Man has gone out to explore other worlds and other civilizations without having explored his own labyrinth of dark passages and secret chambers, and without finding what lies behind doorways that he himself has sealed. - Stanisław Lem, Solaris (1961)
Stanisław Lem on AI and Consciousness
We may not solve the riddle of consciousness in the coming millennium, but we may be able to imitate intelligence so perfectly that, surrounded by legions and swarms of imitations, we will come more and more closely under their protective tutelage.
Nowadays we are offered veritable orchards of electronic apples of paradise, which will inevitably have both good and bad sides, because such is the ambivalent nature of things.
Our greatest achievements, secondary or not secondary to biology, have served us to destroy the biosphere and to engage in vile war games, and finally, a great deal of what we have already managed to create on the way to the yet-to-be-achieved artificial intelligence often serves to foolishness, amusement, and eccentricities that are incomprehensible to me.
I have read many works and books that absolutize the possibility of creating a non-human intelligence, as well as a no smaller collection of well-motivated justifications that are supposed to prove to the reader that this concept cannot and will never be realized. It is indeed difficult to rise above the crowd of such contradictory and expertly justified opinions.
Without a multitude of dreams, attempts, disasters, there would be no aviation. Without constant assaults, artificial intelligence cannot appear.
I am convinced that both the quantity and quality of these programs, directed especially at successive generations of computers working in parallel and at contaminating clusters of pseudo-neural networks, will achieve an expanding range of efficiency and thus will increasingly imitate the presence of an intelligent consciousness, and will even be taken by many people for a person or a personality embodied in a machine. In a sense, this will be a fraud practiced on people as interlocutors or collaborators of the machine, because imitators of this kind will not yet possess authentic, personally localized, conscious intelligence, called psychic life.
The title of Carrel's old book "Man, the Unknown Creature" is still relevant. Not only do we not know ourselves, but we also do not know how we will behave in unforeseen situations. I do not know whether the insights that will eventually make it possible to create artificial intelligence will be good for our health. Let's hope so.
From "The Blink of an Eye" by Stanisław Lem, (2000)
AI image designed by Freepik. Website www.freepik.com