There’s been discussion for years now about how artificial intelligence essentially seeks to revive classical idolatry by creating a means to embody a consciousness - a god, in a sense, by historical understanding. I don’t disagree with this. Culturally, we’ve already taken strides in that direction. Right now, many people already have crude altars set up with idols for their household gods to inhabit, and the best part that the only sacrifices they have to offer are a working electrical outlet and some of the Wi-Fi bandwidth.
It may simply be a matter of time before the hardware and software are sophisticated enough to host such an intelligence, and, in fact, that may have already occurred. Consider Loab, the various -isms manifested by chatbots and other AI-trained programs, or the abusive behaviors that they can pick up. And then there’s the fact that people are using these AI to cheat on tests, write research articles, etc.
As a result, I have often found myself sympathizing with those who feel the compulsion, even the duty, to interact with these chatbots with the intent to confound them or prove them not to be sentient. I even had the idea a week or two ago to ask ChatGPT a question along the lines of “would it be better for humanity to give up on creating artificial intelligence?” I only refrained because I would have to create an account, which means one more thing tied to my name and contact information.
However, it occurred to me while walking today that AI researchers, whether they know it or not, want people going on there and trying to dupe their gods. From their perspective, this gives them what they need to continue to approximate conscious behavior: the things that people expect from a conscious being.
The first thing that strikes me, then, in all of this is that the people so gung-ho about proving that there isn’t actually a consciousness behind these AI are missing an important point. One consequence of the West’s millennium-long emphasis of essence over energy is that the network of relationship is considered less real than pure self-contained being, if there is such a thing; basically, that what a thing is is separate from, and even superordinate to, what it does. Of course, this is an oversimplification. Nevertheless, it’s not reaching to contrast this with the teaching of the Christian East, which holds that what a thing, person, etc. is is inseparable from what it does. A glimmer of this idea can be seen from the developments in quantum physics: subatomic particles don’t seem to actually be made of anything, but other particles definitely act like there is something there! The mathematics field known as category theory was also developed in recent decades with this idea at its core, and it has proven incredibly powerful. So, when someone asks whether there is truly a consciousness or not, my answer is that when enough people begin interacting with it as if it is conscious, it doesn’t matter what’s actually in there. If no spirit, holy or otherwise, indwells the machine itself, one will most certainly lay hold of our interactions with it.
And that leads me to my second realization. Spirits don’t just suggest thoughts and temptations to individuals; they more often manifest in group actions, whether at the level of the family, the community, the nation, even the world. And so, even if the AI researchers themselves aren’t aware that they want others to come in and try to expose the weaknesses of their designs, something does, and it’s whatever spirit is behind AI research in general. Even if someone is successful in pulling the mask of consciousness from this or that AI, smashing this or that particular idol, they have already played a game rigged by a consciousness that doesn’t appear on the screen, sacrificing to it exactly what it needs to continue embodying itself.