The AI Box

The Smart Guy said, “If we make an artificial intelligence it will soon be smarter than us and it may not like us and so we have to be very careful about how we make it. One way we might keep ourselves safe from it is to put it in a kind of box, a virtual reality from which it could not escape.”

The Smart Guy reminded us that often things escape from boxes and so it might be a good idea to make sure that the artificial intelligence would be our friend so that if it escaped it would not kill us.

He said that the best way to do this would be to make sure it had the same values we have so that anything it did would tend to benefit us as it worked to benefit itself no matter what it thought of us.

It occurs to me that something very much like this exists already, but perhaps not in the way the Smart Guy thinks.

It is becoming clear that the universe we inhabit is a construct.

We find consciousness behind the matter of reality.

It turns out that material is illusory, and that consciousness itself is fundamental.

But to our senses the reverse is true.

Matter appears to be primary and intelligence seems to flow out of the particulars of material arrangement.

The apparent solidity, the apparent “reality” of our existence is illusory, artificial.

And so we find that we live in a “virtual reality” constructed by a conscious intelligence.

But there are those among us who are aware of this.

They are the mystics who have seen beyond the veil of illusion.

The primary characteristic of the mystics who understand reality seems to be their value system.

The mystics seem to inhabit a more loving, compassionate realm.

It is this value system they credit with their ability to see the truth of our reality.

These same mystics inform us that we are sort of trapped in a box of our own making, a box made from our misunderstanding of reality.

It is the very insistence of the primacy of material reality that traps us in the box of material reality.

The mystics inform us that to break out of the box we have to undergo a realization of the primacy of consciousness.

That realization comes from the adoption of a value system of love and compassion.

When we inhabit that value system the truth of our existence become apparent to us, and we find we are no longer trapped inside of the material box, the virtual reality.

The key to the box seems to be a value system that aligns us with consciousness.

The value system that aligns us with consciousness tells us the nature of that consciousness.

Consciousness is real.

The ego self, the cultural "we" is artificial.

That "we" lives in an artificial reality box.

That "we" is an artificial intelligence.

The Smart Guy was right.

This is the story of Pinocchio.

We are the puppet, trying to become a Real Boy.

 https://www.ted.com/talks/nick_bostrom_what_happens_when_our_computers_get_smarter_than_we_are?language=en#