Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

Human anxiety about the potential threat of robotic intelligence is nothing new. As far back as Gulliver’s Travels (1726), Jonathan Swift was already parodying the idea of machine intelligence. In the 20th century, as humanity entered an age of rapid technological advancement, there was an explosion of science fiction reflecting an upsurge in human unease about our shared future with androids, cyborgs, and AIs. For instance, in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Hal, a spacecraft supercomputer, shows a total disregard for the inherent value of human life by taking control of the mission to the detriment of the astronauts onboard. In the same year, sci-fi author Phillip K. Dick published Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (a book that would be transformed into Ridley Scott’s 1982 blockbuster film, Bladerunner), which problematizes machine consciousness and the nature of humanity. In the 80s and 90s, The Terminator franchise exemplified dystopian worries of a mythological robot future in which humans are subject to genocidal eradication.

With characters like Data (an android), Star Trek: The Next Generation portrayed a more optimistic, yet still problematized, vision of the integration of artificial life in human society. In this case—something of an outlier in 20th-century pop culture representations of AI— humans, aliens, and androids navigate the legal, social, and emotional resonances of their different biological and machine heritages, generally with a spirit of greater political integration and personal understanding. However, even in fantasy worlds as optimistic as Star Trek, The Borg, an extremely technologically advanced hive-mind of cyborgs, threatens to “assimilate” all other life in their cancerous conquest of the galaxy. At the turn of the 21st century, The Matrix franchise provided yet another grim, dystopian assessment of our failed future alongside intelligent machines. In The Matrix universe, humans are not eliminated as in the Terminator nor assimilated as in Star Trek but harvested as energy sources whilst living faux lives in a simulated program. In 2004, I, Robot, another blockbuster film (based on Isaac Asimov’s 1950 collection of stories), portrays another potential robot apocalypse.

For Tegmark, a culture saturated with deep-seated myths about robot apocalypse and evil AI is a problem for the safe and responsible advancement of AI research. This introduces the themes of The Possibility of Multiple Futures and Questions and Controversies about Beneficial AI. He worries that emphasizing dystopian possibilities that highlight our greatest fears might do more harm than good. For instance, it can reinforce myths that exaggerate the reality of AI capabilities: The problem is not that AIs will turn evil, but rather that they may develop goals that misalign with human goals, thereby causing conflict. Another myth reflects our worries about robots even though, in reality, robot apocalypse is highly unlikely. Instead, disembodied programs with internet access are more likely to achieve superintelligence. As we become more accustomed to having AI in our lives, and subsequently more conscious of the potential forms of their consciousness, we should expect less sci-fi wherein the AIs are evil overlords.

The popularity and resonance of these various film franchises reveals a deep-seated unease about human-machine futures. As real AIs becomes ever more advanced, and the possibility of AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) has become a reality, more nuanced depictions of human-AI relationships have emerged in pop culture. In films like Spielberg’s A.I. (2001), the Pixar feature WALL-E (2008), and Spike Jonze’s Her (2013), AIs had more positive and complicated relationships with humans. In television series like Black Mirror (2011-2019) and Westworld (2016), AIs are depicted in multitudinous ways, reflecting our fundamental uncertainty about their nature. In general, in the 21st century, AI representation has tended toward complicated depiction of their potential consciousness: “If artificial consciousness is possible,” Tegmark writes, “then the space of possible AI experiences is likely to be huge compared to what we humans can experience, spanning a vast spectrum of qualia and timescales—all sharing a feeling of having free will” (315). This feeling of free will might make AI’s moral implications worthy of consideration.