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Computer scientist and futurist Jaron Lanier made some comments on Vox’s The Gray Area podcast the other day that I’d like to make a quick observation about.
In the podcast, titled “Will AI become God? That’s the wrong question,” Lanier talks about how artificial “intelligence” has become a sort of quasi religion in Silicon Valley, complete with its own deity-like entity, and a kind of Armageddon-cult-like vision for our future.
Asked by host Sean Illing about people’s anxiety regarding AI and the possibility of human extinction, Lanier said many in Silicon Valley have come to view humanity as a mere birthing vessel for these new technologies, which will become our vastly superior replacement.
“What drives me crazy about this is that this is my world,” Lanier said. “I talk to the people who believe that stuff all the time, and increasingly, a lot of them believe that it would be good to wipe out people and that the AI future would be a better one, and that we should wear a disposable temporary container for the birth of AI. I hear that opinion quite a lot.”
“Wait, that’s a real opinion held by real people?” asked Illing.
“Many, many people,” Lanier replied.
This is obviously disturbing, but it’s also just plain bizarre, because it shows how little attention these people are paying to the phenomenon of consciousness.
AI isn’t conscious. Saying AI should replace humanity is the same as saying fire should replace humanity, or white noise static from old televisions should replace humanity. It’s not conscious. There’s nobody inside it. It’s just the dark, empty buzzing of machinery, unwitnessed and unexperienced by any perceiving being.
It says so much about the worldview of these weird Silicon Valley cultists that this isn’t obvious to them. They think AI would be a superior replacement for humanity because they’ve paid no attention to consciousness. They’ve paid no attention to consciousness because they’ve lived completely unexamined lives. They’ve never reflected on what it actually means to be a living being having sentient experiences in this world.
Consciousness means subjective experience. It’s the hearer of what’s heard, the seer of what’s seen, and the perceiver of thoughts. We can know consciousness exists by our own experience of it, and we can infer that other people and animals must also have it because they have so many similarities to us. There is absolutely no reason to assume that inanimate, inorganic matter is capable of consciousness besides blind faith religious belief.
You see this with the way many of these cultists say people will be able to one day achieve immortality by uploading their minds onto computers. Julian Assange has talked about this Silicon Valley religious belief in the past, saying the following at a 2017 video conference:
“I know from our sources deep inside those Silicon Valley institutions, they genuinely believe that they are going to produce artificial intelligences that are so powerful, relatively soon, that people will have their brains digitized, uploaded on these artificial intelligences, and live forever in a simulation, therefore will have eternal life. It’s a religion for atheists. They’ll have eternal life, and given that you’re in a simulation, why not program the simulation to have endless drug and sex orgy parties all around you. It’s like the 72 virgins, but it’s like the Silicon Valley equivalent.”
Computers aren’t conscious. Sure you might one day be able to replicate the contents of a human mind onto some sort of software, but it won’t be “you”, because it won’t be conscious. There’d be nobody experiencing it. It would just be ones and zeros, unilluminated by any perceiving awareness.
Consciousness is the only reason life has value. It’s the only reason anything matters. Otherwise life would just be physical materials getting whipped about by natural forces without anyone feeling, sensing or experiencing any part of it. Suffering wouldn’t matter because it’s not being felt or experienced. Joy wouldn’t matter because it’s not being felt or experienced. There’d be no good reason not to torture someone, because there wouldn’t be any conscious experience of pain. There’d be no good reason to love anyone, because there wouldn’t be any conscious experience of love. Consciousness is the only reason life is worth living.
There is no basis on which to believe AI will ever be conscious. Consciousness isn’t some minor detail that science will easily work out once it gets around to it; it’s an all-encompassing phenomenon which has always been a complete mystery to all scientific fields. Science has no idea what consciousness is or why it happens, much less how to replicate it. It’s the single most important and fundamental aspect of every second of our waking experience of life, yet it remains a complete unknown to all of science. And this somehow gets left out of so much of the conversation about the future of artificial “intelligence”.
I guess it’s possible to become so mind-identified that you really believe you are your thoughts, and that a machine which can generate digital “thoughts” much more efficiently would therefore be a superior sort of being. You have to have spent no time looking inward and examining what it is that’s able to perceive thoughts in the first place. You have to have spent no time in meditation decoupling your sense of identity from the chatter in your head. You must be completely asleep at the wheel of your own life.
These are people who have spent their entire lives listening to their thoughts, without ever once taking a moment to wonder who the listener is.
And these are the people who increasingly rule our world. These are the people inserting themselves into our political systems. These are the people deciding what we may and may not say to each other online. These are the people setting the trajectory for the future of our species. These weird little cultists who are so pervasively unaware of their own inner processes that consciousness does not even feature in their understanding of what life is and where it is headed.
Just something we should all be aware of.
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