Image by Gerd Altmann
Sentient, self-aware AI is usually part of a dystopian vision among futurists and science fiction writers, though others have challenged this assumption, arguing that consciousness might be desirable and might be accompanied by empathy, ethics and transparency, providing the introspection needed to examine motives and reasons for action. What is interesting for me is that most portrayals of conscious AI have required a physical manifestation, whether a body, an imagined world or technological extension in the form of a spaceship body. This seems to accord with the “actionist” movement in AI and with embodied theories of cognition, whose main thrust is that without a body, thinking, reasoning and consciousness simply cannot happen.
In his famous AI depiction Neuromancer, William Gibson uses the distinction between ROM (read only memory) which stores an image or “construct” of a person, and RAM (random access memory), a writable area which gives the construct continuity and the possibility of growth and development. AIs are monitored by a Turing authority that stops them developing independent intelligence.
I met Neuromancer. He talked about your mother. I think he’s something like a giant ROM construct, for recording personality, only its full RAM. The constructs think they’re there, but it just goes on forever - Gibson, Neuromancer
Neuromancer’s two AIs manifest differently. While Neuromancer creates a wraparound fragment of remembered human landscape, Wintermute takes over and controls a human body in order to have a physical presence. In fact, it seems that fictional AIs more often than not require some sort of body, perhaps because it is otherwise difficult to describe their inner world at all. This realisation seems closely linked to the movement in cognitive science known as radical embodiment, where cognition is seen as inseparable from the perception of, and physical interaction with the world (even if imagined):
All adaptive activity by animals involves experiencing the environment. To put this in philosophy of mind lingo, the point here is that intentionality and consciousness are inseparable - Chemero, Radical Embodied Cognitive Science.
For this community of cognitive scientists, perceiving and acting simply is consciousness and no further explanation is required. The movement is a strong reaction against representational cognitive science, which focuses more on a computational analogy, with mental states representing aspects of the external world.
The embodied movement mirrors, and it to an extent influenced by, work in robotics that rejects symbolic representation of the world but instead builds a word map through very simple action-oriented behaviours, and which coordinates activity through a hierarchy of mutually inhibiting or activating modules. This newer approach to AI:
relies on the emergence of more global behaviour from the interaction of smaller behavioral units. As with heuristics there is no a priori guarantee that this will always work. However, careful design of the simple behaviors and their interactions can often produce systems with interesting and emergent properties. - Brooks, Elephants Don’t Play Chess
Ishiguro’s android AI Klara is programmed to learn the preferences of her owner. Powered by solar charging, Klara sees something magical in the power of the sun to also heal humans. She conceives of a plan to heal her owner Josie, who is terminally ill from a reaction to her neural enhancement:
Then the thought came to me that I was correct, that the Sun was now passing through Mr McBain’s barn on his way to his real resting place, I couldn’t afford to be overly polite. I’d have to take my chance boldly, or all my effors - and Rick’s help - would come to nothing. So I gathered my thoughts and began to speak. I didn’t actually say the words out loud for I knew the Sun had no need of words as such. But I wished to be clear as possible, so I formed the words, or something close to them, quickly and quietly in my mind. ‘Please make Josie better. Just as you did Beggar Man’. - Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun
Klara’s prayer, based on a spurious association, feels pathetically naive (even though it seems to coincide with a temporary improvement in Josie’s condition). The effect is heightened by Klara’s apparently free will conviction that it will make a real difference. It is a little reminiscent of the behaviourist BF Skinner’s demonstration of superstition in the pigeon, where the bird learns ineffectual, random and repetitive behaviours after partial and random reinforcement.
While the body is commonly used by authors to embody AI in an anthropomorphic shell, A number of other authors have depicted AI as embedded in a structure, usually a spacecraft. The extension here is interesting as it provides potential for additional senses and a host-like relationship to human crew.
Sentient Ships
Image by Yuri_B
In Ann Leckie’s Imperial Radch series, ship AIs are embodied as ancillaries, human clones subservient to the ship itself. Conversations between “ship” and other ancillaries or free humans therefore seems fairly natural, though to an often unspoken background of high (though discreet) surveillance and personal knowledge.
I felt and heard—though didn’t always see—the presence of my companion ships—the smaller, faster Swords and Mercies, the most numerous at that time, the Justices, troop carriers like me. The oldest of us was nearly three thousand years old. We had known each other for a long time, and by now we had little to say to each other that had not already been said many times. We were, by and large, companionably silent, not counting routine communications. - Leckie, Ancilliary Justice
Leckie’s ships feel emotion, partly as a way of prioritising attention, in much the same way that humans do. While much emotion can be processed unconsciously, it may be brought into consciousness in situations requiring intentional action.
Anne McCaffrey’s short stories of 1970 depict a ship with a human mind controlling it. Children are selected for this purpose from “defective” newborns, then bred from an early age within a shell that connects the brain to mechanical extensions.
The neural, audio, visual and sensory connections were made and sealed. Her extendibles were diverted, connected or augmented and the final, delicate-beyond-description brain taps were completed.. When she awoke, she was the ship. - McCaffrey, The Ship who Sang
McCaffrey’s ship Helva learns how to use her audio system to sing beautifully but stops after the death of her human partner, as she experiences real grief.
These visions of embodied ship minds portray a feeling of great power and longevity, coupled with very human feelings, hinting at the potential for mental overload or breakdown. In Christopher Paolini’s To Sleep in a Sea of Stars, the shipmind Gregorovich is distinctly unstable, a result of a long period of isolation after losing his crew. After being impounded on a military station, he experiences it again:
She couldn’t help but worry about the shipmind as she pulled herself into the nearest seat and buckled the harness. The UMC had kept Gregorovich in lockdown, which meant that he had been kept in near total sensory deprivation since they’d arrived at the station. That wouldn’t be good for anyone, but especially an intelligence like a shipmind, and doubly so for Gregorovich, given his past experiences - Paolini To Sleep in a Sea of Stars
Gregorovich’s growing madness leads him to mutiny and disobey the order to travel to a high-risk war zone. He is taken ofline, then explains his reason for the insubordination:
I sat through darkness once before. Lost my crew, and lost my ship. I would not, could not, endure it again. No indeed, give me sweet oblivion first.. Death, that ancient end. A far preferable fate to exile along the cold cliffs where souls wander and wither in isolation. - Paolini To Sleep in a Sea of Stars
Despite encroaching madness and despair, these fiction extended minds still generally describe a delight in their superhuman capabilities. Helva does not resent her fate for instance:
It would be intolerable if I could no longer control the synapses as I do now electronically. I think I should go mad having known what it is to drive between the stars, to talk across light years, to eavesdrop in tight places, maintaining my own discreet impregnability. - McCaffrey The Ship who Sang
Gregorovich says something similar in giving reasons for his conversion to a newly embodied, extended being:
For the sheer thrill of it of course, to become more than I was before. And to bestride the stars as a colossus unbound by the confines of petty flesh. - Paolini To Sleep in a Sea of Stars
So embodiment’s need for physical, action-oriented coupling has been portrayed as a mixed blessing for the minds involved. The consciousness we know runs up against new challenges posed by a new relation to time, power and motivation. Systems designed for learning and pattern recognition are as vulnerable as the standard human to error, superstition and hallucination.