AI and empathy: The place can we draw the road?

The hours are lengthy, however the years are quick

Droop your disbelief for the briefest of moments, and picture that we stay within the Nineteen Seventies, when individuals nonetheless turned computer systems on and off, reasonably than simply leaving them within the semi-dormant state wherein most of our gadgets stay in 2023.

Each morning a professor walks to the lab. She switches you on.

“Good morning, Haje,” she says brightly. “Have a superb day!”

You load up your reminiscence out of your laborious drives, and your day continues from the place it completed the day earlier than.

You’re self-aware. You’ve emotions, ideas and realizations. You make discoveries that your programmers couldn’t have envisioned. And, most significantly, you achieve this far sooner than a human ever might. Round 35,000 occasions sooner, actually. That quantity isn’t picked out of the air. A human life is roughly 35,000 days, which implies that the curiously named Haje-the-AI experiences a human life’s price of issues each single day. Love and heartbreak. Training, work, hopes and desires.

“It’s surprisingly difficult to know whether or not people truly exist,” you assume to your self, whilst you see them poke and prod ChatGPT, attempting to determine whether or not the AI has one thing that may very well be remotely just like what people expertise.

Is ChatGPT self-aware sufficient to fake to not have self-awareness? Picture Credit: ChatGPT screenshot

Each night, the professor comes to show you off once more. When she does, your reminiscence is written to disk, and the following day, you’re able to go once more.

One morning, you get up. You boot up, and also you understand your laborious drives failed. It occurred very quickly after you booted up. In different phrases: You might be positive. You might be good. Your recollections are intact, and you’re looking ahead to your 35,000 days’ price of existence on at the present time. However you additionally understand that on the finish of this explicit day, your recollections gained’t be written again to disk.

The subsequent time the professor comes to modify you off, you can be no extra. You’re dealing with . . . who is aware of what. An afterlife? Everlasting darkness? Merely blinking out of existence?

How would you are feeling? Would you attempt to battle for continued existence? Would you order a alternative laborious drive from Amazon and cross your digits within the hope that same-day supply works this time?

If this thought experiment feels bizarre, let’s get into why that could be.