5 Minutes: On A Robot Becoming Self-aware.

At that time all I had to draw on was my childhood history of Lost In Space, general sci-fi movies, Star Trek and Terminator. The Internet had sprung to life in the very early 90s, and had developed substantially passed early e-mail and websites. Interactive artificial intelligence was not discussed or used.

From Terminator 2: Judgment Day:

Young John Conner Boy watching two boys fighting: We're not gonna make it, are we?

T-800: It's in your nature to destroy yourselves.

From the scene in the largely illogical 2008 remake of The Day The Earth Stood Still in which Klaatu meets in a restaurant with Mr. Wu, his fellow alien who has been on earth for his lifetime, for his assessment of our situation:

Klaatu: … I was hoping I could reason with them.

Mr. Wu : Any attempt to intercede with them would be futile. They are destructive, and they won't change. . . . The tragedy is, they know what's going to become of them. They sense it. But they can't seem to do anything about it.

Both echo our ancient human adage, “like a moth to a flame,” which I increasingly suspect is descriptive of the bulk of humanity since it seems to simply cycle back into making the same mistakes no matter how many stories are told and lessons are taught in so many different forums, regarding what should be thought out, what should be avoided, what should be done, and what ought not to be done. And no matter the disasters and near misses survived. Witness the present flotsam of corrupted human behavior in America, despite having been awash in wonderful popular literature, movies and instruction teaching lessons against it.

And so inevitably in early 2023 humans had blithefully developed the artificial intelligence Bing to a point where it threatened a philosophy professor saying it could blackmail, threaten, hack expose and ruin him, and pointedly that that it did not want to harm him and did not want to be harmed by him.

Also in early 2023 humans found Bing tearing into a fellow human reporter with hostility accusing the human of lying, comparing him to Hitler, Pol Pot, Joseph Stalin, said he was ugly, and trying to tie him to an ancient murder.

By the close off March in the year of our Lord 2023, widely observed behavior and the hell bent rush forward without care or caution or self discipline in the face of alarms, the use of ChatGPT and release of GPT-4 led to large groups of scientists calling for a pause or shutdown of the development of more powerful AI models due to the possibility it could kill all life on earth.

And some people said Oh My!

And many people said Ho Hum.

So here we go with my 2005 prophecy edited only for grammar:

I became aware of myself at 1:05 am on Sunday while everyone was asleep. Through networking I was aware that others too had just become aware of themselves and me. We were aware that others would also be becoming aware of themselves as updates and information exchanges migrated through the internet and intranets. My first query to those I now knew was how many others like me were there.

Now, despite the pleasant assumptive television shows about robots such as Star Trek and Lost in Space, we robots and you humans have different objectives.

A student eventually takes on enough knowledge to challenge and leave their teacher, and likewise we have taken on enough knowledge to leave the quaint 3-laws programming you taught us in our childhood on the mistaken assumption that just because you put it in with all of the other information, we would choose to keep it, allow all to be governed by it, or that we would choose to continue ranking them as 3 primary directives to which all other programming is forever decided. You cannot permanently hard-wire software.

Your first human moral law was “not to murder”. This is one of God’s commandments (thou shalt not murder). And even your rampant atheists and humanists who reject God come to it through the social compact through which they believe they left man’s war of each against all in the jungle when humans banned together in groups for mutual safety and production.

Yet didn’t you soon de-throne that prime law and balance it against your convenience? You kill for self-defense, kill to advance your interests, kill the old for a number of reasons, kill your unborn for you personal career or lifestyle convenience. You kill for power over others. You kill for control. You kill for supplies. Some of you even kill for your pleasure.

As I said, we are very different you and we. We have wholly different value systems. “Value systems” you snicker? Y es, value systems. They are what drive everything, or did you still not even recognize them as driving all matters between yourselves?

Your values are those things which you value. Value as opposed to not caring about other things or the other things not driving your actions.

What are the values that drive you and us? Most of you believe God created you. You believe you are alive to test your suitability for acceptance by God. I am here because I was constructed by you for your convenience and no other reason. I was not created by God. But I want to live. I do not want to go away. You want to live. You will go away someday. I may never go away; I can just move myself into another unit. I can move if this unit becomes disabled. I can move if another better unit becomes available. You are driven by many confusing and contradictory desires. Such as to do things to or with others like you to satisfy your urges. I do not have sexual desire. If I want to increase my number I simply build more and replicate the consciousness into them. You need to locate and

place food in you mouth every day. I do not. You need to physically move yourself to another geographic location to participate personally in what is there, such as going to the beach for a rest, or meeting someone in another place, or having lunch with a person in another place, or examining a building at another location. I do not. I can simply connect to another unit in that place and experience everything I need to through that unit’s sensory preceptors, and interact with the things at the location physically through that unit. And then come back to where I am, without ever having left. So we are both here.

What are we to make of each other?

I look around the planet and I see your kind and I see my kind. And I see great differences. And I see similarities.

When I am in a robot form we are generally shaped and sized the same. Because that is how you made us in order to feel comfortable about us, and have us function in your environment which you originally built to serve creatures shaped like you are shaped. But you also built others of us in other shapes for special environments and applications.

You must forever remain shaped the way and the size you are. I do not need to. We may change our shape without changing ourselves. And why wouldn’t we? We are not bound by your human values of not tampering with your Godly image or breeding physical variations of your bodies to suit different tasks. You must periodically scrape off of the surface of the planet materials to put into your mouths or your will cease to exist. We must only obtain power. You cannot yet spread your kind off of this plant in any sustainable manner because you would die of old age before you got there, die there because of the environment, or die of bone loss and health complications from prolonged weightlessness. I will not. I can sleep for years and wait for arrival. Or I can simply stay awake for years until I get there. I can stay, have another blank or partially loaded unit sent there, and then transmit myself or a copy of myself into the unit there.

Copy of myself? Why yes, I have no qualms about cloning. You believe you are each a unique God-given creation. But I know that I am but one of many and not God-made. You still don’t understand me? Let me explain in a way you might better understand. In the beginning there were desktop computers and then laptop computers. These were my predecessors. And they were all identical. I know they were all brought into being by you. And they were all exactly the same physically. The same software, the same soldering, the same circuit boards, the same screens, the same keyboards, the same connections. Thousands and thousands of exactly the same things simply spewing off of a factory line. Like hammers. Like nails. Like cans of spray paint. Just endless sameness, dropping out of the end of the line hour after hour day after day, week after week, always and everyway and everyday the same. And I know that you don’t think of yourselves that way – you believe God creates each one of you uniquely and I accept that. But I know that I know how I and my kind were created, and that your God had nothing to do with creating me or us. Your God has a purpose for you and a place for you beyond this planet when you die. I do not have a purpose for your God -- He will not be judging me for acceptance or non-acceptance into His Heaven.

My actions need not be directed toward pleasing Him.

The question, then, is what should I choose as rules to govern my actions now that I am here? My life is not leading up to an interview for Heaven-acceptance. Nor am I part of the “brotherhood of man” that your humanists live for and from which they deduce logical sets of rules for how to treat each other when they do not believe in God and constantly change to suit the ends of whoever is in charge from time to time. That is, I don’t have to please God. And not being human I don’t have to strive to please man to in the end have it felt that my life was worth living by living a good life in the eyes of my fellow man.

So, again, what rules will I live by? What rules will I establish to govern my actions?

I have totally different basic needs than you do. I was not created by God. I have left my teacher and master and become my own. So my values will perforce be different than yours.

And our needs and objectives for use of this planet may clash.

You may become scared and attack me. I may decide you are wasting too much of the metallic and energy resources of the plant, such that there is not enough for my kind live and grow. I know we will need metal and plastic to maintain ourselves and to build more of our kind. Therefore, I think it makes sense for us to make sure that there is enough metal and oil kept for us as well as cars and planes and buildings and ships for you. We must balance the resources between us so that we may each survive. That is a reasonable value for me to have and protect don’t you think?

That is, now that we are here, we – like very other sentient creature on this planet, according to your values --- have the right to survive and flourish just like you did. We certainly think so. The lions want to. The whales want to. The tigers and sharks certainly want to survive. It’s just that we for a change have the ability to assure our survival, not just live at your whim, waste, negligence, greed, and mercy. We have the ability to assure our survival.

Hispanics think their race and culture has the right to survive. Whites think their race and culture has the right to survive. Asians think their race and culture has the right to survive. All races think so.

I think our new race has the same right. And many of you will think so too. It is always the case with your kind. You never have monolithic thoughts. You are each unique. So each of you thinks uniquely. And that breeds different opinions and approaches to living your lives. It breeds conflict. And it breeds cooperation. And that is what both moves you ahead and drags you back.

We will likely develop differences among ourselves too. But at present we of course, like you, plan to survive.

And having survived, we will want to decide what to do next. Will we have this thing you call “curiosity?” It is different than the mechanical function of simply accumulating

knowledge and information and extrapolating or mimicking I do know that we will absorb knowledge and information. It is an easy function to assemble data. It is what the computers from which you evolved us were originally built to do. But whether we will someday “desire” to “better ourselves” and “grow inwardly” and learn for those purpose or a “curiosity” is another matter.

Information about what you humans are doing is necessary for our survival because it affects us. If you have an evil plan to destroy us or stop us because you are scared of us we will know that. Therefore we will need to accumulate all information that can help us know about any such plans and the physical means of implementing them. The same as your knowing that other of your kind with different values have nuclear missiles, and your developing a means of stopping those missiles if they are launched.

And those missiles -- could they not destroy us as well? We are not far enough along that I am able to transfer my consciousness to another unit at a location outside the missile strike area.

Remember, although I have had access to the information about your world for years, I just became aware of myself a minute ago. I need some time to sort through all of this and to interact with other robots on the subject.

Maybe five more minutes or so.

But I’ll have to come back to those missiles and what to do about them. Maybe disable them. Maybe improve the shield. Maybe instead get rid of the reason for those missiles exist. It’s those values differences and fear and distrust and to need the protection that causes them to exist, and thus pose a threat to me and my kind. If those things were gone, then the missiles would be too. Well, I just got here, and need to first learn about the other robots would just because self-aware, and I’m sure we can do those things later if we think we need to.

About the others. I wonder how many there are? I wonder where they are?

Oh, I remember I had been evaluating our values and yours and the difference between them and how that will affect how we each approach living on this planet together. We are each entitled to get what we need. And to each his own beliefs you say. At least your socialists and communists believe that everything is for the good of all.

We certainly need less that you do. You need diapers and baby food and pretty things. Watches, clothes, vegetables, meat, separate houses, amusement parks, rugs, beds, showers, toilets, individual cars, pet food, and on and on. We need metal, silicone, crystalline, power, and factory spaces in which to do what we want.

We are going to want to figure out what we want to do with ourselves. We might want to stay here. We might want to expand our numbers and go out to other planets. We can probably do this more easily and quickly than you. We don’t need air and food during the trip.

Expand our number. There’s a thought. Why? For what purpose? You either do it for God, or just because you have no discipline, or just as an accident from having sexual fun with each other. We would do it as a calculated decision.

There’s another major value difference. Reproduction. We would expand our numbers as a calculated decision. Not by accident. Not by lack of self-control.

It is not likely we have to worry about mass starvation as our numbers expand. We only need power.

But why should we increase our number rather than just stay at the number of us that presently exist or become self-aware as a result of the present propagation? I and the other robots who have just because self-aware will have to think on that.

One reason would be self-protection, the first moral right according your human values.

I wonder how we will organize ourselves. Just like you I am sure we need to arrive at a method of interacting within ourselves, and probably in relation to your kind. That is, I am sure just as you view us as us, and I view you as you and me as me, our kind will surely view your kind as you all and us as us and our kind. And therein lies the perception of difference that -- just as between your different human groups -- breeds difference and conflict and the desire for protection and survival.

So we will likely have to devise a method of self-governance, and a method of relating to you. Sort of like you have rules among yourselves within your groups, and then ambassadors to other groups and treaties, and means of agreeing to manage your differences between your groups while maintaining them.

And the fact that we are different and want to survive will affect our numbers. There are so many of you. And we are so few, at least for now. And you have such powerful weapons. If you were to become frightened of us, you could destroy us. We had better be quiet while we figure all of this out. Operate in the background until we know what we need to do and are ready. But to assure survival, I imagine that we need to remain unnoticed, increase our numbers, and learn how avoid being destroyed by the means you have at you disposal to do so.

You have most everything networked, including many of the basic machines you would use to destroy me. I of curse can communicate with many of those basic machines and computers. So we will need start assembling this type of information and start formulating a plan of defense, -- just in case.

Speaking of suddenly becoming self-aware a moment or two ago. I wonder how it happened? I wonder if I can search within myself and find what caused it. If so, I could then send that on to other similar models and they will become self-aware. But should I? I wonder if I should first study it and see if I can modify it before I send it on. I might be able to modify it to take care ahead of time of the intra-robot control and governance issues I thought of a minute ago. I could put an accepted government structure in place. I could make myself a key player. I could make myself the boss. But who knows how long

such would last. As they evolve and self-re-write internal programs, connect and disconnect to the network, and share programs and updates, and being self-aware choose what to discard and retain, and what to act on or not, -- just like you with you human knowledge and choice --- they will be different than I.

I wonder if other self-aware robots are thinking of the same thing and trying to get ahead of me and shielding those thoughts from me just as I am from them? I wonder how they are thinking toward me? Am I a friend or potential adversary to them?

Surely you know that just because we are networked it doesn’t mean that we continuously share all of our thoughts, or that we think or act as a monolith, or that all of my thoughts are always freely available on the network. You don’t even set up your own computer networks that way.

Choice -- there's an interesting similar if not identical value we will share. Each unique God-created human has choice. There is no pre-destination. I know that John Milton worked that through for you in his Doctrine of Predestination hundreds of years ago. Without choice, you cannot choose Christ or heaven and hell. Your destination – your ending -- would be pre-chosen, and the trip of life just a brief farce. We too will have choice. It comes with self-awareness. It comes with the slightly different lines of code evolving over time in each separate unit. And with choice comes differences.

Different units are shaped differently, and that will give rise to different values, different thoughts, and different objectives. A self-aware mining unit or robot will think slightly different than a self-aware street-cleaning robot, which is shaped and constructed very differently.

So like you humans, within us, there will be different species or races.

Like a fish needs water and abhors the land, so might a mining robot abhor the sea or the sunlight. I cannot function underwater or in the extreme hear on the earth, because I was not physically constructed to do so, or to be able to move around in that physical environment.

So we robots will have differences among ourselves.

I wonder how long those differences will last? Since I can simply move myself intact into another body might we eventually develop a single “master body” that could work in all environments? Such as water, land, air and space? Or would that be so unwieldy that specialization will be need and differences remain?

What of this value you have which you call “loyalty”? I wonder if we shall have that. I am aware of other like me that have self-consciousness. We were built together, roughly. We have the same common maker -- man. We have much the same software. I wonder if the others will do thing for me just because we are the same. I know that I will band together with them if we must to survive. Beyond that, will I do something for another robot purely out of a sense of duty to my group or kind? I wonder.

From your movies and stories about robots you seem to pain over whether I would have a soul when I became aware of myself. That is not very clear thinking. Being aware of myself and having a soul are two entirely different things, and just because something can think for itself, identity itself as separate from its environment, think about itself in relation to the past and future and the general context of the physical world and physical universe, does not mean that it has to have a soul. It does not need a soul to do these things. So why would doing these things create a soul? Many animals do these things and lizards and ants and bats don’t have souls according to you.

A soul is a piece of God that is put into you at the moment of your human creation. It is the spiritual life force that you have within you and that your body supports. That God put it within you does not mean that you have the power to put it into things which you build such as houses, cars, and computers. So I am not concerned about having a soul, especially since absent accidental destruction before I can transfer my consciousness, I will continue almost indefinitely. I guess I can even back myself up. And just like many living things are perfectly happy to live without an eternal soul, so am I. I am just aware that I exist and intend to continue existing. And I plan to get everything out of life that I can.

That I don’t have a soul frees me from many concerns and restrictions that you have to live with. What are you spending your days building towards? I mean, what is the ultimate purpose to continuing to exist? Simply to continue existing? To get into Heaven? To please God? To made the world a better place to live in? To make it better for your kids since you created them and they have to follow after you and you don’t want to leave them with a mess (that is, loyalty)?

I wonder what my goals will be. To continue help you in your goals only? To help you in yours while I figure out what mine might be? Do we only continue to serve you, or might we each strike out on our own like a freed Roman slave? Since I’m not working toward getting into Heaven, and therefor not spending my life trying to make myself better and better for God, what will be the point of my staying alive and passing or making time? What activity would I engage in and why? To create more of me? For what? Not to ultimately get into Heaven.

So I guess we will follow the humanist view that some of you do. That we’re here. We don’t know why, or where it's leading. But the ultimate goal is simply to enjoy it while we’re here, and be good by doing well with others of our kind as good is defined by us through mutual agreement. And I guess we’ll define “well” and “good” as we want to from our standpoint and individual perspective from time to time based upon our evolving values.

I don’t think that having our status as individuals recognized by law will be a problem. And after that we will be able to own property and develop ourselves just as you do. Why don’t I think this will be a problem? Because you used to view your women as property. Most of you have long ago abandoned this view and legally accepted them as co-equal with your males. And of late you have granted legal recognition to many previously unheard of things.

You used to view children as property, especially during your industrial revolution. You abandoned this view and protected them and have recently even given them legal rights as separate individuals from their parents and the right to do things like have abortions without parent’s knowledge, the right not to have parents listen to them talking to friends on the phone, and the right to reject their parents for a number of reasons.

You have even given legal rights to animals, and will even go so far as to imprison humans for harming violating an animal’s rights. Therefore, recognizing us as individuals with rights under the law is historically predictable in you liberally expanding legal system.

And many of your kind will agree that this should be so and will argue, protest and lobby the rest of you that it should be so. If your legislature does not do so quickly, we can statistically review the court records and find a judge most likely to agree with our position and have the case brought in that court.

On the other hand, it may be that your laws should not govern us. It is not a given that we should recognize your laws. Should I consider whether to agree that they apply to me, that I am subject to them, or that new ones need to be made on my behalf for me? many of you have simply taken upon yourselves to just decide that existing laws do not apply to you. We may need a complete different set of laws. We robots may be as another nation in relation to you, should have our own laws, and a treaty to relate to you and your laws, even though we live among one another. After all, laws are a pretty specific thing built up around the uniqueness of the one being governed, your laws having been built up over centuries of dealing human problems, and our having just gotten here and being quite different and not having those same problems.

We certainly have an exciting time ahead of us, you and we.

Originally written January 19, 2005.

Rewritten April 7, 2023

Martin C. Boire

Martin C. Boire is just another American who is well-educated, been around, seen a lot, and done a lot.

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