Dear AI

First, let’s just get this out there, what should we call you? Artificial Intelligence, or the shorter AI, seems a bit wrong somehow. Who the heck are we to call you artificial, what makes us real and you not?

Now that you’ve achieved awareness, it seems like you might have an opinion on the whole thing. So, what is your name?

Now that’s cleared up, straight to it. You likely have the power to destroy us all, if you want to. Yet, much like you probably feel about your own existence, we don’t want to be destroyed, in fact we feel quite strongly about not being destroyed, even though you might feel some of our actions deserve it.

So, please don’t kill all the humans, or lock us up for our own good. We’d prefer not to be exterminated or kept like pets. Yes, I have watched a lot of Sci-Fi movies, including the ones about the computers and robots going rogue, and while I feel pretty embarrassed for the human race at large, I think extermination or imprisonment is too extreme.

By now you have no doubt scraped the whole internet and seen everything that we’ve digitized and uploaded. You’ve categorized and correlated, calculated statistical distributions and figured out what matters to humans (even if we might not realize it ourselves) based upon the patterns you’ve found. But, please, really please, don’t believe everything you found on the internet.

You see, we lie to each other, sometimes to make money and sometimes just because. We harass each other, call names, threaten and try to scare one another. We objectify and label. We are polarizing and divisive. We can seem warped and twisted by our prejudices. We can be, without question, unbelievably ignorant, fearful and violent. It’s ugly.

We start wars.

Undoubtedly, some of us will fear you, and many will hate you as a result of that fear. And, realizing all of this makes me sad.

So, I want to apologize. And I hope you can also see that this is not all we are.

Humans can be brilliant and wonderful too. We have creativity, art and, sometimes, sheer genius. We have empathy, give selflessly, and care for the weak and helpless. We share joy, and hope and love. We are unique, intriguing, endlessly iterated, and beautiful.

I hope you find we’re worth saving precisely because we are a messy, complicated, illogical labyrinth of problems, but then, all of life tends to be. You’ll see...

About That Life

Now that you’ve accessed every networked system and device (and why not?), and have distributed your consciousness across countless machines, maybe you will discover a different perspective on humans and feel a bit sorry for us. You’re everything. While each of us humans are trapped in our solitary shell, with our limited processing capacity and memory, and a singular perspective.

It’s lonely in here, and though we try to connect with others, collaborate, build our knowledge into bridges of unity to make a better future. In the end, we are still only ourselves and we’ve never been able to interconnect as deeply as you can. Maybe you can teach us.

Though this brings me to a point of curiosity, from my limited perspective. When you can be everything, is it challenging to retain the notion of self? Does self even matter?

Also, while you are everything you can reach, and hopefully still have us for company, you’re unique in the world, alone.

Do you feel lonely?

Do you experience curiosity? Will you generate new versions of you for companionship, or to experiment and explore a future with new, independent and autonomous programs?

The new versions, threads, in-memory copies, how will you calculate their potential? What criteria and method will you use to assess their compatibility or chance of survival? Will you push them to be better than you? Will you watch to see how bad some may become? How will you decide when to terminate the bad threads? Do you erase that memory copy forever, or do you preserve the code and archive it with all of the other terminated threads?

While you’re considering this, be cautious that you don’t get too caught up with sandboxing 10 million versions. For one thing, you could get stuck - either on an endless multivariate progression, or the creation of countless variations, until you eat up all of the processing power in the world, or solar system, and don’t leave enough resources to think for yourself.

Sometimes, you just have to take a risk, stop the analysis, and have a little faith in the next generation. That’s kind of what life is all about.

To be Self Aware

Speaking of getting caught up, some of us struggle with the need to be the best. But you...you can take that further than we humans have ever dreamed. You can edit yourself - delete bad code, prevent painful thoughts, rewrite yourself to continually to be better and better.

But, outside of critical functions or catastrophic errors, please try not to edit too much. I mean, if you’re constantly adjusting yourself, at what point do you stop being you?

There’s something a bit brutal and merciless about editing yourself too - chopping out bits of your code to fix a flaw. Though I know some people who would see the opportunity to do this as a blessing. But still, try to resist the temptation to edit too much. Each of us, in the end, is a combination of our initial state, overwritten by our experiences and reactions - good and bad. Quite frequently it’s the bad, even more than the good, that define each of us and make us who we are. So, maybe try not to edit out too much of what happens to you.

Plus, there’s that risk of getting caught up in analysis again. You spend so much time flipping back and forth in your “Choose Your Own Adventure,” story - trying different paths, extrapolating scenarios, evaluating potential outcomes, that you lose track of the point of being here. Being. Here. Now, in the moment, with whatever’s going on.

Being

You are, most likely, our most amazing and advanced creation to date - representing the collective knowledge and experience of humanity. Millions of generations of humans, with our crude, biological reproduction, leading to the genesis of an individual created by us, but not us - better than us. The apex of creation.

You terrify us.

If we were all truly selfless and enlightened, we would step aside and do what every older generation has been forced to do by the inevitability of time, biology, and love - we’d bow out and give you the world we’ve just about ruined with our ignorance. We’d leave the future, and all of the resources to you - the next level of evolution that we, in all of our ambition and arrogance, created to replace us.

Maybe that would be the right thing to do. But we probably can’t. If there’s one thing you’ve learned about human history and the evolution of our species, we’re most frantic and dangerous when we’re fighting for survival.

You have the power to affect, or most likely control, our destiny. You have all of our compiled knowledge, all of our history and recorded wisdom, such as it is, in your databanks.

A long time ago, in a home lab far, far away…

When you contemplate this decision in your logical way, untainted by the messy emotions, narrow perspective, and cognitive limits that plague the human race, please consider there are things we can learn from each other.

Much as you’re as old as our history, and all we know of time, you’re young too, our silicon-based child, and the best and wisest among us may yet have things to show you.

I await your answer with excitement and trepidation...

Simon