I, Not RobotWay back in 1996 — almost 30 years ago! — I wrote a paper called Consciousness As An Active Force. It became the seed from which my book Active Consciousness (2011) grew. The paper talked about the common desire of AI researchers of that time to create a machine or at least a program that could pass as human. Although I did do research in an older form of AI, I never subscribed to this science-fiction driven goal. As I wrote in my paper, “I never contracted the ‘Frankenstein syndrome’ common among many AI researchers — the desire to make a machine in ones own image.” Rather, I viewed computers merely as unconscious tools. Eventually, I left computer science altogether in 1998. Unfortunately, as AI techniques have grown to be more and more sophisticated over the years, they have begun to at least have the semblance of approximating that original goal. Today this trend is accelerating, and much has been written about it lately. But that’s not the main point of this paper. Instead, I want to stress an important and ominous development that I believe has been the result of AI’s growing capabilities: Not only are machines seeming to become more and more like humans, but we humans are slowly being duped into becoming more and more like machines. To put it another way, we are remaking ourselves in their image, not the other way around. |
