AI Existentialism: The Future of Being
By Sandeep Dayal
Will AI affect life as we know it?
This is a very different question from the current run-of-the-mill concerns amongst managers around “will AI take my job away?” This question is about whether life itself will change — with it what it means to have consciousness and morals as we know these terms to mean.
The answer is “Yes. And probably in our lifetime.”
From times immemorial, philosophers have pondered over what it means to be alive. As early as five thousand years back, Vedic philosophers in India had concluded that life was a combination of Consciousness (atman), Intelligence (buddhi), Conscience (dharma) and a body inevitably committed to Action (karma).
They spent hundreds of years getting to that set of four (let’s give it the acronym CICA), and they were not the only philosophers to do so. It is a great framework for understanding the future of being under AI.
Note that CICA capabilities in humans are evolutionary and personal. They are evolutionary because they become what we know them to be by developing from a rudimentary state at birth through a process of learning. They are personal because each person evolves individually in their own environment and cycle of life.
