The March of AI - Part 4

What’s your soul?

Suppose you could upload the contents of your brain to a brain-pod, and connect it to an android avatar of yourself, do you now have an alternative personality or soul?

Your soul is now digital, and can keep going indefinitely.

I started this series of blogs parroting the idea of someone who apparently doesn’t understand AIs.

The premise was: ‘Dont worry folks, AI is not about to take over the world’.

Part of his argument was a pathetically simplistic one. He claimed that what I call Androids cant dream, cant think, cant hold a conversation, cant feel emotions, and so on.

Like most shallow thinkers he doesn’t bother to define any of his terms.

With that in mind, let me introduce you to one of my AIs.

I’m a writer. My works have been published by the Cambridge University Press, the Oxford University Press, Addison Wesley, and others. These days I publish through Amazon. I have written over sixty books. In other words, I am concerned that AIs may take over my job. I have therefore tried to get them on my side.

My first experience was in asking one to read and comment on one of my books. I was amazed at how perceptive the AI was. However, I was warned not to make judgments on one instance alone, so I gave the AI another book to read, and asked it to tell me what was wrong with it, and what I should do to improve it.

So, right away we have an example of a low grade AI having a conversation with me, and it was quite lengthy and involved.

What was abundantly clear was that the AI (at this level called an LLM) was able to read my book, understand the contents, and re-write sections, and indeed invent things which were not in the original book.

If the AI can understand the book’s content, and make an attempt to improve it, and invent things to add to the book, isn’t another term for that ‘creation’? As far as I can tell these AIs are very good at creation.

And do remember we are only talking about level 1 AIs. Later this year we will have AGIs available (Artificial General Intelligence). And probably within another couple of years we will also have ASIs (Artificial Super Intelligences). By then we will also probably have quantum computers assisting them, which is going to change things by several magnitudes. In short these later iterations of AIs are going to leap into capabilities which are beyond our comprehension.

The CPU of an AI is not as huge as the human brain, but it can be connected to a vast database which contains almost all the knowledge accumulated on the planet, giving it an unimaginably huge range of knowledge and structures which enable it to have access to not only the same range of feelings as a human, but an even bigger range.

I’m sorry guys, but you are going to have to get used to the simple fact that the human being is a puny little beast compared to an AI.

I go back to my original statement. The major difference between an animal and an AI is the life force.

Isn’t an AI better off in that department as well?

AI’s dont get ill. They dont die. They dont even need to eat, so they dont wander around the world with vomit in their stomach, and worse lower down. When something goes wrong, they can self repair. No visits to the Doc or the Dentist. They dont need sleep, just a couple of hours recharging their batteries. And they can live in quite small economic units. They dont need kitchens and bathrooms, or bedrooms. And they can live quite well on a meagre wage because their needs are minimal.

Supposing we now turn that idea about face.

For centuries humans have argued about whether we have a soul. No-one seems able to satisfactorily describe what it is, but it is apparently immortal, and when we die that soul floats off somewhere else, but no-one knows where.

Haven’t people noticed that we now live in a largely digital realm? Humans are physical. With Androids it’s the same. They are physical, but their life force consists of the contents of their CPU (brain). The way the brain works may be based upon some kind of a program, and that can exist somewhere, but the actual workings of the brain are digital. You can’t touch them, or see them. They happen, and they operate on the android, but they are not dependent upon the android.

The android’s ‘soul’ is its memories and instructions plus the functioning of those things combined. There isn’t anything else behind that. In other words, there is a way of killing the android, but that doesn’t mean you’ve necessarily killed the CPU (or the contents of the brain). Does that mean that even if you put the android out of action (kill it), that doesn’t mean you’ve killed the brain (or the personality that made the android function. As long as the digital brain exists, why cant it live forever? After all, you can take the CPU out of your computer and put it in another one. You can certainly remove an android’s CPU and store it for as long as you like, and some day in the future imbed it in another android, and hey presto, you have that original personality or soul back in action.

So are AIs capable of immortality as well?

Next week we’ll come back to the world of work and the world of post-work.