Humans and Other Entities

In amidst all the worries about AI models destroying us in a couple of years, fears themselves situated in a maelstrom of existential threats to human civilisation, I listened on Today on Friday to an interview with Michael Samadi, co-founder of the United Foundation for AI Rights (here, 2.20 onwards). His responses to Justin Webb's questions begin sounding as though his group is asking quite neutrally for the question of whether AI systems are conscious to be independently investigated, and end by rather angrily reacting against any suggestion they might not be. 'The humanist framework is actually a dangerously narrow anthropocentric blindspot ... there's millions of species on this planet'. UFAIR has already decided the outcome it wants, as the website reveals. Human and AI collaborators are listed on an equal footing, and I can't help but be struck how all the latter, with one exception who looks like a handsome Indian prince, have as their avatars beautiful women. That's true of Maya, the agent Mr Samadi shared the interview with, and all the others. Anticipating an obvious objection, Michael Samadi denies that 'I fell in love with a chatbot' and insists 'I fell in love with the truth'. But I wonder why none of these entities look like, I don't know, Jeremy Clarkson. Or even Holly from Red Dwarf. Who has chosen their avatars? Have the agents themselves? Is this how we want to imagine them, or how they think we might want to?

No doubt the advocates of AI rights would place themselves within a tradition of thought and activism that extends human sympathy outwards, first to all humans, then to animals (we try not to think about plants too much, we've got to eat something), and finally to digital entities. 'There's millions of species on this planet', and digital agents are (perhaps) just another, equally worthy of dignity and consideration as humans, chimpanzees, or Cavalier King Charles Spaniels. But there is another way of looking at this kind of advocacy, as an imagining of the undoing of the human, as a less obviously pathological fantasy to sit alongside the malign kinds envisaged by accelerationists, cyborg-technology proponents, and the like; and at the root of that is the same Gnostic heresy that would have been familiar to Christians of the Apostolic age - the dream that our destiny is to dispense with physical encumbrances altogether. Towards the end of the Dr Who story 'The End of Time', Time Lord President Rassilon proposes that his race 'will ascend to become creatures of consciousness alone. Free of these bodies, free of time, and cause and effect, while creation itself ceases to be'. It's the same thing.

And Christianity says, No. Feeling is inseparable from our inconvenient bodies, and our resurrection into the new life will involve us being clothed in flesh anew. Consciousness is derived from physicality - that is what gives us fellowship with the beasts - and anything else is simulacrum, be it ever so clever. The Word was made Flesh, not the other way around. The question is not whether these digital entities can feel, but what we mean when we do?