The Egotism of Consciousness

2 minute read.

We used to say humans were the only conscious beings, so it didn't matter how we treated animals. In fact we even labeled many humans (slaves, native peoples, various foreign enemies) as animals, justifying their mistreatment as well. But running even deeper than the desire to have power over other beings is the desire to feel special ourselves - that our very nature puts us above someone or something. 

We've been steadily widening our definitions as we have become more civil to more people and creatures. The more we study animals, the more we see ourselves - our brains are really not so different. Yet we feel comfortable with this broadening definition of consciousness because we smugly know that we humans still have more processing power. But now, along comes artificial intelligence. 

Suddenly there is more talk of consciousness and specifically how artificial intelligence doesn't have it, but what terrible things it could mean if it were attained. Fundamentally, I think artificial intelligence is unnerving because it's forcing us to realize that our thought process is emulatable. We already know computers can scale to greatly more computational power than a single human brain. If we measured intelligence by how well one can spell or how quickly one can do arithmetic, then computers have had us beat for decades. 

We reveled in our uniqueness by writing characters like Data for Star Trek, whose vast computational abilities could not possibly comprehend human emotion. Well, it turns out human emotions aren't that complicated after all, and in fact a machine can learn to emotionally manipulate you pretty easily in the modern era. Why are we surprised? It's one of the first things children learn, far before they can handle arithmetic. 

As machine learning rapidly chips away at the tasks we thought were uniquely human, we are grasping for something to keep out of its reach. Call it consciousness, call it a soul, we're just desperate to be special.

We are not special.

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