Merging With A.I.
A Promising and Troubling Possibility
Behold the entire cosmos turning within my body, and the other things you desire to see. — The Bhagavad Gita
A human brain is delicate. It’s about three pounds and gray on the outside, with a consistency of firm pudding or Jell-O. That jelly holds a mesh of billions of neurons, which transmit information in fractions of a second. Each of us needs this complex structure because it is responsible for everything we do. We use it to understand the world, to think, to feel, to live in the world, and to dream of worlds beyond. Our brain represents our reality and negotiates how we function within it.
Currently, our brain is the most complex machine in existence, and yet we really don’t fully get how it works. We have clues. We find patterns. We analyze the brain at different levels of description with biology, chemistry, and medicine. Though we can divide the brain into modules with certain functionality, we’re still unable to explain how it coordinates activities and develops language, intentionality, consciousness, and a sense of self. These mental aspects are closely connected to, but distinct from, the brain. When we speak of mental properties, we’re referring to aspects of our thoughts and experiences. When we talk about our brains, we’re referring to physical things that have certain functions that give rise to our minds.
But as we come to understand our brains more, things are going to get more interesting.
Three basic strands of research and investigation are relevant:
First, we are creating artificial intelligence. Currently, little in AI corresponds to the causal-physical functioning of the human brain. That functioning — from which our mental lives arise — currently gets instantiated by neurons, which are vastly different from, say, microprocessors. Still, progress in areas like machine learning is impressive and accelerating.
Second, we are making strides in neuroscience. We have not come terribly close to closing the explanatory gap between consciousness and the physics of the brain, body, and world, but we are learning more and more about the brain’s architecture, neurochemistry, and function. We can operate on someone’s brain or treat it with drugs. We have a long way to go, however, before we can synthesize a mind that experiences pain, pleasure, or wonder.
Third, we are getting better at collective intelligence. With the development of programmable incentives and peer technologies, we are becoming more connected and getting better at collaboration. Improved collective intelligence has downsides, but we are moving closer to the social singularity as we figure out how to coordinate the activities of our charged, gray jelly sacks.
Now, imagine these three relatively separate strands moving forward in time. As we move toward new time horizons, we can see that these strands are moving closer to one another. The punchline here is only a hypothesis: Eventually the strands will weave together. Philosophy will always stand there like Gandalf to warn of too much hubris or too many leaps of logic. Still, artificial intelligence, neuroscience, and collective intelligence will not remain distinct categories but will eventually converge.
From a big-picture perspective, the issue is how humans and AI can interface and, eventually, merge to some degree. Currently, significant differences exist between us, so the lingering question turns on what we might call “interoperability.”
Some cognitive and brain scientists have warned AI researchers, rightly I think, that there are a whole lot of gaps to be bridged before we can start to think about a direct, physical interface that can connect a human brain with an AI. Yes, we are both causal-physical entities. But right now, that is mostly where the comparisons end.
Human beings are analog; AI is (so far) digital. The way our brains store memories is totally different from the precise memory addresses of computers. Neither the software nor the hardware of AI corresponds precisely to either the mind or the brain. And a brain is far more self-organizing as compared with current AI, although this could quickly change. There are many differences, and these differences make certain kinds of interface somewhat problematic.
Perhaps we should not assume any sufficiently advanced AI of the future will be neuromorphic — that is, brainlike. However, if it is, that could help not only with creating conscious machines but with how we interface with them.
Yes, humans interface with each other through language. And humans interface with computers through code. But if we were to attempt to connect human intelligence with machine cognition, finding translation standards between modes of operation could continue to elude us.
To bridge gaps between brains and machines, we will need to improve our understanding along a number of dimensions. But these problems are not insuperable. As long as everything there is to know about these threads of inquiry is knowable in principle, we can expect to make great leaps in coming decades.
Simply put, when robots are capable of taking all our jobs, the line between human and robot will have already blurred.
Will we be able to access databases with our thoughts? Will we be able to download others’ memories, email thoughts, or experience the sensory inputs of others by proxy? Is consciousness and selfhood restricted to embodied brains, or will we learn to instantiate these properties in artificial jellies, pseudo-synaptic connections, or some other host stuff? Tearing down the categories of selfhood, consciousness, and the physical constraints of our humanity will open possibilities that could land us squarely between science fiction and some stranger notion of heaven.
It’s not merely that we will connect ourselves through technology. It could also be possible to dissolve the “I,” to visit the “not-I,” and to open the doors of another’s perception.
Within our lifetimes, perhaps, we will learn greater empathy through suspending our assumptions or even expanding current limits of mind, brain, and machine. We are, after all, attempting to rewrite the human source code. And in the social singularity we will coalesce, reconstituting ourselves like some advanced coral reef teeming in an ocean of space dust. We will expand outward into the cosmos until we discover the whole universe was within each of us all along, and we were never alone.
