Is Uncertainty What Makes Us Human?

oh gee...I...uh....I'm not sure?

Photo by Steve Johnson on Unsplash

Maybe it’s the Liberal bubble I call home, but this present moment feels like everyone is required to have an opinion on everything. AND that opinion should line up precisely with whomever you voted for. Democrats have one set of values, Republicans another. Those are the only two options!!

Not only must we all hold the requisite values, we should be voicing them loudly and often on social media, wearing t-shirts that proclaim them, basically bedecking ourselves and our property in the equivalent of political bumper stickers at all times.

I, myself, have felt this urge. During Trump 1.0, I amassed a collection of t-shirts which I called my “protest wardrobe.” When our political situation can best be summed up in the words: polarized and dire, every issue can take on life-or-death significance. Social media is full of Nazi Germany comparisons and this Martin Niemöller poem:

image courtesy of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

Niemöller makes a fair point about solidarity, but extrapolating his views on a literal holocaust to our current situation doesn’t leave a lot of room for nuance. If the other side are simply “Nazis” and all their opinions are “Nazi opinions” then we will never be able to find any common ground. It also begs the question: what if you don’t know?

Here are two issues I’m uncertain about (please don’t kick me out of the tent!): abortion and trans athletes playing sports. Neither of these issues affects me personally (I don’t even like sports!) but being a “good” informed citizen means I should educate myself on these issues and come up with the “correct” opinion, which, of course, lines up with my political party. To do otherwise is to leave myself open to accusations of bigotry.

But these issues are nothing if not complicated. Some days I might feel one way about them, some days another. I am uncertain and inexpert. I can understand multiple viewpoints. Is that wrong?

Our culture preferences certainty. Certainty leads to action. Deliberation is often seen as weakness. We’re supposed to automatically know right from wrong and where we stand on every issue, be hyper-informed and always correct, or else!

But maybe uncertainty is what makes us human. Take AI, for example. How many stories have we heard of AI confidently, boldly asserting completely wrong answers, such as “there is no country in Africa that starts with the letter ‘k’”? As Maggie Jackson writes in Uncertain:

“In trying to emulate and even surpass human intelligence, AI’s designers have long focused on building machines that know just what to do. In most AI to date, humans specify an objective—stack a package, play masterful chess—and the machine learns how to pull it off, ideally free of human guidance. Contending with uncertainty, such as noise in its sensor data or humans in its path, has been treated as a necessary evil, something at best peripheral to the cause.”

Jackson argues that AI’s single-minded pursuit of its objective has led to many knock-on effects, including algorithms that steer users towards extremist content and a chess robot that broke a child’s finger (!!!) as he reached for a piece. AI’s efficiencies come from its lack of competing values, but that lack of consideration is also what makes it monstrous.

Is our rush for efficiency, certainty, and moral rectitude stripping us of our human ability to weigh competing values?

We think that showing our uncertainty will make us look weak or uncommitted to the cause, but actually, when AI is programmed with uncertainty as a possible outcome, people rate it as more intelligent. It brings to mind the engineering maxim, “Know what you know.” This has two parts:

1. Be confident in what you know, and

2. Be willing to admit what you don’t.

The surprising thing is that uncertainty invites collaboration. Being willing to admit our lack of knowledge and/or competing values invites others to share their stories. Our egos may convince us that we should know everything, but the truth is, we are meant to live in community, to share knowledge, to dialogue.

And I think this extends to spirituality. Once I thought that I needed to be certain about things like the existence of God and the resurrection. In the milieu I was raised in, I needed to be prepared, at all times, to argue with atheists and win souls.

But I’ve come to believe that maybe one person isn’t meant to have all the answers. Maybe we’re meant to wrestle with ideas and stories communally, to listen deeply and delight in differing perspectives. After all, if we can’t embrace our own small uncertainties, how will we ever learn to live with life’s big mysteries? There is much we don’t know and probably never will.

That thought doesn’t scare me as much as it once did.

BONUS MATERIALS:

• friend of the ‘Stack

  Liz Cooledge Jenkins
  wrote a fantastic piece about privilege, generosity, and uncertainty

• here’s a delightful standup clip