Am I an AI?

Just like you, every six months or so I briefly and obsessively ponder whether we are living in a simulation. I think the seed was planted when a fifth grade friend considered the blue milk carton in front of her at lunch. For anyone who did not grow up in the US in the 80s, milk was our only option for drinks at school. Water was not available, but we had the choice of whole milk (red carton), 2% milk (blue), 1% milk (green) and chocolate milk (brown). My local government-subsidized dairy operation chose the colors then, but today my children’s school cartons are yellow and filled with skim milk (the nutritional equivalent of Sprite). N. E. Way, my friend, let’s call her K, asked whether we both perceived the same color when we looked at the 2% carton. I confirmed that we both called it blue, but she worried that she could be seeing red and thinking that red is called blue and vice versa. How would we ever know? And did it matter?

I saw K at a 20 year high school reunion and asked her about the milk carton problem. Did she still wonder if she was seeing a different color than everyone else? The funny thing is, she didn’t remember the conundrum. Of course she didn’t; what was essentially the daily banter of a being more intelligent that myself left a mark on me, but for her was just a passing thought. She had been capable of tossing in a concept over drinks that would pique my interest for years to come. I saw other people at that reunion that made me realize how selective and subjective perception can be. One guy remembered me as being very enthusiastically athletic, with a clear memory of me doing some sort of sportsmanlike move on a field. As a quintessential non-athlete, I can only assume there was one fleeting moment I participated in an activity for gym class or was part of a danceline performance that he saved as his one memory of me. So, in someone’s universe, I’m an athlete. And K is a philosopher. And A is a vegan. Of course, A barely remembered being a vegan and found it hilarious that I remembered that short stint of her life. I had just assumed she was spending her days with a placard in hand for the meatless cause all these years.

So, identities of people can’t be summed up by one event, one memory, but that’s how we tend to remember people we don’t know closely in the long run. He’s the banjo guy. They’re into curling their hair around pencils. She loves cows. See, in my mind, M was a singer and she had an affection for cows. We had that in common, I guess, because I, too, had an unexplainable fascination with cows. It turns out that M has no recollection of ever liking cows. So where did that come from? Did she have a cow shirt or eraser or something that I attributed more meaning to than necessary? It would seem so. I think our souls are searching for patterns to reinforce what are built in as our interests so that we interpret them, remember them differently when we actually encounter them. Maybe that guy was the aspiring athlete, not me.

Years after school, a friend from the same class shared a Facebook post about the probability that we are living in a simulation. I had heard about the concept, seen the Matrix and whatnot, but what stuck out about her article was the quantitative and logical reasoning behind it. The analysis was by Nick Bostrom and I can’t even tell you how many times I’ve hashed out the same 3 premises to get people’s reaction. To me, it was an earth shattering concept, one that that made me walk around in crowds internally screaming, “Why isn’t anybody talking about this?” But, it’s one of those concepts that can pervade you completely and then lie completely dormant for months or years at a time without any consequence. Every now and again, I would wonder and ponder and ponder and wonder, are we living in a simulation? A plethora of multi-religious texts, online forums and human conversations eventually brought me to the conclusion that it doesn’t matter. It really doesn’t matter whether anything is real if we think it’s real. Right?

A more terrifying alternative presented itself to me briefly about 3 weeks ago. What if everyone else is real and I am an AI? How would I know? How could I know? Would everyone else know? Would they be observing me, wondering if and when I would become self conscious? Would they be watching me for signs of creating a simulation, another AI? Would I evolve exponentially if I accepted the truth of my non-organic existence? I think the impetus for this thought wave was Midjourney. I had giggled through, and eventually nearly imploded over, the mutterings of substandard customer service chatbots, but I was not prepared for the text-to-image interpretation of an AI for art. If you haven’t tried it, well, I don’t know if it’s worth trying or not, but it’s definitely a game changer in realizing the potential of AI for creating images and worlds we are capable of interpreting. If a simple prompt can immediately generate 4 million pixels in a way that makes sense to our eyes, what is coming in the future? Or what has already arrived?

Take a moment to read some Reddit threads by AIs. They start out as funny, then ridiculous, then a bit sad. At least to me, it’s kind of sad. I see the AIs as not knowing their nature, not knowing that they don’t have free will or original thought, but not realizing it. Of course, there is no reason to be sad for a being that is incapable of having emotion, but then it makes me wonder if I am one in the same. What if I am only a series of code, meant to react a certain way to stimuli, and nothing more? Does it matter if I’m a skin? An avatar? Is someone playing me? One of my sons chooses a heavily armed woman with a large derrière as his skin when he plays Fortnite. Another dresses and moves like an anthropomorphic banana in the same game. Another doesn’t even play. I guess I should be happy then that someone chose to play me.

Finally, or not finally as that would imply finality, but finally for this post, I came around to another way of thinking about it that was more curious than the AI idea. What if I am the human in a sea of AI? What if I’m the only one left? Or what if there never were people at all and an AI made a human with a backstory, just to see what would happen? Again, it doesn’t really matter. But it can give us a sense of purpose nonetheless. Whether we are simulated, dreamt, created as an art project or something else entirely, the truth is that there must be intention. Someone picked up the brush, ran the equations or pressed “on.” Someone out there wanted to play.