Are ‘mental children’ the future of fertility? | | AI (Artificial Intelligence)

A A few months ago, an AI researcher from Europe attended a dinner party in Silicon Valley. During one of the many lectures, the host spoke to his guests, who all worked in AI. The researcher clarified his message as follows: “Is it any wonder that we are the last generation of people who will need to think about natural reproduction?

“I didn’t see that coming,” the researcher told me. “I was just enjoying my fish.”

But the landlord was determined. His words caught the researcher’s attention as a well-informed person would have said 100 years ago, after the discovery of antibiotics. after?”

Suddenly all the guests were talking about “mental children”, and the researcher turned to their neighbor to ask what the term meant. “He said, ‘Here is the book,’ and, ‘Haven’t you read the book?’ and, ‘Oh my God, you really have to read that book.'”

The book in question was Hans Moravec’s Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence, which was first published in 1988, and at that time, according to the economist and futurist Robin Hanson of George Mason University, it caused a lot of noise in the small pool – the group of robotics and machine learning experts that Moravec had.

Moravec’s book is more of a philosophical text than a technical book, but the main idea is that cultural evolution has long taken over from biological evolution as the most powerful force shaping humanity, and the logical interpretation of this is that the information that sets our future will soon be filled in hardware and software and not DNA. These psychic children can have soft, nervous bodies, like real children, but they can also take on a kaleidoscope of other physical – or non-physical – forms.

Moravec noted that the outcome of the change was unclear, but he also appeared to be pleased with it. In a century, he wrote, there will be machines “that we can be proud of when they call themselves our descendants”.

Hanson shares his conviction that this shift is inevitable, once AI achieves something experts agree to call human intelligence. “We’re going to bring an explosion of things like us in the future, who will be different from us in many ways,” says Hanson. “To the extent that they share our thoughts, they are our children of thought.”

Angela Aristidou, who studies the real deployment of AI at University College London, is not surprised that Moravec’s book is enjoying a revival. He says that what in 1988 might have read as science fiction – and still does for many of us – seems to make sense to those in the know. Elon Musk’s pronatalist stance is unique among tech brands, he says, where the idea that the clock is ticking on natural reproduction is widespread — and the (perhaps self-fulfilling) prophecy information is there for all to see. Delegates at this year’s Nvidia GTC in San Jose, California, the world’s largest AI conference, were treated You have an avatar For example, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang.

Then there’s the phenomenon of human-AI marriages. Such couples are obviously unable to produce biological children, but since the person in the relationship usually makes their ideal love partner in the AI, Aristidou asks, sarcastically: “Why couldn’t they also make their ideal child?”.

In thinking about this biological future, however, we must expand our concept of “child”. This new entity may be an AI that human ancestors lovingly and cooperatively sculpt to melt away the parts they consider to be the best – as is technically possible with genetic modification in the creation of nature – but since we will be eliminating birth, death and generations, as these principles are understood, it can also be very different.

A person can only put his knowledge to be beyond his shell, while the child is close to the painting. The person can transfer their knowledge to an AI companion, or create an AI companion that they perceive as different from themselves, believing that opposites attract. Every time, something new comes out, but the line between yourself, partner and children is blurred. If this sounds familiar, remember that there is no risk of reproductive-related diseases, although there may be some.

Aristidou does not doubt that AIs can improve human relations. They have been displayed be useful as medical assistants, for example, or internally to conquer loneliness. But he worries about what happens when AI replaces humans. If a person can delete an AI partner, he says: “How does this work as a marriage of equals as we understand it?”

He also complains that there will be a two-tier society, where technologists, knowledgeable, with advanced tools prepare AI creations to be real, manage their changes and changes, while everyone else has to do with cheap, off-the-shelf products that put them at the will of the creators – “as if there are three entities, AI in this relationship. Among the many ethical, legal and practical issues that this brings if the creator can be considered is to be one parent to the child of the mind.

Hanson says that there are legal experts and legal experts who are thinking about such things, but until people take their future after biological, the proposed protection has no hope of debate, even implementation.

And no one is discussing the most critical issue of all: are people looking at what they did in the end? Hanson says the discovery of more complex organisms doesn’t require the extinction of primitive, simpler ones — or there would be no more bacteria on Earth. But if that thought makes you feel unmotivated, take a page out of Moravec’s book and look for the positive. “There is not the slightest need to be lost in the transmission of this light,” he wrote in 1988. “(It) will be in the power of our creative descendants, and to their benefit, to remember almost everything about us, even perhaps, the detailed works of each individual mind.”

Another reading

The kingdom of AI by Karen Hao, (Penguin, £12.99)

Time of Em by Robin Hanson, (Oxford University Press, £12.49)

Mind Children by Hans Moravec, Harvard University Press, £31.95)