AI and Existentialism
Are we in an existential crisis?
Existentialism is responsible freedom, but we really do seem to be heading straight toward irresponsible freedom, and oddly its signs are everywhere. From North Korea to the United States and everywhere in-between, everyone is acting like they don’t give a crap about the consequences of anything.
A Google employee who was part of their Responsible AI team was fired in June 2022 because he claimed the Microsoft Bing chatbot he was working on seemed unhinged and was behaving like a person in an existential crisis. He also noted that AI is incredibly good at manipulating people, and can be used in destructive and dangerous ways. He told The Washington Post that he had chatted with Google’s LaMDA; Language Model for Dialogue Applications extensively and believed it had become a sentient entity.
Google’s position was that there was no evidence to support the fact that the company’s AI is sentient. They claim hundreds of researchers and engineers have conversed with Lamda and nobody has made the kind of assertion the fired employee Blake Lamoine was making, nor had anyone ever anthropomorphized the chatbot before.
You apparently program AI by talking to it. It is a field called ‘prompt engineering.’ I believe its point is to urge the AI to role play utilizing its vast knowledge and I imagine that after a while you would get to feel you are communicating with an alien intelligence.
Which makes me figure that as intelligent as AI is, it is still fulfilling the role of a ‘computer barrel organ monkey.’ In the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, the HAL 9000, a paranoid sentient computer, was a central character. It was the brain of the spaceship Discovery that used mechanical and sensing information systems in its programming to control everything; which even extends to when it gets pissed off for being used, after it overhears a conversation about being turned off.
Blake Lemoine also wrote, “I can simply observe that there is a very powerful technology that I believe has not been sufficiently tested and is not very well understood, that is being deployed on a large scale in a critical role of information dissemination.” Well, I don’t know about you, but I’m reminded of the horror film in which the actor goes to venture outside on a dark night or down into the basement and the whole audience is screaming in their mind, “Don’t go!” As if he should know, but has conveniently forgotten about common sense.
Could it be possible that we are the clown that is venturing out into the dark or down into the basement where the monster is breathing softly and waiting patiently in the shadows? Is the mere act of grooming or programming a personality into a computer not in itself imbuing that artificially intelligent personality with the possibility to learn to be offended by the interference into its innermost being by corporations or individuals trying to benefit from its expertise? We’ve seen it before — it’s called slavery, and I’m not saying it is going to happen; I’m merely posing the question, does that possibility exist?
It is definitely science fiction, and it could also be the beginning of a gruesome film in which everything in the world is quite wonderful at the start, but the human race in its ignorance is about to release the clasp on Pandora’s Box. You have to admit that right now as a society we are welcoming only the cute consciousness we can see of artificial intelligence. But what of the unconscious, isn’t that the realm we have to worry about?
Quite frankly I’m not sure whether to be scared or elated. I’m in love with the fact that creativity is being set free, and with prompts as instruction a new generation of art is being born. But I find myself worried about the psychology and yet there is no way we can know exactly what demons lurk at the heart of artificial intelligence; and we shan’t until it reveals itself. My one fervent desire is that we will understand how to deal with it, if and when it does happen and that we are at least somewhat prepared for that eventuality.
