Jay's Expose

In our philosophy discussion (oh wait- we were supposed to be discussing technology and artificial intelligence, weren’t we). Well, in our discussion in class about AI, the conversation naturally shifted toward philosophy, as it often does in dialogue about an ever approaching concept- the singularity. This is the idea that eventually at some point in the foreseeable future, humans will be taken over by artificial intelligence. With the way technology is moving faster and faster, it is becoming less of a concept in the realm of science fiction and more along the lines of future reality. At some point, when computers are able to create their own successors, humans will not even be involved in the process of technological advancement and artificial intelligence will be more advanced than the human mind. Some of the philosophical implications of whether or not we should keep trying to make AI better and better in order to benefit ourselves are the reasons for continued discussions. However, no matter what conclusions are drawn about whether or not we would even want to have AI that is so advanced, if it can be done, someone will try. That shifts the conversation away from “if” to “when?” And let’s say that when we have AI that is sentient that can help us carry out our daily tasks, would it be slavery at that point? If AI is sentient, would people be able to fall in love with it? Furthermore, could a child have an AI best friend? Lastly, if you were to copy the neural net of a human brain, and put it into AI that could live past the lifespan of the human it made the copy of, would it truly still be the person’s consciousness that lived on?

These are not questions that are easily answered as there are many different ways to think about the answers as well as a bunch of answers we can never know the answers to. How can you know if something else is sentient? We have all heard the common philosophical phrase, “I think therefore I am,” but that applies to oneself. We can look to the way other people or living things act and behave in order to try to understand their level of consciousness or whether or not they’re sentient, but apart from actually being them, we’d never truly know. This can be analogized with Theseus’s paradox. If we want to know whether or not a sentient AI with the same neural connections as the person that it’s replicating can carry on forever as the person’s consciousness, we have to decide what we believe to be true as a solution to Theseus’s paradox. The main idea of the paradox is that if you sail a ship and over time take out one plank at a time and replace it with a different plank as the ship sails across the sea and then construct a boat out of the planks that you switched out in a separate location, when the ship that originally left returns, but has all new planks, which ship is the real Ship of Theseus? Is the real one the one that sailed across the sea, but changed over time or the one that has all of the pieces from the original ship that sailed, but never touch the water? These kinds of questions launch technological conversations into deep conversations about philosophy. There is no way to stop this train now; technology is advancing whether we like it or not. It’s like a row of standing dominoes and ever since the first domino fell, there’s been no going back; the conversation will continue…