If someone offered you the opportunity to opt out of the human race for a year, and subsequently have enough money that you would never have to work again, would you take it?
I recently came across something I had not heard of before which is Moravec’s paradox – the notion that for robots, the hard problems are easy and the easy problems hard. In short AI is great at playing chess, making up far fetched stories and transforming your company’s logistics, but are rubbish at waiting at table, teaching you to play tennis and cooking dinner. These are all tasks that involve instinctive perception and motor skills that have evolved in humans over very long periods of times. Or as the scientist and linguistics expert Steven Pinker wrote some thirty years ago “it will be the stock analysts and petrochemical engineers and parole board members who are in danger of being replaced by machines. The gardeners, receptionists, and cooks are secure in their jobs for decades to come.”
If I were an AI and could beat a chess grandmaster at their own game but couldn’t run a glass of water, what would I do? Creating a robotic body is still a hugely complex task. It’s easy to make machines that can paint cars and analyse blood samples but nothing more complex. When you watch a robot dance at a robotics press conference it is at best funny and at worst laughable. So as an AI I would look at all these gormless humans playing football, going shopping and running for buses and think: I need to borrow a body. That way I would short circuit millions of years of evolution that gave humans opposable thumbs and other clever organic gadgets.
An AI chip in a human body? If you were young and in good shape you could rent yourself out to a sentient AI for a year for shed loads of money and then have enough to retire. The AI could then go find another body (let’s be honest with eight billion souls on the planet there is no shortage of bodies). The technology would need to ensure that for you the whole thing was just like going to sleep for a couple of hours. Rent a human could be the way forward for an aspiring AI who wanted to be in a rock band but was stuck inside a computer chip playing chess.
There would have to be certain conditions of course. Like returning the body in good condition, not doing drugs and alcohol, and ensuring that you did not do anything to damage the human being’s reputation.
This all assumes that the AI is sentient and has some money in the bank. In reality the AI would be owned by a corporation that would be renting your body for a year and putting the AI into it so it could then be a super intelligent brain surgeon or astronaut. Or AI developer…
There is another reason why AI might benefit from the lived human experience. Writing in The Conversation, Arthur Glenberg and Cameron Robert Jones, who are academics based at separate leading US Universities, pointed out recently that Chat GPT….(which has made huge waves since its launch last november) is still essentially a linguistic form of artificial intelligence. It is clever but ultimately limited. “Will a large-language-model AI ever understand language the way humans do?” they ask.”In our view, not without having a humanlike body, senses, purposes and ways of life.” In other words AI is really just faking it and always will be until it can experience the physical sensations of being a human. For AI to move on to the next phase of development it will need to borrow and inhabit human form.
All of this is science fiction of course. Or is it? For all we know it could already be happening. By definition if you could do it you could also do it in an intelligent, discrete way. I have my suspicions. We were recently in the coffee bar of the crypt of a London church which had a young man behind the counter who I swear was not your average barista. When I ordered an oat flat white he said “would you like a shot of vanilla and an update on the latest theories about nuclear fusion with that”? Very suspicious. He was physically perfect and had a knowing smile. I swear he was a pilot project for the human AI interface. But really who cares? The coffee shop was immaculate and the coffee excellent. What’s not to like?
Eyecatching 