The Happy AI Merge Or Tangled Up in Blue?
by John Hawkins
"And through the future, near and far, as through the past, shall this law hold good: Nothing that is vast enters into the life of mortals without a curse."
- Sophocles, chorus, Antigone
To go by the stories I'm reading these days about Artificial Intelligence (AI), revolution is in the air. AI artwork; AI content generation, AI language generators, AI cops, Exoanthropology: Dialogues with AI, AI harvesting of algorithms and fusion databases, AI social media moderation, AI "restoring" lost art and music, AIs and CRISPRs working together to remake humanity: new skin, new brains, new drugs, artificial DNA -- on and on it goes, daily inundations, intense implications, a technology revolution happening without general popular input, or even knowledge of, and coming at us at breakneck speed. It feels like we're being thrust out of control of our own destiny by mysterious shape-shifting fascists of the Regime.
Recently, that revolution got some free feel-good buzz from the mainstream media when Neuralink CEO Elon Musk held a press conference at company headquarters in Fremont, California, on November 2 to announce that AI chips, called R1, would be ready for implantation in humans within six months. Up to now, the brain-controlled technology has only been used in animals at Neuralink. (Muskmelon's closest competitor, Synchron, is already ahead of the game with humans already, apparently, using a similar brain technology that allows the lame to rise and spend - it says so right there on their site!).
According to Elissa Welle of the Mercury News,
Musk's explanation of Neuralink's vision ranged from medical applications -- restoring independent movement to someone with a spinal cord injury -- to science fiction, enhancing the cognition of an able--bodied person using artificial intelligence.
Sight could also be restored, Musk said, using R1; it would bypass the eyes and stimulate the visual cortex, bringing vision to people even if they had never before had sight. It sounds like a miracle along the lines of Jesus healing the blind and the lame, and Neuralink has the potential for that kind of impact and appeal in the world. Suddenly, Feel Good is back.
The plan to develop an AI chip that could eventually "enhance the cognition of an able-bodied person," will no doubt see human volunteers flocking to go to deep inner space, the final frontier. Back in 2013, when Musk asked online for volunteers for a one-way trip to Mars, more than 200,000 people signed on.
[Breaking News: Musk and Neuralink are in trouble for killing off 1500 animals in their experiments on their brains. With the failures of Tesla and the absurdity of the Mars venture, now you're thinking Melon may be some kind of Sergeant Schultz Nazi eugenicist - please don't tweet that. Oh, and BTW, poor Bob Crane, later paid the price, found brutally murdered in his apartment, some say by German-speaking nihilists with a rug-whizzing weasel.)
The fascination, in some quarters, with our merger with AI may have begun in 1997 when world chess champion Gary Kasparov famously lost a match to the AI machine, Deep Blue. All of his known moves from all of his published games were fed to the IBM supercomputer and it was able to "see" his patterns of chess moves and have responses ready when Kasparov came at him. This is similar to the function of algorithms we all address today online -- anticipation of our next moves in buying, browsing, needing.
Similarly, MIT used to have online a "psychologist," or early AI chat box that was eerily similar in some respects to how therapists operate. ELIZA featured the standardized response to revelations so many clients have heard: "How does that make you feel?" You could "almost" talk with ELIZA. Now, there is apparently a major breakthrough in this AI area -- ChatGPT, developed by OpenAI, which is astonishing techies and wonk-wannabes alike. PCWorld has an article headline, "ChatGPT is the dazzling, scary future of AI chatbots." The article describes how ChatGPT can not only chat and chuckle with users but also write poetry and essays and tell you why nihilism should be your personal philosophy.
The Guardian even went so far in an Explainer piece to ask in its headline: "What is AI chatbot phenomenon ChatGPT and could it replace humans?" AI is everything everywhere all at once; the internet of everything augmented by AI for everything. It's exciting, frightening, and may be a paradigm shift leading to our species extinction. Ooops.
A real worry, from an ethicist's point of view, is the current lack of mainstream forethought and discussion about the public implications of technology, its control, and its alliances between government and corporations. Interestingly enough, a small group of techno wonks who helped make the social media milieu so "engaging" have recently explained, in the film The Social Dilemma (2020), why they quit their jobs at Google, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram to warn us all about the imminent dystopian energies that these platforms really represent. It's a riveting documentary that exposes how the AI world is creating an existential crisis for humanity.
This problem goes beyond mere manipulation by AI bots (and their executives), as revealed in The Social Dilemma, to a philosophical quandary about the so-called hivemind that a centralized Internet represents. There's a theory -- Integrated Information Theory (IIT) --that suggests that we are all heading toward a merge of all minds and all data. Philosopher Philip Goff suggests in his book Galileo's Error,
IIT predicts that if the growth of internet-based connectivity ever resulted in the amount of integrated information in society surpassing the amount of integrated information in a human brain, then not only would society become conscious but human brains would be "absorbed" into that higher form of consciousness. Brains would cease to be conscious in their own right and would instead become mere cogs in the mega-conscious entity that is the society including its internet-based connectivity.
This is weighty stuff. It needs time and space to evaluate. Ethical questions need to be applied.
Modern consciousness arguably begins with Descartes and the Cogito. It continues with Galileo and the classic division of mind and body. Contemporary development sees 'mind' replaced with 'brain' and consciousness relegated to the status of an epiphenomenon. We seem to be becoming a more unreal species by the day. At the very moment in our history when reflection on our doings on Earth and our purpose in the universe is a paramount activity, we seem to be crossing the Rubicon into a new synthetic being. This is not necessarily 'evil' and may well deliver a whole lot of good -- cures for cancer, longer lives, more entertaining toys, miracles -- but the human track record suggests that we slow down and consider, sit around a campfire off-grid, and talk to each other face-to-face like human beings again.
Before we are merely like human beings.
