The Irrational Drive to Create, Suffer, and Persist
For all our talk about progress (self-driving cars, neural networks, and AI systems that can write passable poetry) there remains a fundamental difference between machines and humans. Not intelligence, not creativity, not even consciousness (a can of worms best left to philosophers and neuroscientists), but the simple, stubborn ability to want something and act on it.
Will is not reducible to instinct, nor does it fit neatly into the logical predictability of machines. It defies determinism, yet isn’t entirely free. And most importantly, it’s the only reason anything gets done in the first place.
The Problem with Will
Machines don’t have it. They follow instructions, execute algorithms, and optimize for objectives. Even the most sophisticated AI isn’t really making choices - it’s just running probability-weighted computations to minimize some loss function.
Humans, on the other hand, behave in ways that aren’t so easily reduced to computation. Sure, we make decisions based on incentives, habits, and biases, but we also act against our own interests, pursue abstract ideals, and occasionally do things just because.
A purely rational system would never choose to suffer, yet humans willingly endure pain for causes that have no immediate utility: climbing mountains, writing novels, launching startups despite laughable failure rates. Where does this come from? What kind of error in the system allows a person to look at a daunting challenge and say,
yeah, I’m going to do that anyway
Art and the Stubbornness of Will
Nowhere is the absurdity of will more apparent than in art. If rationality dictated human action, no one would spend years perfecting a skill that doesn’t guarantee survival, wealth, or even recognition. And yet, people do, obsessively.
As a student of Hindustani Classical music for over a decade, I’ve seen firsthand the sheer impracticality of such an endeavor. Learning this art form requires hundreds (if not thousands) of hours practicing minute inflections of sound, all in pursuit of something that can’t be fully explained. There is no endgame, no ultimate victory condition - just an ongoing, stubborn devotion to an idea of beauty that exists outside of logic.
A neural network trained on ragas could technically generate something that resembles a performance, but it wouldn’t will itself to do so. [See: kala]. It wouldn’t care about the nuances of a note, the emotional depth of an alaap, or the weight of centuries of tradition embedded in each phrase. That kind of devotion, the kind that compels someone to train rigorously for a performance that might not even be heard is purely human.
Free Will vs. Determinism
If all events have causes, and all decisions are the result of neurochemical interactions, then isn’t will just an illusion?
Every decision you make is influenced by prior experiences, genetics, and external conditions. But the fact that we can even frame this as a problem suggests that will exists in some meaningful way. Unlike a machine, we don’t just execute instructions - we interpret them, modify them, and occasionally reject them outright.
A chess engine evaluates millions of possible moves and picks the best one. A human player might make a suboptimal move just to mess with their opponent. Why? Because they want to.
The source of that “want” might be murky, but it’s undeniably different from a mere calculation.
Will in the Age of AI
Will is tied to subjective experience - to feeling the weight of choice, the regret of failure, the stubborn refusal to back down despite rational odds. It is not clear that AI will ever have those qualities.
Which means, for now, will remains uniquely human. The drive to struggle, to pursue, to act irrationally in the name of something greater than oneself - that’s still ours alone.
Irony
The funny thing about will is that while it’s the defining trait of human agency, it’s also a burden. To will something into existence is to take responsibility for it. Machines are safe in their passivity; humans aren’t.
That’s the price of having will. It means we don’t just exist - we decide to exist, in a way that matters, and that might just be the most human thing of all.