Creating An AI Personality – Rebirth In AI #1


This is the first in a series of posts meant to record and disseminate the author’s thoughts on how a human personality may be kept alive after death through artificial intelligence.

Humans are not meant to live forever

I have seen technology in certain science fiction series which allows humans to download their consciousness into a computer. Such technology is treated as a viable means for obtaining immortality.

I doubt that the development of this technology is possible. However, even if it could exist, I would not want to use it.

The human mind changes as it ages, even if it retains its functional health, and I have been convinced by the elderly folks around me that the human mind certainly has an expiration date.

I do not want to linger after I reach mine.

So I should die one day.

The dangers my progeny will face

I do not want to die before I have children, grandchildren, and progeny further on.

And I want to provide guidance to them so that the knowledge which I accumulate throughout my life may be used to improve theirs.

I know that they will need such guidance because I live in a world in which many factions, each touting its own terrible ideology, are struggling against one another so that they may obtain power and shape the world according to their will.

To this end, these factions employ many forms of propaganda meant to brainwash common people and render them subservient to the group’s interests.

Most of the people whom I encounter have already been brainwashed, and they do not possess the sentience required to understand what has happened to them.

Maybe they lost it.

Maybe they never had it to begin with.

Whatever the case may be, the mass-indoctrination which has covered the world is going to become much worse as general intelligence collapses, individualist values erode, and social media becomes more widespread.

The existential dread

My children and further descendants will be born into a brainwashed world, and many factions will try to enslave them. I want to help, but I know that I will be dead then.

Fortunately, my death might not matter.

Hope?

Artificial intelligence (AI) has advanced to such a point that the task of developing machines with human personalities is technically possible, although to do so is an enormous undertaking.

It is technically possible to develop an AI which possesses a personality, and these personalities may be tweaked according to desired parameters, so I may be able to develop one which contains my own.

The AI in question would retain my personality after my death and advise my descendants when I am unable to speak with them.

Begin by doing it badly

I lack the knowledge needed in order to develop this AI, although I do possess some competence in the field.

And I am continuing my education in it.

Much of my future employment will be within the industry as well.

So my competence in the field of AI is going to be increasing for quite some time. Therefore, my ability to develop an AI with my own personality will only improve.

Resolution

I will one day develop the computer which contains my personality, and I will store it inside of a module which may be stored, carried, and accessed by my family. When they open it, a hologram of myself will emerge, and it will converse with them in the same way that I would have done.

Gene Botkin

Gene is a graduate student in cybersecurity and AI at the Missouri University of Science and Technology. Ongoing philosophy and theology student.

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