technology, and promoting scientific development to improve their material living standards, people are still willing to squeeze out some time and energy to protect stray animals and send warmth to vulnerable groups to maintain the warm side of life. This shows that perceptual factors and humanistic significance have always been an organic part of human society [4].

In the future, in intelligent society, if the human race wants to continue the significance and value of humanities, they should coexist with data, information, and rationality, and they need to make breakthroughs in the following three aspects:

First, flexible conversion must be kept between information acquisition and reprocessing. People can repeatedly extract and process data in the data and information cluster. However, the significance comes from the humanistic value thinking outside the data information system. People’s life experience and thinking consciousness can be interfered by the information system. At the same time, people can reprocess the information they experience and realize. In this way, the creation of meaning becomes a multiple construction under the integration of objective information and subjective factors. On this basis, it promotes the coordinated evolution of meaning creation and information change.

Second, the transformation of the meaning output mode must be updated. When intelligence and information become the important dependences in people’s life practice, they must be the carrier for the output and transformation of meaning. Meaning is first transformed into an information object, and people accept it in the form of data information. The difference between meaningful information and traditional objective information requires the subject’s ability to distinguish independently while receiving information. At this time, it is necessary to substitute unique code information into the data coding of meaningful information and attach some subjective cognitive elements required to interpret specific information. For example, the explicit requirements for emotional state, the main emotional cooperation required to interpret information, etc.

Third, meaning acts on human model innovation must be promoted. In an information system, people’s perceptual cognition and rational analysis belong to the process of calculation. Their conclusions are also the results of calculation. This shows that people’s cognitive system itself has the ability of calculation and inference. To guide people in humanistic meaning, we should unify the operation mode of our own meaning system with calculation. In this way, we can deduce various possibilities of meaning into practical operation, estimate their feasibility, and finally compare and select the best way. On the contrary, if we only rely on subjective judgment and deviate from the data and information deduction of the intelligent society, the meaning will lose its humanistic role on the subject.

To deal with the subversion of humanistic significance in intelligent society, there have two options: choose the traditional way, and finally isolate itself from the intelligent society. Or, take the initiative to integrate with information and data to strive for its continuation in the future.

In fact, humans’ demand for sensibility and the development of humanities has been continuous, but their continuation mode and evolution path need to change with times in different historical stages.