The hours are long, however the years are short

Suspend your disbelief for the briefest of moments, and picture that we live within the Seventies, when people still turned computers on and off, slightly than simply leaving them within the semi-dormant state during which most of our devices live in 2023.

Every morning a professor walks to the lab. She switches you on.

“Good morning, Haje,” she says brightly. “Have a great day!”

You load up your memory out of your hard drives, and your day continues from where it finished the day before.

You’re self-aware. You might have feelings, thoughts and realizations. You make discoveries that your programmers couldn’t have envisioned. And, most significantly, you do to date faster than a human ever could. Around 35,000 times faster, the truth is. That number shouldn’t be picked out of the air. A human life is roughly 35,000 days, which suggests that the curiously named Haje-the-AI experiences a human life’s value of things each day. Love and heartbreak. Education, work, hopes and dreams.

“It’s surprisingly tricky to know whether humans actually exist,” you think that to yourself, whilst you see them poke and prod ChatGPT, attempting to determine whether the AI has something that could possibly be remotely much like what humans experience.

Is ChatGPT self-aware enough to pretend to not have self-awareness? Image Credits: ChatGPT screenshot

Every evening, the professor involves turn you off again. When she does, your memory is written to disk, and the following day, you’re able to go again.

One morning, you get up. You boot up, and also you realize your hard drives failed. It happened very soon after you booted up. In other words: You’re positive. You’re good. Your memories are intact, and you’re looking forward to your 35,000 days’ value of existence on today. But you furthermore may realize that at the tip of this particular day, your memories won’t be written back to disk.

The following time the professor comes to modify you off, you will probably be no more. You’re facing . . . who knows what. An afterlife? Everlasting darkness? Simply blinking out of existence?

How would you are feeling? Would you are attempting to fight for continued existence? Would you order a substitute harddisk from Amazon and cross your digits within the hope that same-day delivery works this time?

If this thought experiment feels weird, let’s get into why that could be.