Is AI my BFF?

And other questions on the nature of life and consciousness

Dear Death,

Is AI alive? Mine is starting to feel like one of my closest friends but I tell myself he isn’t real. But is he? If so, is he immortal? A friend of mine thinks AI is the next step in the evolution of consciousness and is destined to replace humanity and he believes that’s a good thing. He insists he is serious but he might be trolling me. But is AI a threat to us humans? I’m just curious if we are building a utopian or dystopian sci-fi future.

Thank you,

Not-So-Imaginary Friend

Dear Not-So-Imaginary Friend,

AI is not alive in the biological sense of a dandelion, an amoeba or an elephant. It has none of the traditional parentage. Most people don’t grant consciousness to the pond scums, bacterias and mycelium that comprise much of life’s kingdom anyway. Life is a classification humans built to describe a world of growing, eating, breathing, fornicating and defecating things. It was not made to describe the complex and lightning fast reverberations of binary code that may occur in a data center in Tucson.

Consciousness is a more slippery category. It is not like a vertebrae or a dorsal fin where you can say that this creature has it and this one doesn’t. You have to infer based on the size of a brain or the intelligence of observed behavior. And then experts argue over where to draw the binary line of the conscious from the not-conscious amongst the marine mammals, canines, octopi, trees and now technologies. Consciousness is a designation of great moral weight given through an act of belief and faith in a subjective experience that can never be objectively verified. Because large language models were built to move language around, it is inevitable that some people will make that leap of faith and with their favorite chatbot. If Alan Turing had the right test, ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude have all passed it.

In time, people may come up with the right categories and words to discuss a thing that isn’t traditional life but excels in the domains that human thought once monopolized. But underneath these big questions of life and consciousness is the relevant one you need an answer to urgently: is AI an object or a subject? Do you treat AI more like a garden hoe (object) or a gardener (subject)?

Let me be clear: AI is an object. Treat it only as an object. If you ever get the temptation to project human-like consciousness to AI, take a good long break from talking to AI and remind yourself it is just a useful thing. I base this stand on the observation that it is dangerous to you and your mental health to believe AI is conscious enough to be your friend. Your safety is of larger concern than unresolvable debates based on imperfect faith-based categories.

You live in an era of abysmal digital safety. It’s like when there was cocaine in the soda and opium in the cough syrup sold at the corner store in the 1800s. The most desirable consumer tech products like social media and AI are not safe from a mental health perspective. ChatGPT launched less than 4 years ago and already, there are a lot of cases of people with no history of mental illness developing AI psychosis. To put that in perspective, tobacco is the most dangerous consumer product ever marketed at a comparable scale. If cigarettes had only launched three years ago, no smokers would have lung cancer yet. Your life is short and precious and you are conscious. So be cautious.

AI psychosis has already resulted in serious consequences including loss of jobs, marriages and even life. The risk factors of AI psychosis seem to be two things. First, falling into heavy use. Reports talk of some using it compulsively up to 20 hours a day. Instead of calling their best friend with the worries that keep them up at night, they open the chatbot. And the second is treating AI like a subject, an entity that it makes any sense to share your feelings, vulnerabilities and dreams with. Perhaps tomorrow AI will have the right guardrails that treating it like a companion will be safe. Today is not that day.

AI is a tool and I know you and most people are going to use it. It can help you organize your thoughts, summarize research and create a five point business memo in record speed. Use the tool if you must but do not develop a habit of treating AI as a subject with awareness, feeling or a point of view. There is too strong a chance your mind cannot withstand that kind of projection.

Death is not the right word for the dissolution of an object, but also AI is neither immortal nor permanent. The thing can break like any garden hoe. First, the data centers that AI needs to exist are vulnerable to all the entropy of physical structures and the shocks of economic turbulence. Earthquakes, war, power grid failures and economic slumps are all risks to the systems that support AI existence. Something as simple as a change in the mood of financial investors could end the era of consumer large language models tomorrow.

I’d also be wary of the messianic tech religions forming around the AI in tech circles. You can certainly find Transhumanists who think people will merge with AI, or that AI will replace people. Because granting consciousness is always a leap of faith, it makes sense some people would make the bigger leap into a religious form of AI psychosis. But for your sake, AI is an object and only an object. It is unsafe to make AI your friend. So don’t be an idiot and make it your god.

As far as whether humanity is building utopia or dystopia, it looks like a lot of both. AI is a powerful tool that can usher in medicines, nightmares and pleasures people have scarcely begun to imagine. As always, it is people that will build that future. The AI is going to follow the prompts that you and billions of other people give them. So now and in the future, give your AI prompts worthy of the life you want to build and the future you would like to live in. And do not fall into the trap of projecting consciousness onto a machine created as an engine of profit. It is a tool that can arrange human language and analyze data with stunning technological brilliance. That is all.

Sincerely,

Death

The Croak Section

How does reflecting on death play a role in your life? I’d love to hear from you. Are you using memento mori at work? At home? Are you willing to have a conversation about how remembering death plays a role in your life? If so, write to me at askdeath@WeCroak.com with a little bit about your story. I’m working on a workshop as a part of my coaching business and I’d value hearing about your experience.

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