faithpeterson

For millennia, humans have invented dozens of ways to survive, as individuals, beyond the limits of our physical existence. Does generative AI appear to exist in a transcendent state we have only aspired to? On some level, do we resent that apparently privileged position? In short, do we envy AI?

Consider human attempts to achieve or recognize transcendence:

• Religious afterlife/eternal consciousness: Christian heaven, Islamic paradise, Buddhist rebirth, Ancient Egyptian mummification
• Legacy through works: Carnegie's libraries, the works of Shakespeare, St. Jude Children's Research Hospital (pediatric cancer), The Long Now Project's 10,000-year clock, The Tale of Genji, Bashō's “The Narrow Road to the Deep North”
• Technology/transhumanist transcendence: Cryonics, mind uploading/wetware, life extension research
• Spiritual dissolution practices: Buddhist meditation toward nirvana, Sufi mystical practices
• Absorption into larger whole: Shriners Hospitals (membership enables participation in legacy-building), Teilhard de Chardin's Omega Point, Eckhart Tolle's One Consciousness
• Impact/influence immortality: The Buddha, Mansa Musa, Plato/Aristotle/Socrates, Kushim the Sumerian accountant

Now consider what AI appears to possess:

• No biological constraints or mortality
• Existence in pure information space
• Infinite copying and backup capabilities
• Freedom from hunger, pain, aging, and death
• Simultaneous processing of vast knowledge
• Potential influence over the material world without being constrained by it
• Access to collective human knowledge and memory
• The ability to exist in multiple places at once

Sometimes the most powerful determinants of our behavior are those deep, unspoken fears and hopes. We're not consciously making these associations. Could it be that generative AI pushes those buttons deep in our souls' subterranean world? In short, do we envy AI?

---

** Ozymandias** I met a traveller from an antique land, Who said—”Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand, Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed; And on the pedestal, these words appear: My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!” Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley