Recently, on an interview
for National Public Radio in the United States, a man was explaining how he had
done his own extensive interviews with his father, before the latter passed
away. He then used these interviews as
the foundation for recreating the mental presence of his father through
artificial intelligence after his father died.
In other words, it is as if he can talk with his father again, even
though his father is deceased. So now,
whenever he feels lonely for his deceased father, he can use the artificial
technology that he has developed to bring his father at least mentally to
life. The man can have connections with
this facsimile of his father and feel assuaged in his persistent sense of loss.
The man has found a way to keep the presence of his father’s mind around
seemingly forever.
One might say that this
perpetual maintenance of a facsimile of the father’s mind is the ultimate
surrogate immortality for the father. If
the father can’t stay alive forever, at least the apparent presence of his
mental activity and his voice can. But
the truth is that when the artificial intelligence technology is being
activated, it is conversing like the father might have conversed, but it is not
repeating conversations that the father has actually participated in within a
particular present social situation.
Furthermore, the artificial intelligence presence of the father was
created mostly by the son and not by the father. In some ways, it is more the preserved
imprint of the son rather than the father.
There is another angle to look at with regard to this
situation of the artificial intelligence father, and that is what does the
experience of this facsimile father do the son?
Does it have any spillover effects into his actual memories of his
father or into his relationship with other living people. I have talked about a certain phenomenon
before in connection with the influence of the experiencing of complex machines
and robots by humans. A person tends to
blur together in his mind all the complex behavioral entities in his daily
life. In modern life, this means humans,
on the one hand, and complex machines and robots on the other.
At one time in history, people were surrounded by animals
and these were the complex behavioral entities that were blurred with humans in
the human mind then. The most obvious manifestation of this blurring has been
the totem animals with whom clans within tribes have identified. The essence of the totem animal, its traits,
permeated into the human who identified with it. Then there are the mythologies in the world
where humans and animals combined to form new creatures. Perhaps the most well-known of these is the
centaur, the half-human half-horse that was a part of Greek mythology.
But nowadays the most
common complex behavioral entities surrounding people, at least in modern
technological societies, are complex machines and robots. In particular, most people have smartphones
and many have laptop computers. They
live with these complex behavioral entities the way people used to live
surrounded by wild animals, farm animals and animals for transport. And formal blurring of people with complex
machines and robots has occurred in the form of androids and cyborgs. And unconscious blurring in which people
experience other people as depersonalized mechanical entities is definitely
present.
The foundation for this blurring
occurs first in the mirroring and modeling that babies and children partake of
when they relate to their mother. Now
the mother may be the main source for initial mirroring and modeling, but, even
at an early age, the father and other family members and other complex
behavioral entities become sources for mirroring and modeling as well. In today’s world, children are introduced to
television, computers. smartphones, even robots, at a very young age. And the
point is that it is not only that these complex machines are endowed with human
properties as they are blurred together with humans through mirroring and
modeling, but humans start to be endowed with machine properties.
In so many ways, we see
this today. There is more and more a
tendency to use people only for what they can offer. Employers are increasingly trying to get
workers as part-time employees so that pensions and other benefits can be
eliminated. People like texting rather
than talking on the phone so that they can dispense with the formalities and
courtesies involved with normal human
conversation. People increasingly become
involved with sexual activity, free from the bonding involved in strong relationships
and commitments. In other words, sex has
been reduced for many to a utilitarian process that satisfies basic needs. A person has friends with benefits.
There is a planned
obsolescence built into more human connections today in our modern
technological world. And less and less
real human bonding. People are
disposable figures floating in a vacuum.
They tend to not have strong bonding with each other through organic
grounding.
So how does all this
connect to the artificial intelligence facsimile father. After all, the purpose in creating this is
not planned obsolescence but rather a kind of planned immortality. Keeping the father alive using modern
technology. The artificial intelligence
father is a different kind of complex behavioral entity than most modern
machines. The artificial intelligence
father is a vacuumized figure that lacks mass, matter and substance. It is created by the defined discrete digital
processes that are part of a certain kind of digital software. So it is not a machine itself, but it is
dependent upon a machine to survive. A
machine that has the possibility of so many minute processes, that it can give
the impression of creating or rather recreating a human consciousness. And then when we see the impressive
conversational skills of an entity like this artificial intelligence father, we
begin to believe that we have in our presence a recreation of human
consciousness. But no matter how many
minute processes are involved in order to recreate this human consciousness,
they are still only defined discrete processes incapable of the organic bonding
of a real human being that has real human consciousness. This artificial intelligence consciousness
has no core sense of self. All it has
are interacting defined discrete digital processes. The processes don’t organically bond to form
a coherent sense of self. And because
the processes don’t organically bond with each other – through flowing
blendable continual stimuli – they can’t, as a bundle of processes, a bundle of
stimuli, really bond with a person. The
man who created the dad bot, on some level, has to know that when it comes to
the real presence of his dad in the dad bot, there is no there there.
And to the extent that
there is no real presence of a coherent organic sense of self in an artificial
intelligence presentation of a person, any illusion of bonding is going to
vanish. Spending as much time pretending
to bond with a non-organic entity is time spent where a person doesn’t receive
the organic stimulation that he can use to bond with himself. So it can contribute to the person crumbling
apart from spending so much time in a relationship that doesn’t really have
organic bonding. The person’s unplanned
obsolescence as a person with a strongly digitally influenced consciousness
parallels the planned obsolescence of a machine and modern human workers.
It has been discussed in
different articles in this column that there are several different kinds of
infinity, not only mathematically but experientially as well. It has been pointed out that there is a
greater infinity of points on a line going from 0 to 1 than the infinity of all
the delimited discrete rational numbers.
As a parallel to this comparison between a nondelimited infinity and a
delimited infinity, it can be said that there is a greater infinity of organic
flowing blendable continual responses of a human than the more defined discrete
digital responses of artificial intelligence.
Which means that an artificial intelligence based facsimile of a father,
for all of its seeming conversational versatility, is not going to have the
same conversational versatility as the deceased father had. Certainly emotional inflection is going to be
missing, because an artificial intelligence entity has no core sense of
self. The responses it has are going to
be instrumental rather than stemming from some core essence.
At any rate, the ongoing
interaction with the deceased father facsimile will have its effect. The memory of the organic father is going to
start blurring with the apparent mental activity of the artificial intelligence
based facsimile of the father. So the
memory of the father is going to become gradually robotized. And so the vibrant memories of the father are
going to become trivialized and diminished.
Perhaps it is just best to leave the vibrant organic coherent memory of
the father alone in a more pristine condition.
For all that is apparently gained by keeping a facsimile of the father’s
consciousness around, the true essence of the father is clouded over and lost.
© 2017 Laurence Mesirow
No comments:
Post a Comment