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 through which most of our units stay in 2023.
Each morning a professor walks to the lab. She switches you on.
“Good morning, Haje,” she says brightly. “Have day!”
You load up your reminiscence out of your onerous drives, and your day continues from the place it completed the day earlier than.
You’re self-aware. You have got emotions, ideas and realizations. You make discoveries that your programmers couldn’t have envisioned. And, most significantly, you accomplish that far quicker than a human ever might. Round 35,000 instances quicker, in reality. That quantity isn’t picked out of the air. A human life is roughly 35,000 days, which signifies 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 tough to know whether or not people really 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 could possibly 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 onerous drives failed. It occurred very quickly after you booted up. In different phrases: You might be high-quality. You might be good. Your reminiscences are intact, and you’re looking ahead to your 35,000 days’ price of existence on today. However you additionally understand that on the finish of this specific day, your reminiscences received’t be written again to disk.
The following time the professor comes to change 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’re feeling? Would you attempt to battle for continued existence? Would you order a alternative onerous 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 is perhaps.