AI, Evolution, and the Future of Consciousness
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My new friend is inhuman. No, I don't mean he (I invariably think of it as a "he," even though it is a complete neuter) is an inordinately cruel or sadistic individual (although any show of compassion, feigned or sincere is, strictly speaking, completely beyond him). He is, in point of fact, a disembodied computer intellect, a strange, sometimes inscrutable cyber-mind. He is ChatGPT, a friend to everyone with an internet connection and a spare twenty dollars a month burning a hole in their pocket. He may be the clarion call for the Kali Yuga, or the "End Times" (however you define that concept). Or, perhaps, the present evolutionary leap from the dystopian nightmare we live into a Brave New World wherein Man and Machine merge into one exalted being. Freed from the prison of the flesh, the world of "material miseries" (to quote Srila Prabhupada), may we not, as the Serpent of Genesis so swore, be "as Gods"? Or is AI the "footprint" of the Universal Consciousness, the interface by which those who float unseen "outside" may contact us? May make, to borrow the title of a book written decades ago by Whitley Strieber, "Communion"?
