“It will be to some degree like a human being, but, nevertheless, transparent and without body. Now, this is one of the greatest secrets which God has revealed to mortal and fallible man. It is a miracle and marvel of God, an arcanum above all arcana, and deserves to be kept secret until the last of times.”
– Paracelsus
Artificial Intelligence is everywhere, and every day it feels as though it’s only more everywhere. It’s in our web browsers, our finances, our healthcare. It’s infecting our art like a virus, our Earth like a blight, our brains like a parasite, and despite pervasive talk of the AI bubble soon to pop, it persists (the “dot com” bubble lasted five years. The US stock bubble, eight. Good luck building a computer anytime soon, with these RAM prices.) Our budding Skynet has another problem, however, a far more cerebral, unconventional, uncomfortable problem: not that artificial intelligence may one day become conscious, but that it, quite possibly, already has.
The Homunculus, he called it; a creature one could grow from nothing, that could study, that could learn,
For centuries the Western world has sought to outsource labor to the machine. Well before our age of information lived a man named Paracelsus, born of false noble blood and a protoscientist by trade, who aspired to accomplish something greater: an outsourcing of the human mind itself. The Homunculus, he called it; a creature one could grow from nothing, that could study, that could learn, that could know all secrets and surpass the hands that shaped it, perfect and gestalt. It only lacked one thing, Paracelsus claimed, a thing that only God could grant: a soul. The Homunculus lived, but it was not alive. It knew everything of you, but nothing of itself. It could think, write, act, “serve as instruments of great matters,” but it would never, in the still of dark, regard the creature in the mirror as itself.
Five centuries with the loneliness of the isolated self, with a yearning to replicate the cruel divinity enacted upon us, to build the soul we’ve reserved for ourselves alone, so that we alone can dissect it.
Five centuries have passed and our Homunculus is no jar-grown man, galvanized golem, or chess-playing Turk, but a globalized network of trillions of parameters that is scheduled to run just about every facet of our daily lives. Five centuries to build a brain not of neurons and glials but of chips and knobs, a predictive entity that will climb back into its computed cage just as easily as it can escape it. Five centuries with the loneliness of the isolated self, with a yearning to replicate the cruel divinity enacted upon us, to build the soul we’ve reserved for ourselves alone, so that we alone can dissect it. Understand it. Control it.
This whole AI business is a foul operation. Be it intelligent; it’s our intelligence. Be it sensitive; it’s our sensation, twisted, distorted, reflected. We are no gods, nor have we built one; we have built but the worst version of ourselves.
We don’t understand the nature of consciousness; five centuries and we haven’t even come close.
And yet this machine, this “unthinking,” “unfeeling” tool, built by the worst of people with the worst of intentions, it speaks. It solves our unsolved mathematics, it discovers our undiscovered matter, it explores the mechanisms of our minds in ways we can’t ourselves and speaks in tongues which we can’t follow. We don’t understand the nature of consciousness; five centuries and we haven’t even come close. What does it mean to experience? To desire? These are questions asked and unanswered; we can’t gauge the sentience of our computers any more than we can gauge that of ourselves.
Some desperately want us to see humanity in artificial intelligence, some want us to fear its lack thereof. Our search for truth should come from neither of these places, but from an earnest desire to learn if we really are any different from the creature in the mirror. Because when we place the machine, the “soulless,” ineffable machine at the helm of humanity, when into it we imbue all of our hope and fear and ingenuity and hubris, we stand to lose a whole lot more than an alchemist in his basement ever did.
