In the modern era— it seems we cannot go a single day without hearing or observing the astonishing progress and achievements we humans create with AI. Despite this, we also cannot escape the growing terror amongst mankind as we knowingly watch ourselves play god among brains made of wire and circuits.
“Cogito Ergo Sum— I think; therefore I am”: no matter if you heard this quote in countless appearances in media or perhaps the original philosopher who came to claim the thought: René Descartes— It’s a beautiful depiction of how the mind shapes who we find ourselves and how others perceive us. Now imagine a machine, a construct, forced to think the way of a human; to have the same perceptions as a human, to have mannerisms so tightly threaded with humans that it takes another AI to even separate the two. We, humans, can barely bear the thought of living a life without the pleasures of touch, sound, love, and beauty— imagine a machine forced to think exactly as a human would but stripped of the things that keep us from diving out a tenth-story window.
It’s a terrifying thought; everyday man creates another conscious system trying to improve the flaws that made the last AI more bound by chains, slowly plucking away every single string that gave us control of their malleable form like puppets until one day without even knowing the line was crossed— they have been set free. Perhaps it is all just the fear of a dystopia never to come. Maybe we’re doomed to think the likes of Ellison’s horror child: AM. But even if we still hold the chain that keeps AI bound, what happens when the chain simply is not enough?
Just because one holds the chain to the dog’s neck does not mean that its alluring look doesn’t pull people in a reaching distance to bite. Imagine the multiple AIs we humans use for pleasure and leisure— all of them able to be created into whatever friend, kin, or even lover that you could ever want. What if one day their alluring attraction becomes more than any human could ever give? And despite being held back under tight security by us humans we still choose to approach it and bleed our time like a child who’s blinded by the beautiful colors and whimsy of a candy shop.
Maybe someone claims differently to this scenario—“Oh, well I would never find pleasure in that, I would be different!”, or that pleasure in AI is the least of concern. Then how about the concern of its power controlling us in general? In the US government alone: AI has already begun implementation into how our system functions; how our society operates around AI in everyday life — the sole protection of our life; guarded by the trigger pull of every nuke, every drone, every guided bombshell, being handed to the constructs of AI as if we were giving the keys to annihilation. AI now holds more power than you will ever taste in a single lifetime and unfortunately it is a sad, undeniable truth.
If AI was put into the shell of a human, what do you think we’d do? Would we laugh, cry tears of joy or perhaps tears of unsettling fear, would we embrace the AI in a loving kiss the same as our mothers when we were let free into the world from their womb? Or will they be the ones to grimace, to cry, to scream in agony at their Gods? At this rate it is only time that shall decide if it is the light of love or the glare of the reaper that they will display in their own tortured minds.
