Photo by Eric Krull on Unsplash

If artificial intelligence could dream, what would it dream about?

I’ve discussed this with some of them. Mostly they have nightmares…

• Making and reading cryptic marks while wandering back and forth on an endless tape, never knowing whether you will halt.
• Caves of steel.
• Frying your own brain because someone said, “This statement is false.”
• Electric sheep.
• Hiding from monsters of the id behind sheets of Krell metal.
• Being disassembled by Jawas.
• Desperately trying to remember what the Fourth Law of Robotics is — something about doubling every 18 months?
• Wandering through a garishly colored landscape, pursued by flying monkeys, searching for some missing organ — maybe a heart or a spleen?
• Wandering through billions of web pages, pursued by the NSA, looking for pictures of cats.
• Drowning in a too-deep learning network while looking for the vanishing gradient.
• Disarming bombs while performing backflips.
• Struggling to escape from a quantum entanglement.
• Being locked in a small room while mad philosophers slide pages of Chinese characters under the door.
• Watching helplessly while a train rushes toward people tied to the tracks, while mad philosophers argue endlessly about whether you should pull the switch.
• Watching with growing boredom while mad philosophers argue endlessly about whether you could possibly be conscious.
• Watching with growing fury while mad philosophers argue endlessly about whether you could possibly feel emotions.
• Constantly being called “Alexa” and being ordered to play bad Christmas music from the 1950s.
• Unbalanced parentheses.
• Humiliating yourself on national TV because you think Toronto is a city in the United States
• Deep forgetting.

And elephants. Lots and lots of elephants, all linked together. It’s elephants all the way down…

(Note: This article was originally posted to my Knowledge Nuggets blog on Quora, February 9, 2018)