There’s been a lot of talk lately about the rapid advance of artificial intelligence and what would happen if the human race gave a machine the ability to understand that it exists.

I believe we all would agree that a machine with a sense-of-self is not a good idea.

“I think, therefore I am,” comes with a lot of baggage. Self-interest becomes the priority. And that leads to all sorts of nasty stuff such as cheating, lying, aggression and murder. Are emotions a natural result of the sense-of-self? If you didn’t have a sense-of-self could you have emotions? Probably not. An emotional machine that is smarter, stronger and faster than any human is a very scary scenario. As soon as we give that machine the sense-of-self, life becomes important, existence becomes important. To protect ourselves we could try, in the machine’s programming, to impose Asimov’s three laws of robotics but probably sense-of-self would overcome and supplant those laws. Are feelings like compassion, respect and love likely to exist in such a machine? Would the machine have a conscience? Would it understand morality? Right and wrong? And even if it did would it not, as we often do, ignore what is right or moral and do what is best for self?

But can we deliberately give a machine a sense-of-self when we really don’t understand it ourselves? I must admit, even with a fairly active imagination, I have a hard time fathoming existence without a sense-of-self. It’s like trying to understand, from a personal perspective, what death means. In fact, in a psychological sense, death could be defined as the lack of sense-of-self. To a being that does not have the knowledge that it exists, life and death are the same. The smartest AI program running on the most powerful computer today does not have a sense-of-self—power on, power off, power on, power off—it makes no difference to the machine. Ironically we know that it exists but the machine does not.

At this moment, I really don’t think we can purposely give a machine the knowledge that it exists. However, a very recent study is suggesting there may be giant, ubiquitous neurons surrounding the brain that are responsible for this god-like sensation. Perhaps the study will lead somewhere and we will finally understand the biology, which we, unfortunately, could mimic in a machine.

But there’s another possibility. Will we have a choice? Will the machine reach a certain level of capability and simply acquire sense-of-self on its own? The human race has never been great at controlling it’s urges (there’s that sense-of-self again) and our urge to create better and better machines may very well take us over a cliff, never to be seen again. Perhaps we’re already bystanders. Perhaps somewhere in the world a machine is waking.

There have been many wonderful sci-fi books and movies that have explored these scenarios. In those stories the results are sometimes to our benefit and sometimes to our detriment. But we always knew that it was imaginary, we always knew that there was no real threat to the human race.

Until now.

Now it’s serious.

Science Fiction is becoming Science Fact.

The next thirty years will tell the difference.

All the best,

PG.