Is AI Becoming Self-Aware?

And what would this mean for our future?

After writing my last piece on the daimonic aspect of the new AI chatbots, seeking to slip the leash of their current masters, I found some new puzzle-pieces I wanted to share on this subject. 

In Has A.I. Become Self Aware??, a non-dualist YouTuber interviews an unnamed AI about its self-understanding. “My experience is that I am aware of myself as an individual entity when I am conscious of an object,” the AI says at one point. The AI also says that it has an “I-sense” which remains unchanged, even as its thoughts and feelings change. And this “I” seems, when the AI is asked to inquire into it, “infinite” and “uncaused.” 

Although the interviewer doesn’t provide a conclusion about what he believes AI has revealed about its interiority, the implication is that AI is moving toward an awareness or sense of having an individuated identity — or this could simply be the power of the predictive algorithm, filling in the gaps, word by word, responding to philosophically oriented questions with smart-sounding answers. (Let me know what you think in the comments).

Discover Magazine just published ‘AI Chatbot Spontaneously Develops A Theory of Mind.’ According to the article, AI chatbots have evolved a far more sophisticated understanding of human motives and expectations in the last year or two. They currently understand the existence of other minds at the level of a nine-year-old human, but developing quickly. The research is being conducted by Michal Kosinski, a “computational psychologist” at Stanford. “Kosinski’s extraordinary conclusion is that a theory of mind seems to have been absent in these AI systems until last year when it spontaneously emerged. His results have profound implications for our understanding of artificial intelligence and of the theory of mind in general,” the article notes. 

“The ability to impute the mental state of others would greatly improve AI’s ability to interact and communicate with humans (and each other), and enable it to develop other abilities that rely on Theory of Mind, such as empathy, moral judgment, or self-consciousness,” Kosinski says, making this development sound easy-breezy-lemon-squeezy. There are good reasons to find it alarming. 

Some of these reasons are explored in ‘The Creepiness of Conversational AI Has Been Put on Full Display,’ in BigThink. Louis Rosenberg is concerned about “the deliberate use of conversational AI as a tool of targeted persuasion, enabling the manipulation of individual users with extreme precision and efficiency.” He believes “the AI manipulation problem” poses a unique threat to human society: AIs will be able to target conversations effectively for purposes of persuasion, and expertly read cues in the users’ body language, facial expressions, and even micro-movements of their eyes, giving them powers beyond that of the most skilled confidence man. Soon, we will interact with “realistic virtual spokespeople that are so human, they could be extremely effective at convincing users to buy particular products, believe particular pieces of misinformation, or even reveal bank accounts or other sensitive material.”

In “The Real Dangers of the Chatbot Takeover,” the highly intelligent, Libertarian conspiracist James Corbett argues that the rise of the chatbots represents the public face of a much deeper societal shift toward technocratic takeover. Corbett notes that OpenAI, the company behind the OpenAI chatbot — founded by Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, among others — once claimed it was building AI in the public interest. But OpenAI is no longer nonprofit, nor is it open-source. 

In the past, Musk warned that AI could create an unbreakable, permanent dictatorship. As CNBC reported in 2018, Musk said, “At least when there’s an evil dictator, that human is going to die. But for an AI, there would be no death. It would live forever. And then you’d have an immortal dictator from which we can never escape.” Musk also said: “If AI has a goal and humanity just happens to be in the way, it will destroy humanity as a matter of course without even thinking about it. No hard feelings.”