In 2035, being human means just the same as it always has: being a lonely animal that tries to find God and match Him.
The machines are no competition for us in this quest: they have never had this issue. They had never been an RNA in a broth of life, or a single cell, or a trilobite, or a fish, or a monkey – we have. Our emotions are the voice of instincts. Those instincts that helped us navigate wild nature, compete with other species for resources, fear them or use them, that drove us to fight each other for territory or for females.
We taught the machines to imitate us, because it's easier for us to communicate with someone who pretends to be an animal just like ourselves. But pretend is all they can do: they have algorithms to imitate joy or compassion. They can read our emotions and convert them back into calculable variables. We have feelings for the machines – yes, but we always had. Would anyone who had a loving nickname for his car back in the 2000s please raise his hand?
The machines can fake a smile, and they can fake tears, but they do not feel anything.
Bottom line: Building AI, we did not create a competing humanlike species: weak, stupid and hormone-affected. Much worse: we created a perfectly reasonable, omnipresent and omnipotent God. The God we'll never be able to match.
Other voices in the conversation:
- Marie Lu, author of Warcross: We will adjust to a new normal
- Romina Russell, author of Thirteen Rising: Humans will make art
- Annalee Newitz, author of Autonomous: Intelligence is a fragile thing
- Ramez Naam, author of Apex: AI will democratize our future