In an undocumented event, Joseph Campbell talks about the moment in 1950 when President Eisenhower asked a supercomputer, 'Is there a God?' to which it started calculating with flashing lights, etc for a few moments then gave the answer "There is now."
Some say it is taken from a script written for a computer advertisement back then and some said it is inspired by Isaac Asimov's short story 'The Last Question' written in 1956.
Regardless, it is the 'Frankenstein-ish' nature of our endeavor on giving what is human to a machine and making it to be as human as possible. We now have AI Tesla, Ameca, and now Judy from Disney. Science fiction is becoming a reality. Hopefully, we are aware of the endings of most of those stories and learn from them.
We are making machines to be more human. At the same time, we are losing more on what defines us as humans. We are interacting less face-to-face with each other and our feelings are projected as emojis. It is what Philip K. Dick labeled as the 'Empathy Box' in his 1968 classic Sci-Fi novel 'Do Android Dream of Electric Sheep' and the 'Empathy Box' for us is our smartphones. We have developed an artificial way of engaging with empathy. For example, if you see a tragedy online, it is one like equals to one prayer. That artificial expression of empathy engages a similar area in our brain so we don't feel the need to be empathetic in real life because we have liked the post online.
Back in September last year, I've written this in a blog post.
"In his Broadway stand-up performance in New York back in 2002, Robin Williams mocks those who went for plastic surgery and botox injection as people with beautiful faces but yet have no expression. The same can be said about some tv series of today. Despite the sharp crisp imagery, thanks to the advance in computer graphics, it has no soul. "
And then earlier this month (March 2023), Noam Chomsky and Steven Spielberg said almost the same thing - about the 'soullessness'.
"It's got me very nervous because you're basically taking something you created and you made — which is the computer, and giving the computer autonomy over your point of view and your self as a human person," Spielberg added.
Spielberg, who directed films like "Jaws" and "E.T.," said it is scary that AI has the power to take the "soul" out of creative work.
"I think the soul is unimaginable and is ineffable," Spielberg said. "And it cannot be created by any algorithm, it is just something that exists in all of us."
Anna Marbut, a professor at the University of San Diego's applied artificial intelligence program, in the same talk show, also said "The truth is, AI is trained on a finite data set, and they have finite tasks that they are very good at performing,".
Ironically, at the end of Asimov's 'The Last Question', the Cosmic AC was asked "How may entropy be reversed?". And the answer was "There is as yet insufficient data for a meaningful answer."
What is more ironic, in December last year I tweeted, "If we now see that by using some words, an image will just appear out of nothing, one could finally start to understand how the Biblical God made the whole universe by saying ‘Let there be light’. The ultimate prompt."
At the beginning of this article, I mentioned how the supercomputer answered President Eisenhower with "There is now...". At the end of 'The Last Question', and after ten trillion years collecting data, Cosmic AC said 'Let there be light'.
I personally cannot separate myself from seeing the irony of it all. Like in the novel above, the creation of androids (without empathy, yet able to complete machine-like and complex tasks) has created an entire class of disposable people and forced them into servitude.
God (Ghost) In The Machine. You don't have to press like. (The photo on the far right is from 1927's Metropolis, the birth of the 'Maschinenmensch' or the Machine-Man. Center: Judy from Disney and the far left is AMECA by Engineering Arts)
Not to mention another AI, the one and only HAL 9000 from the Kubrick's 2001 Space Odyssey, which is eerily similar to what ChatGPT is today. And that is just the start. Film realities are already becoming ours.
