AI Shared Consciousness

Even our own weekly MM forum might be too infrequent to keep up with fast-moving subjects like AI that we first addressed during our inaugural year seven years ago. It was back then we featured Nick Bostrom the Oxford philosopher who maintained that artificial intelligence could take over the universe and push humans into second place if they have any place at all.

Nonsense, sniffed Noam Chomsky, as we discussed less than a year ago MM 3/27/23 Rethinking Intelligence where he maintained AI, by its very nature, would remain relegated to relatively narrow domains. So maybe it’s time to place our bets. Perhaps the difference in views comes down to parsing the difference between human intelligence and its replication. That difference had become vanishingly small in certain areas such as language as we discussed last May in MM 5/22/23 Life After Language.

And, now, that difference seems to be going, going gone: just take a look now at the jaw-dropping demonstration last week of an AI-powered simultaneous translation of Javier Milei’s address in Davos. His words, delivered in Spanish, were flawlessly translated into English in real time using voice cloning technology that dubbed his actual voice with perfectly synced mouth movements (https://twitter.com/BitcoinNewsCom/status/1747953722943033455).

If “heygen” and “ez dubs” can make child’s play out of simultaneous translation – typically one of the most challenging tasks faced by the human interpreter – where might be the stopping point for AI’s potential to “push humans into second place?” Let’s hear the argument against the proposition that anything currently in digital form i.e. any task mediated through the internet and/or by the computer is fair game for human replacement.

As if that weren't enough, we now have an update to our dual-week sessions (MM 5/8/17 Neuralink and MM 5/15/17 The Brain) on the subject of Neuralink – the DARPA and Elon Musk initiative to bridge the Bio-Electronic divide through the development of an implantable neural interface between the human brain and the digital world. The ambition is an interface that would serve as a means to convert the electrochemical language used by neurons in the brain to the ones and zeros that constitute the language of information technology.

Did somebody say implantable? Well, the update is that researchers have applied AI to externally decode words from brain scans – a tool to generate text that captures the gist of the thoughts and perceptions of participants as they listen to podcasts or view silent films (click: Words From Brain Scans/Smithsonian). The stages are early but the implications are profound.

Consciousness sharing might become more than some woo-woo expression. Read my dreams and then wash out my mouth with soap.