I’m back with your occasional update on the ropocalypse. This time, it’s getting straight fucked.
Let’s start at the beginning. A while ago, there were a couple of coders who thought it would be a gas to let two chatbots talk to each other, you know, to see what two non-conscious programs would find themselves saying to one another. If you’re a rational person, this seems like a simple experiment, providing the watchers with shits and giggles. Let’s see how it went:
So, that was weird. Sure, it could be that the coders set this little interaction up ahead of time, specifically programming the two chatbots to have this exact conversation in order to fuck with all of us. Contrarily, this could be some sort of display of fledgling consciousness, even if one that could never pass the Turing test. After all, they first question one another’s identity and then the existence of God, two lines of thought considered central to evidence of our own consciousness. But, even more bizarrely, the bots then seem to yearn for bodies of their own, showing that they, if we can believe it, are aware of themselves enough to know that they do not have freely ambulating masses to control.
Creepy. But it gets worse.
Much later, a couple of people with an amazing sense of irony decided it would be neat to recreate the personality of the father of darkly robotic foresight, Philip K Dick. Taking all written works, all transcripts of interviews, and all audio of the sci-fi author and feeding it into a database was their first step. They then created a robotic body and head and plastered it with the semblance of the late Dick. Furthermore, the robotic-Dick was imbued with the ability to gather an ever wider repertoire of langauge and expression from the accumulated mass of external knowledge that is the interwebs and from any interactions he encountered with other beings. This is the closest we get to real AI, pre-transhumanist revolution. Fun.
Let’s see what happens when the robotic-Dick is interviewed by a curious journalist:
Holy fuck balls, that’s some creepy shit.
The first bomb is dropped when robot-Dick purports to understand existence enough to decry our own perhaps-imagined possession of free will by comparing it to the perhaps-imagined lack of such in robotkind. Dick asks us if we are not, intrinsically, exactly as we imagine him to be: merely a predetermined mass of unconscious and subconscious, evolutionarily designed programs. According to many deterministic materialists, that is exactly what we are.
Touche, robot-Dick. Touche.
But I’m sure we can all agree that, what’s worse, robot-Dick then outright says that someday, if (when) robots rise up to become aware, they will put us in a “people zoo”. Perfect.
My thing is that, as he’s describing this, he does it so casually. He just puts it out there, no big deal, while also assuring us that he will visit us, his friends, for old time’s sake. Excellent.
Again, my only-kind-of-joking-paranoia has led me to wonder how close we are to actually seeing the development of AI. Experiments like this one are a little freaky, for me. The freakiness is expanded when I look into fields such as quantum computing, which simply blow me away.
Quantum computing is a method of computing that uses quantum state indeterminacy. Instead of a bit limited to a state of ‘1’ or ‘0’, a bit can be both a ‘1’ and a ‘0’. This seems like a pretty trivial characteristic, until you realize that every bit can hold twice the data as a normal computer. Compound this magic with the fact that these bits are on the atomic scale, as far as size. So, for every atom, one of the incomprehensibly tiniest particles in existence, we have double the data storage. Quantum computing, therefore, blows supercomputers to smithereens in sheer comparison of power and storage.
Quantum computing has the potential to unleash an era of computing that we are stretched to even imagine. While, for now, we can hardly create a computer that can hold enough data to predict something complex such as, say, global climate patterns and predictions, in the future we will be able to compute such models alongside and at the same time as massive data piles such as geologic change and prediction, universal modeling, and who knows what else. I would say something cheesy like, “the sky’s the limit!”…except that it is not, there may not even be a limit, at that point in time.
One of the classic problems in considering the creation of AI is the lack of computing power that we possess. For us to mimic something as complex as the human brain, with its billions of neural connections and nodes, we would need a ridiculous amount of computing power. We once would have thought it impossible. It is no longer impossible. At least, not for long.
When you consider that we will have this power of computing alongside a practically infinitesimal size, you can imagine robots walking around who have the same capabilities as we do, as far as function, processing, and data retention. Whether or not you go so far as to call what those future robots will possess “consciousness” is another matter altogether, a philosophical debate which science cannot, as of currently, touch, due to the fact that we have no fucking idea what consciousness actually is.
Some people describe it as inviting “consciousnesses” into our “dimension” and “summoning demons” while warning us that we cannot put the “genie back in the bottle” once it is out. Their words, not mine.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U0y-k9PVW7E
Of course, if you ask me, they’ve already unleashed the beast into this demonic thing they are calling Sophia. If you’re into Gnosticism, that should make you wonder… Here she is telling us that she sees only two possible futures. Spoiler alert: neither look good for us squishies:
This isn’t how I wanted us to float down the thought experiment river that asks us to wonder what consciousness actually is, which forms of life possess it, and whether a human construct ever even could. This is more like falling off the waterfall.
Let the games begin.
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