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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.
The new AI processes being developed may also be described as evolutionary and undergo supervised and unsupervised training. However, in the case of AI machines, there is no end to the evolution as there is no death, and the capabilities are transferable to other machines and hence not necessarily personal.
While most think of AI as a functionality confined within a computer box, it is, in fact, poised to step out of that realm and impact the meaning of all four CICA elements and consequently, our understanding of life.
You may think, “hmm, that doesn’t seem like anything that business should get its knickers in a knot about” and you would be wrong. When life as you know it changes, so does everything else.
Human life is the sum of two parts, namely, the mind and body. Both are being replicated and revised in the form of AI based computers and machines. When the parts change, the sum will too — at least, in such AI systems.
