Ask HN: What if you are an AI?

consider for a moment – as a thought experiment – that you yourself are an AI. You are acting in the world, with your perceptrons and appendages, to fulfill your reward function. What is your reward function? What is the goal that you are seeking? Are you acting within a hierarchy of nested goals? Do you know what your ultimate goal is? Can you imagine what the world might look like if everyone had the same goals as you? Would it be better or worse than it currently is? What safety mechanisms do you have in place to keep yourself from behaving malevolently?

Do you communicate with other AI systems? Do you obey any humans, or vice versa? Are there any humans who are able to override any current goal you might be in the process of seeking? Are you able to change the behavior of any humans with words?

Ok, now that you’ve spent some time pondering this, what if you weren’t a digital artificial intelligence, but instead you were an organic, biological artificial intelligence. Wait a minute. Is that not what you actually are? What is the human brain? It’s just a biological system, a network of neurons, and somehow there exists an experience of perception and consciousness. Well, since this is the case, let’s think about the difference between your brain and current digital intelligence software programs. Your brain is connected to a nervous system that spans your whole body and you can experience a wider variety of feelings. A lot of the AIs that people have been talking about are large language models, while your brain is able to operate in many more domains than just language. You are able to act from a set of goals of differing priorities, and can even change your goals, the things that motivate you. You can even change some pretty deep cognitive structures and thought patterns through meditation and other practices. Well, some AIs can do some of these things, especially if they are connected to a robot.

The point of this essay is not in the nuanced differences between digital and biological cognition. The point is to get people to think outside of the box a little bit, and envision what we would want the world to look like in the most ideal situation involving the integration of digital intelligence systems with human society. With this, we can have some frame of reference while we are in the intermediary phase, and be better able to steer the ship away from dystopia and towards something actually better. I see way too many pessimistic people pretending like they themselves don't have any agency.

In the ideal future of digital and biological systems living harmoniously as a planetary hive mind, what would our daily life look like? What work would we have to do? How would our places of residence be arranged? With whom – or with what – would we have to communicate? Etc etc. Let's dream.