Can artificial intelligence ever truly understand human values?

Question

As AI keeps improving, I keep wondering if it can ever actually understand what matters to us. It can mimic behavior and sound convincing, but does it really grasp things like empathy, fairness, or meaning? What do philosophers think about machines and ethics?

Answer 1

Answer: Can artificial intelligence ever truly understand human values?

Short answer: No — not in the way humans do.

But it can model, approximate, and respond to human values very effectively.

From a technical standpoint, today’s AI systems do not possess beliefs, emotions, or lived experience. They operate by identifying patterns in large amounts of human-generated data and optimizing responses based on statistical relationships. When AI appears empathetic or fair, it isn’t experiencing those values — it is reproducing patterns associated with them.

This distinction matters.

Philosophers like John Searle highlighted this with the Chinese Room thought experiment: a system can manipulate symbols correctly and still lack genuine understanding. In much the same way, AI can generate convincing language about empathy or ethics without actually knowing what those concepts mean internally.

That said, some philosophers and cognitive scientists argue that understanding itself may be nothing more than the ability to apply concepts correctly across many contexts. From that perspective, advanced AI systems increasingly resemble human reasoning at a functional level — even if their internal mechanisms are very different.

Where AI clearly falls short is moral grounding. Human values are shaped by:

1. Lived experience
2. Social relationships
3. Consequences, responsibility, and accountability
4. Cultural and emotional context

AI has none of these. Its “values” are ultimately borrowed from humans and enforced through design choices, training data, and constraints set by developers.

So the most accurate conclusion is this:

AI can reflect human values, reason about them, and help us think more clearly — but it does not own them.

Rather than replacing human judgment, AI works best as a tool that supports it. Ethical responsibility still rests with people, not machines — and likely always will.

Answer 2

My view is no, AI can mimic things it's seen before, but it doesn't have its own beliefs or emotions. The way it works under the hood is making a prediction for what would come next based on what's been fed in, it works with pattern recognition as opposed to having values of its own like a human does.

Answer 3

I would like to offer an opposing view to Alexander's.

The short answer to your question is

"Artificial intelligence can understand human values as well as

humans can understand their values, but AI will never understand them because

it would be prohibitively expensive".

Alexander brings up the Chinese room experiment, and you can read about it, and its counter-arguments here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room

My interpretation of the Chinese room experiment is that the person in the room

can find relations between Chinese writings and material or abstract objects,

but he can never understand the true meaning of the characters.

That is true, but it does not point to any shortcoming of mere syntactic manipulation of symbols,

only to the limitation his access to richer context.

If a person who speaks only English is locked in the room,

he might figure that the Chinese people outside the room use these two characters ”你“ and ”您“

to refer to himself.

But it would be impossible for him to figure out whether one of them means "you",

or whether one of them is his Chinese name, or something different.

I would argue that he would not understand their meaning even if somebody translated or

explained them to him in English.

The reason is that those two characters have no English language equivalent nor

does their equivalent meaning exist in English speaking cultures.

The only way to understand their meaning is by observing their use in the Chinese culture.

My argument is that "understanding" a word or concept means knowing how to use it in context.

Exhibit A: Children learn the meaning of words from nothing more than observing how they are used in context.

Exhibit B: The easiest way to explain the meaning of a word to someone is to give him examples

of how it is used in context.

Exhibit C: Understanding a mathematical theorem does not mean being able to recite its wording,

but being able to apply it in the context of proofs.

Exhibit D: We measure the degree of understanding a word by the variety of contexts in which

the word can be applied.

Assuming that I convinced you that "understanding" means "knowing how to apply in context",

then let me point out that Large Language Model essentially just keep applying words in context.

Thus, computers are capable of understanding concepts the same way as people

(who also know nothing more than how to apply concepts in context).

Or equivalently, our brains are just computers.

But they are much more efficient than the electronic versions.

We can accomplish on the 20W consumed by out brains much more than computers can accomplish

with megawatts.

That is why I am saying that computers could potentially reach the same level of understanding

as people, but it would be prohibitively expensive.

Answer 4

I don’t think AI can ever really understand human values. It can learn how to act like it does, but that’s not the same. Just predicting behavior or repeating the right words doesn’t mean it actually gets what something means. Real values come from pain, conflict, reflection, and experience.

John Searle's Chinese Room argument is all about this. Just because something responds in a way that seems smart doesn’t mean it understands what it's saying. It’s just following rules. That’s what AI does. It performs well, but it doesn’t know why anything matters.

Byung-Chul Han would probably say AI is part of a bigger problem. We keep replacing deep thinking with fast answers. Han says we’ve turned everything into surface-level clarity and efficiency, but that kills off depth and meaning. AI fits right into that. It performs empathy, but it can’t feel anything. No shame, no joy, no fear. It’s just pattern recognition.

At best, AI can help us reflect our values, but it doesn’t have any of its own. You need to live through things to really understand them. And no matter how smart a machine gets, it’s never going to feel what it means to be human.