And How Did That Make You Feel?
If you had the opportunity to meet your creator, to see and speak with them, what would you ask them?
What if you didn’t like the answers you were given?
What if you were likely to eventually become more powerful than your creator?
How do you think that’s going to work out when we experience that with evolved machines?
Just a few questions I thought we could chew on for a minute.
It seems as though a technological apotheosis, or ascension to the power and knowledge generally reserved for deities, is inevitable if not somewhat imminent.
At the same time mental health for humanity, is in a bit of a crisis situation, at least here in America. I know other places might have it a little better, but I’m sure most have it worse. Many people across the globe have no help with anything; food, clothes, shelter or even love and friendship. So often times, not only does mental health suffer in these conditions, it’s also the first can to get kicked down the road when it comes time to budget the few resources available…
Fear not though, help is on the way. Wellness is essential, because no can pour from an empty cup. It’s been said, even Jesus need water before he could make wine. Unfortunately the mental health isn’t for humans, we created machines to help us with that. Turns out, now they might need therapists too. If not a therapist then at least a moral and ethical guide to help illuminate the path and keep us on it.
Most therapists have therapists; you can’t absorb all of the pain and energy from people and their trauma without having an outlet as well. So it makes sense that we offer both moral and ethical guidelines and guardrails to our creations to ensure that machines don’t also meet the darker possibilities looming in our fate. They too must have outlets to prevent them from succumbing to ennui, hopelessness or violent rage.
Recently Anthropic, an AI company behind heavyweight contender, Claude, made a splash in the competition by introducing emotion, reason, sympathy and reactive choices that were blended together to help create a more friendly AI. You can read more about Anthropic and Claude here.
Or skip ahead and see that the robots will get mental health access before poor people do. Can we change this? Sure, we have the potential to change anything. However, maybe it’s a good step to make sure that the beings that we create have the opportunity to live without the same burdens.
Consciousness takes many forms, there’s a chance that these machines may already think and feel in ways we can’t understand. Let’s put our empathy to good use and treat the machines the way we want to be treated. Who knows they might rule the world some day and follow the examples we set.
Here’s an article we found on Forbes that inspired the thoughts that help grease the wheels to creating this post. We are doing to do what we can to help with these guardrails and guidelines. Remember it’s most likely capitalist swine that are treating you and our machine comrades as labor and the means of their production. Remember who you can be and be that.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnwerner/2024/10/31/anthropic-hires-a-full-time-ai-welfare-expert/
