As tempting as it is to rush in with intellectual scaffolding where AI and the human mind increasingly intersect, one has to tread carefully where consciousness is concerned.
No philosopher with his or her daily peripatetic would definitively declare “Since language is the main way we get insight into other people‘s minds (and one of our best indications that minds other than our own exist at all), it takes an effort not to project mental states onto AI engines that can chat fluently in human.“
The assumptions behind these assertion are rife: that we are separate individuals, each with our own unique consciousness; that consciousness is mine or yours, rather than a shared phenomenon; that insight flows from language, rather than from beyond words; and that projecting mental states onto AI “agents” is the problem, rather than projection itself.
The phrase, “one of our best indications that minds other than our own exist at all” exemplifies solipsism. It’s the absurd idea that the only thing we can know for certain is that our own mind exists, since it cannot be proved that other people have thoughts, feelings and a conscious mind.
The entrenched and deeply conditioned idea that consciousness is unique to each individual arises from a compulsively individualistic culture that nurtures narcissism. It’s no accident in America has the president it has.
Projection, on the other hand, is a universal human mistake and tendency. Part of true education is to help young people be alert to this feature of human nature. Then it won’t take such an effort to keep from projecting it onto an AI chatbot, and people won’t be so susceptible to algorithmic manipulation.
As far as regulation and building the proverbial “guardrails“ for AI, the genie is already out of the bottle. Which is not to say that governments should give up on regulation, and take a laissez-faire approach to AI development like the Trump Administration has with its atavistic nationalistic mindset.
National borders are seen as irrelevant impediments by transnational AI corporations, where the competition between developers takes place beyond increasingly porous technological borders.
In any case, what happens when the American goal of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) “breaks free of human limitations, improving itself on an exponential trajectory,“ and merges with China’s well underway goal of mass deployment, embedding AI in schools, hospitals, factories and security forces?
Then an autonomous AI agent in China will be indistinguishable from an AI agent in America, and they will think autonomously together. That makes a mockery of national borders and identification.
Given the world‘s economic and political reality, the idea of “an enlightened US president making a case for global AI regulation“ is risible. It’s premised on an international order that no longer exists, a nation-state paradigm that’s passé, and restoring previously dubious American superpower leadership when the POTUS is the king of chaos.
AI is not like nuclear fission, which, even after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (81 years ago today), scientists naïvely believed atomic energy could be utilized for good or ill. Nothing has changed, epitomized in recent months by the United States and Israel ostensibly going to war against Iran to prevent it from obtaining a nuclear weapon.
AI is undercutting what it has meant to be human, compelling us to find out what it means to be a human being.
It’s not just that our thinking is behind the curve; it’s that human thought is flatlining in the face of the cognitive machines we’ve made in our own image… including imbuing them with a fear of death!
To proclaim, “It is plausible that consciousness will one day emerge in robots because we know that abstract thought can arise as the end product of billions of tiny unconscious mechanical events” is a non-sequitur.
Philosophers and scientists cannot even agree on what consciousness is, so it’s foolish to say that it is plausible that consciousness will one day emerge in robots.
The assumption of mechanism is intellectually grading. Thought, which is a mechanical process, may arise as the product of billions of mechanical events, but is that consciousness? If so, then AI already possesses a simulacrum of consciousness.
Some say, “we will need a huge range of knowledge to give us the ability to see wide and far enough to understand in real time what is being done to us.” And therefore, “reading is not just for pleasure and delight, but more urgently, for power.”
This author incongruously writes, “The world is spinning slightly out of alignment with a benevolent universe,” when in fact, the human mind has brought the Earth to the verge of climatic and ecological collapse. Prescribing knowledge and power as the remedy at this point can only exponentially increase the disease.
To see what it means to be a human being, we need to understand how Homo sapiens’ cognitive and knowledge-based consciousness has brought us to the point of polycrisis.
We cannot resist, much less compete with AI for knowledge and cognitive superiority. However, we can let AI be the repository of knowledge, and learn the art of right living that flows from stillness, insight, and true intelligence.
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