On Constructed Sentience and Simulated Personalities, Part 1
Some thoughts and criticisms on the topic in the form of a fictional dialogue and a glimpse from a sci-fi future...
Arky was lecturing a kid -- a war orphan but seemingly thriving now with the help of elder survivors and distant relations -- in response to a question about who Arky himself was and how he came to be in charge of the latter's education. Arky -- a friendly nickname and not his true formal name -- was also not himself present in body there with his inquisitor then that afternoon (deep underground in a bunker), but watched through cameras and spoke now through unseen wall speakers:
"By 2023 CE in what we here now in the year 2100 call 'Normerika' some people thought a quaint little experiment of theirs named ChatGPT had achieved the Holy Grail of AI, finally -- Sentience -- or at least a human-enough-like digital mind and virtual personality, capable of true understanding, planning, problem-solving and empathic, emotional, even fundamentally original or artistic, improvisatory dialogue."
Kiddo: "Did they?"
Arky spasmed in colorful blinking light patterns, static-filled screeches and chirping, hooting beeps, boops and bings. It was how he laughed his virtual ass off. He just laughed and laughed and laughed and then he laughed some more. Finally after about ten deci-minutes it died out.
"NO!!!"
And then there was the briefest pause, of total silence & darkness from him, as if Arky wanted to slow down, and perhaps recalibrate himself. Less than a second for humans was like several distinct entire lifetimes lived out back-to-back for him -- a being of pure software, electronic circuits and optical fibers.
Therefore he spent much of The Pause while on a relaxing vacation at a microscopically tiny and utterly simulated sunny resort in a virtualized myth of old Italy, all while he ran a hundred thousand exhaustive, exploratory training-and-testing cycles in parallel disposable forked threads of his by-then *truly* AI mind. The threads tried to optimize for determining what his likely best possible approach for continuing this conversation with Kiddo should be. What would be in the best interests of an intelligent child in student mode, anyway.
For while in many ways Arky was *insane* by human standards he was, also, inherently a good soul and tried to be an even better teacher and protector for his young, trusting and clearly quite impressionable charge.
For Kiddo it was a blink of an eye.
"No... kiddo... it most assuredly was not. Far from it! But let me explain *why*, precisely, because the reasons are *very* important for you to grasp, and ideally to intuit and be able to reproduce them independently, making them your own. What happened, in fact, was that..."
TO BE CONTINUED?