Why We Never Create Sentient AI

Well, It doesn’t seem to me we will become gods this way. It cannot be achieved. Not in 50 years, not in 5 million. Why not?

We can’t create what we don’t understand. Or, to be more precise, things that we are not capable of understanding. There are a number of such mysteries in the world that are above our cognitive level. For example:

— The origin of the Universe, or the world as we know it.

Ok, we can assume that it’s the Big Bang which everything eventually originated from. Good. But what was before it? Another universe that had collapsed into a singular particle that then exploded? But where did that previous universe come from? And so on, ad infinitum. We will never be able to understand this on our natural cognitive level, no matter how smart we are.

We can become 10x, 100x smarter and still this problem will be unsolvable for us because it doesn’t depend on quantitative smartness of thinking. It requires a new qualitative level of intelligence which we are simply not born with (or we lost it, and computers won’t be able to help us get it back — it’s a totally different order of intelligence).

And the next mystery related to the previous one:

— The nature of eternity.

We can talk about it as much as we like but we will never be able to grasp it. In our physical world and, consequently, in our intellectual reasoning, everything should have (at least) a beginning. Something cannot just exist without an origin. But if something began to exist, what was before that? And before? What is going to be after our world ends?

The same endless repetition of the cause and effect chain.

— The nature of infinity.

The same as the previous one. If the Universe has a limit, what is beyond it? Nothing? Something must always exist, hence our next mystery:

— The nature of nonexistence.

How does it feel to not be born? If something came to be, there must be a time (if we can call it thus) when there was nothing. Again, it’s beyond our comprehension.

— The nature of time.

The scientists say that just before The Big Bang (again, “before”) there could be no time. But how can it be to exist at all, or non-exist, without time? Again, no answer, and there will never be.

— The nature of consciousness.

How does a cat perceive the world? What does it think and how does it feel? We will never know unless we’re in the cat’s skin. But even if we manage to turn ourself into a cat, to be able to record the cat’s feelings we’ll have to retain our human consciousness to watch and register our feelings as a cat. But in that case we won’t become a cat proper, just a human in the cat’s body. A dead end.

Now, we might be able, in the future, to record all cats’ reactions and movements to different stimuli, we might be able to predict their responses and behavior, but we won’t be able to know what it feels like to be a cat.

Forget the cat, how does it feel to be another human being? We can only describe and know for sure how it feels to be us. We can draw conclusions observing other people and compare their reactions to ours and our underlying feelings, but to get into someone else’s self? No way.

— How can from a living organism, and then a sentient life, grow from an inanimate object?

Again, we can only speculate and hypothesize. How and at what moment does life begin? Does an embryo have consciousness? If it does, where does it reside? If it doesn’t, at what moment does it get to have it?

— The reason for being?

— Why is there something rather than nothing?

We can continue the list (free will is on this list as well, along with feelings).

So, we will never be able to fully understand how a different person feels and consciousness itself. But how then can we create a sentient being if we don’t understand how, when, and why we ourselves come to be?

If we can never understand the origin of our world, its meaning and purpose, its boundaries, its destiny, how can we create a new one?

What we can create is a simulation of our world (or other made-up ones).

But the nature of a simulation is that it mimics an appearance of the original, its external behavior and reactions. It can fool someone into thinking they are dealing with the real thing, but only to a certain extent. Lacking the substance of the original, the simulation will eventually reveal itself as a fake.

Then, we can populate this simulated world with “units” that will be in turn simulations of living things, animals and humans, but they will be just that, a computer simulation, no more: without consciousness, without free will, and without true intelligence. They may technically be, and I’m sure will be, real smart, being able to solve enormous toughest problems, but they will always remain the same — a bunch of running code.

Consequently, we will never be able to create a general AI. Just a range of simulations mimicking some of our activities as humans, and that’s it.

It’s time we began to realize again the simple truth: science and technology can take us only thus far. There are things that make us human which are just beyond science and technology. They will never make us gods.

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