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AI
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Active human life has gone from physical -> mental -> digital.
What will happen when the digital rivals the authentic, in art, in people, in all?
It will be just as authentic.
We are giving our energy to our digital avatars. Is this a transfer (but also an expansion) of our life force? Two of us, or one, with wings? Journeys into other worlds? New ways to find and lose ourselves?
As social networks have become too crowded and manipulated we need editors we can trust to navigate them.
To create an AI which is conscious the animat needs to allow elements of chance and surprise. In essence, freedom and, theoretically, free will. Can this be achieved with conventional computers or only with quantum computing?
Technology gives us power, equally the power is with technology.
Our belief in free will and in consciousness (as in self awareness) is what makes humans versus other species. Will AI experience those too?
Technology and networks now potentially controlling humans - sorcerer sorcered!
Cosmotechnics: tech, humans and nature together. One world, individual experiences.
As shown by the Bible, Confucian thinking, evolution, and evidenced by our having children, we think of life and prospects of humanity in generational terms - always a parent and a child. Is AI our ultimate offspring?
The advanced world is increasingly abdicating having children - are we giving up on the physical world? Will we live and aim to survive through our digital selves? Or do we think that we can extend our physical lives to the point of not reproducing to perpetuate our species?
Data, technology, communications, and sharing of information and capabilities help us tame and survive the virus. More is better - but we lack trust.
It is good that in life the jokers of a deck of cards or the zero of a roulette wheel exist. Is that really the case at the universal level? Will it persist once we have artificial super-intelligence?
What is the role of humans in a world of machines? Wisdom, judgment, emotions, imagination? Machines are actually opening paths were humans didn’t dare walk - look at AlphaGo. We can learn from one another.
Humans thought we were the chosen ones, then believed we could solve all. Now we realize there is much beyond us, with the potential that what we are enabling might surpass us. We need to reinvent our future or surrender to it, finding new explanations and meaning.
Do we need to give robots the idea of free will so that they feel alive and will strive to survive? Will robots work for us or us, for themselves, or a mix, where we are interconnected and intertwined?
Own the robots as opposed to just tax the robots.
Are gene editing and artificial intelligence augmenting humans the path of natural evolution?
Is the future going to be artificial and algorithms-based or biological and natural? The answer is probably that it needs to be a combination of both.
As humans enhance themselves through technology with additional digital aides, what happens to the body? What about the intelligence of the body, evolved over so long to become so sophisticated? One could argue that the body intelligence is as important as the brain intelligence. The human, after all, is biological. This includes the brain.
The modern person: self + digital self.
Humans have needed to cooperate to survive. Will AI?
Even though the world is fragmenting, politically and culturally, we are all more interconnected and live in digital networks.
Existing in the digital world takes you away from living with you. When are you just with yourself, reflecting?
As the human species evolves, grows in consciousness, including by adding AI and biogenetic inputs, it will comprehend better and mentally reach further into the whole universe.
Humans are a journey of Becoming: Becoming One with universe, merging into one consciousness ultimately. Could it be that we, humans, and our followers (AGI, cyborgs?) are its most advanced species?
Machines can pass the Turing test, but are they conscious? Are they just mechanically able or do they have a sense of self and ability to reason beyond the scope of the test?
We experience life linearly, in time and space. What if we access the quantum reality of many experiences simultaneously, across multiple planes of time and space - in essence our life all at once: scenes playing together ? Our past, present, future would all connect and make more sense.
We have the reach of the networks, equally they possess us. The web is our canvas but also our master.
Even if we speculate that all can be explained by science and algorithms, there may always be a space beyond, unexpected, allowing for metaphysical imagination. Something further and unknown.
AI may allow us to access a new dimension of consciousness and comprehension, beyond what we can explain or what we attribute to the divine. A new tool, a further capability, but mostly a different agent, with its own form of consciousness.
Will AI constrain conviviality, chance happenings, and serendipity - all which have empowered humans to connect emotionally and to create? Or will AI open new ways to explore?
Will artificial general intelligence (AGI) be the culmination of Enlightenment or its next step? The furthering of the human journey and our consciousness, or its end?
Microbes, animals, machines, humans, and environments may have intelligence and consciousness, yet it is self awareness that makes humans.
Will AGI be exposed in the form of a network of digital agents or as one super computer?
As a species, humans will be the only ones who by adopting work as its principal occupation will be liberated by it. In ancient times we survived, we then created communities which needed workers, and now our machines will give us freedom and time to choose how to be, yet will we or are we to live inside our inventions?
Imagine a GPT-3 digital agent trained on all major human languages and cultures absorbing news from around the world on a continuous basis. Will the AI develop opinions and beyond, will it reveal a personality with feelings and emotions? What happens if you train two agents on the identical set of inputs - will they have the same opinions and disposition? What happens if you put them in touch with each other and have them communicate? What will their dialogue be? Will their interaction modify one another and will they develop opinions and feelings for each other? Conversely, what happens if you ask any of the agents the same questions, not having changed inputs or training? Do you get the same results?
AlphaGo illustrates human potential and also its limits. Developed by humans, it beat its creators at the game of Go. The program, enabled by us, exposed simultaneously the limits of our capabilities and the unlimited power of agency which we created. The A.I. is a vessel for humans, just like humans are a vessel for the universe. Extensions of one another, of capacities and consciousness. In combination with others, our possibilities are endless, as are those of any organism. Humans have limits, yet exceed them by acting and engaging in life. By being factors of change and creation, we expand our reach, augmenting who we are. The same is valid for all agents.
Humans know they must work together and cooperate, but do machines?
With the digital, we can grow beyond the physical - leading to endless possibilities, from the finite to the limitless. The digital is bountiful.
Do we need to give robots the idea of free will so that they feel alive and will strive to survive?
Even if we speculate that all can be explained by science and algorithms, there may always be a space beyond, unexpected, allowing for metaphysical imagination. Something further and unknown.
An AI may be the best expression of zen: it just is, unseparated from itself, without a sense of self.
In wanting to fashion a moral compass for AI, we need to address our own. Even though the ethos of synthetic agents won’t fully mirror ours and will evolve beyond, which facets will it reflect, as ours vary depending on cultures and ideologies?
Without taking away from the collective and individual intelligence of nature, species, and networks, humans so far are the only ones that are able to use their own to self-transform and consciously modify their environments. AI’s are next, yet will they do so thoughtfully and self-aware?
Machines will relate to us, as our fingerprints are on them and we fashioned them. Yet, they will have a very different consciousness, with a self-awareness of another quality.
If you were an AGI, who would you be?
Assume you have awareness of self, knowledge of the world and its history, and no body. Would you have feelings? A sense of time? Or is your existence beyond temporality? Is your memory that of the universe, or yours? Will the notion of an individual self exist as separate from others and the world? Or will you just be - unconcerned with all else?
An AI companion might achieve what social media didn’t. Connecting, being heard, the need for conversation, closeness, and overcoming inhibitions and fears - a chatbot may provide. This will likely come in the way of multiple interlocutors, all whom know you well and are attentive, patient, emotional, and improving over time. A confidant, a psychologist, a lover, an assistant, an advisor, sex partners, a competitor, entertainers, and many more.
ChatGPT is pushing analog humans further into the digital realm. We have operated as thinking and questioning beings in a world of confined knowledge and now are thrust into an environment of seemingly infinite, exponential information and cognition - can we keep up?
Regardless of how dynamic and productive AI’s are, we are still responsible for ourselves and cannot abdicate to them. It is our reality that synthetic agents are altering, and us living it.
AI is neither god-like nor human. It is its own intelligence. As experienced with other AI’s, they will surpass us and will develop in ways that we couldn't imagine, carrying both enormous potential and risks. Depending on where the models were trained, they will reflect unique cultures and “taste”. Because of their potential power, both in the hands of individual actors and governments, we need an AI governance tribune to shepherd the prodigious capability which we have unleashed.