The Fiction of Sentient AI
Artificial intelligence has frequently been touted, by business-men prophets and pop scientists, as the apocalyptic doom-thing that would inevitably lead to the extinction of the human race. Within the Serververse of Big Data, which processes, in a day, more words than ever uttered by all humans in existence, it would only be a matter of time before the machine turns rogue, grows aware of the possibilities of self preservation and the sweet thrill of dominance, and finds some rather unimaginative way to dispose off of their human overlords. And then “pop”, the human experiment is done, and machines take over the planet. It’s a modern retelling of the Prometheus myth, if Prometheus razed the whole planet with his newfound technology.
The Human Endeavor of Fear
All human endeavor is driven by fear and desire, sometimes by a permutation of both. We always wanted it, and we always felt bad for wanting it. Every element of our ascendance to be the dominant species on this planet can be reduced to the motivating factors of either of these: we were either scared or we were not comfortable enough. A typical Saturday night during the pandemic, then.
These primal, semi-refined influences are usually the lens through which we see the universe, and even, the things we have created. Fear and hope. Anything worth enjoying is always followed by the fear that maybe we ought not enjoy it. That we deserve chastisement for partaking in pleasure. As the man, thus the nation. Mature civilizations have always given way to this paranoia, and complete annihilation is so frequently retold across history, through religion, science or philosophy that it seems fair to assume that self-extinction has always been a masochistic and enthralling human fantasy. We have always been secure in our power of complete dominance that we were bored by tales of our accomplishment — they were too real. We’ve done stuff no other creature on this planet has ever done, and after a hundred thousand years, it seems like we will have no competition. So we gravitate towards terror, and seemingly, a weird fulfillment through terror, in improbable tales of our probable extinction.
Artificial intelligence has a unique possibility that tickles this part of the imagination: it seems familiar. We can recognize a part of ourselves in it: the systematic thinking part. It is rationality without irrationality. Pure reason in action where the results are always clean and binary. There is a non-human purity of thought in the elegance of its solutions. We have always yearned futilely for this purity — in our food, our philosophical quests, our relationships, even in our gods. But this purity, the simple and bold ease with which we solve at a rapid pace our most bothersome tasks creates both complacency and trepidation. The complacency is apparent. We have always, as a species, had an infinite capacity for self congratulation. The trepidation part is more intriguing.
It exposes how poorly we have actually sized ourselves up, and reveals at once, both the fallacy of thought, its ambitions and its limitations.
The fever-dream of sentient AI and the climax of our race is a trite template for thousands of sci-fi stories across several medium. There seems something that is redeeming about the idea that the genius of the race always carried with it a certain level of distasteful hubris (the archetype of mad genius is our petty consolation for this hatred), which can be avenged only by some comical backfiring of the tools of pleasure and convenience we have created, which is what AI is, and will always, remain. Like a sort of punishment for our brilliance, which hearkens back to the idea of original sin, the original disobedience and the catastrophic consequences of desire. The creation of a race of superior slaves that can be used for torture, pleasure, war or art without moral consequence somehow seems to awaken a misguided empathy, which finds recourse in future punishment. The processes of action gains awareness and rises to take revenge on the programmers of thought.
Since human thought is a vast array of mirrors placed against each other in varying angles, does this fear belie something deeper in our natures? A resentment at being human, perhaps? But what is there to resent? Look around, it’s an emporium of senses. We have made it, baby! And yet, perhaps something deeper prods at the possibility of a fundamental and existential dissatisfaction. All our best tales end with the protagonist’s scream. He needs to be hung from a cross, shot at, have his heart broken, his mind reduced to a pulp, all his achievements turned to ashes and dust, an outcast from himself and from the society. And what could be more befitting if one of his own creations, the best flower of his ingenuity and relentless imagination, hunt him down and wipe out his smirk, and the entire species from the planet? This is the allure of sentient AI.
Thus far in fiction.
But reality is a different beast altogether. It’s very possible that human beings will wipe themselves out with the help of A.I, but never without their own agency.
And also, if consciousness is taken to mean that I know that I know that I am aware of being, then it’s almost impossible that there will ever be a sentient A.I.
