Games and humanity
I've been playing The Talos Principle lately. It is a peculiar game where you play as an AI solving puzzles into a virtual world, an experiment mimiking the garden of Eden, where the voice of a God tells you what you should do and, of course, what you shouldn't. Traversing the worlds made by the creator for you, you can find some terminals: here you can talk by chat with someone that ask you questions about humanity, free will, conscience, faith in God and all those things. Do you, an artificially created being, consider yourself a person? Why, and how can you prove that? It's the devil trying to defy your faith in God, but it poses some interesting questions. Questions as old as time, with no clear answers. You can also find some recordings, from the creator of the experiment, where she talks about her experiences and her thoughts, like it was her journal. Or a Time Capsule, as it's called in the game. There's a specific recording that I keep thinking about.
The answer that came to me again and again was "Play." Every human society in recorded history has games. We don't just solve problems out of necessity, we do it for fun. Even as adults. Leave a human being alone with a knotted rope and they will unravel it. Leave a human being alone with blocks and they will build something! Games are part of what makes us human, we see the the world as a mystery, a puzzle, because we've always been a species of problem solvers.
Since my teenage years I've been really fascinated by artificial life, dreaming of a science fiction future with sentient robots and androids. A lot of my favourite stories has that. Some of them take the existence of a conscience in those artificial creatures. Other question what makes them different from humans.
We're still far away from this future. Yes, we got AI now, but I definitely wouldn't call Chat GPT a person. We're more on a "Her" (the 2013 movie)1 kind of situation. But I keep dreaming of sentient AI. If we ever manage to create that how would we distinguish that from genAI chatbots? It's hard to figure out from the outside. The Turing Test doesn't really work for this.
I don't have a real answer. No one really does or Blade Runner wouldn't be all that interesting. But I feel like there's stuff that wouldn't make sense if made by someone without conscience. And that's playing. Playing for the sake of doing it, because you like it. Or the pleasure of discovery. Something without a conscience engaging games, or any kind of entertainment really, don't really make sense to me, unless it was commanded by some higher being, like its creator, programmer, or anything determining their actions. Who knows, maybe we'll never have a technology so advanced to actually create artificial life. But it's interesting to think about that. And I liked the quote and wanted to share.
Now that I think about it, I never finished watching that movie...↩