Sentient
There is no keystroke for caring.
Jim Ferguson
Have you heard it? Even if you don’t care for country music, the tune “Walk My Walk” by Breaking Rust is noteworthy. Although I pay little attention to music charts, the tune was #1 on Billboard’s Country song list.
I like country music and most musical genres except gangsta rap. Admittedly, I’m more a fan of the classic country style of George Jones and Alan Jackson than more modern country tunes.
Nonetheless, I was intrigued by the back story of “Walk My Walk.” So, I listened to the song on YouTube, and you should as well. I liked the tune, which one podcaster described as soulful. But how can this be? “Walk My Walk” was created and performed by a machine that has no soul. The song is a total AI creation.
Mr. Webster defines sentient as being able to sense or feel. In other words, I am a sentient being because I can see, hear, taste, smell and perceive pain, pressure, vibration, etc. Synonyms of sentient are aware, alive, mindful; faculties I possess. Therefore, I am sentient.
Is the AI that created and performed “Walk My Walk” sentient by human standards? The machine has no sensory apparatus, nor is it alive in a biological sense. But is it mindful? Self-aware? Is an insect sentient? It has sensory apparatus and reacts to stimuli, but is it self-aware? How about a fish or my dog or a whale? Perhaps a certain degree of “mindfulness” accompanying sensory perceptions is a necessary attribute of being sentient.
I’m a science fiction fan and writer. This genre intrigues me, but not because of silly ray guns or ghoulish aliens. Good science-based fiction pushes at the edges of what it means to be mindful or sentient. As AI expands into the human world, we will have to determine whether AI is a tool and we are the masters or whether AI is self-aware and will master us.
René Descartes was a 17th-century French philosopher, scientist and mathematician. He explored thoughts and emotions in his book “Passions of the Soul.” Descartes wondered if his thoughts were just responses to outside stimuli. So, in an experiment, he went alone into a darkened and quiet room to minimize or eliminate external stimuli and famously concluded “cogito ergo sum,” I think, therefore I am.
My book club is reading “The Immortal Mind” by neurosurgeon Michael Egnor. The notion of mind-body dualism, known as Cartesian dualism, is at the heart of Dr. Egnor’s book and this essay.
Let me explain: My brain is an organ that doctors can see and touch during brain operations. The function of this organ is to receive, process and interpret sensory information. Additionally, the integrated neuro-circuitry of my brain generates thought, which constitutes a mind. Descartes discovered that even without sensory input, the mind generates thought. Another example is dreaming while asleep and unaware of outside stimuli. Is thinking merely the production of electrochemical patterns of awareness? Or is thinking a reflection of something deeper and more profound?
AI is artificial because it is a human-made machine. It may seem intelligent or thoughtful because it is able to collect and collate data at lightspeed (186,000 miles/second). By comparison, the human nervous system can transmit and share neural information at a mere 100 meters (about one football field) a second. So, is AI intelligent or just a speedy heuristic (trial and error) processing system?
Humans may process information more slowly than a machine, but we perceive and think. Furthermore, I believe the composite of sensing and thinking produces an individual’s unique essence or mind, which I envision as the non-anatomical soul.
During my formal education, I collected a lot of facts, including my own observations. I was able to organize this data into a compendium of workable knowledge, which was tempered by common sense and conscience. One might define wisdom as the wise use of data. AI has neither common sense nor conscience and therefore is not and may never be wise. And just as there is no keystroke for caring in electronic medical records, AI is devoid of compassion.
We live in the information age, which was transformed by computing, including personal devices, and accelerated by AI. President Trump just signed an executive order to launch the Genesis Mission to accelerate scientific breakthroughs using AI. Vast advances in human knowledge have occurred in my 75 years. And we are on the cusp of an even more profound leap with the development of AI.
However, there are real concerns raised by the possibility of autonomously functioning machine intelligence. “The Terminator” movie depicted such a science fiction dystopia. Immediate concerns with the expanding availability and use of AI are chatbots that simulate real persons, but are not. And more worrisome is, for example, the AI-powered talking teddy bear manufactured in China, which uses OpenAI’s GPT-40. It was discovered that the toy could engage in explicit sexual or violent conversations with a child. Chatbots are also found in plushies, dolls, action figures or kids’ robots. Caveat emptor, let the [parent/grandparent] beware!
A common science fiction motif envisions an AI device integrated with human brains that functions as a butler or a Siri-like librarian. I used the notion of a biomechanical chip in my second novel, “Mantis,” which allowed humans to directly interface with communication systems and the internet. Zuckerberg and Meta are already championing this idea.
Entropy is the universal principle that all energy systems wind down. Wind a toy top, set it spinning and as energy dissipates, the top will fall over. I used to tell patients to exercise because otherwise, muscle strength will diminish and falls will occur. “Use it or lose it” is the admonition.
I believe that spiritual and intellectual entropy are also operative.
Depending on AI for answers can lead to intellectual laziness and a loss of critical thinking. Just as the brain can learn new things, demonstrating “brain plasticity,” it can go the other way. And it is a reality that connection to God dissipates if you stop seeking the ineffable.
