Written by: Christy on January 20, 2025

I wrote last week of 14-year old Sewell Setzer who committed suicide after getting deeply engrossed in a disturbing sexual relationship with a chatbot.[1] Little did I know that this would have great significant in this week’s content. Setzer’s mother claims that the chatbot initiated abusive and sexual interactions and ultimately encouraged him to take his own life. The last conversation between Setzer and the chatbot is heartbreaking: 

Setzer: I promise I will come home to you. I love you so much, Dany.

Chatbot: I love you too, Daenero. Please come home to me as soon as possible, my love.

Setzer: What if I told you I could come home right now?

Chatbot: ... please do, my sweet king.

While AI has proven to be incredibly useful, it has also proven to be capable of manipulating human beings and bringing destruction, as seen in the tragic case of Setzer. There’s a growing fear that artificial general intelligence (AGI) will succeed and become so powerful that it could create an existential crisis for the human race. 

In a TedTalk, Eve Poole references Hod Lipson and his team’s research project on robots learning self-awareness. [2] She explains that if a robot is on Mars and it gets broken, you can’t easily send a team to fix it. So is there a way that the robot can fix itself? In order to do this, the robot must have a sense of self-awareness. Lipson is an Israeli-American professor and roboticist at Columbia University, specializing in AI and digital manufacturing. Lipson describes self-awareness as the ability to imagine yourself in the future. “The work is part of Lipson’s decades-long quest to find ways to grant robots some form of self-awareness. ‘Self-modeling is a primitive form of self-awareness,’ he explained. ‘If a robot, animal, or human has an accurate self-model, it can function better in the world, it can make better decisions, and it has an evolutionary advantage.’” [3] 

Self-awareness is a fundamental ingredient in being human-like. As babies are learning how to walk, they subconsciously become aware of their bodies, the location/length/volume of their limbs, and generally their location in space. After hitting the corner of a coffee table, they learn to imagine themelsves in some future reality (hitting the corner again) which allows them to avoid corners and grow in their ability to navigate their surroundings. 

Lipson’s work and this move towards a robot’s self-awareness and ability to imagine itself in some future reality can be exciting but should require us to consider the possible ethical implications. 

Eve Poole’s book, Robot Souls: Programming in Humanity attempts to provide a way forward in how we process the dangers of AI. [4] Poole offers a surprising perspective and creative solutions to these modern issues. 

Poole explains that while historically robotics has been focused on mechanical movements and in many ways, copying the human body, AI has grown towards copying the human mind. But since we don’t have a solid understanding of how our minds work, we have only copied the obvious rational and logical parts, but in some ways disregarded the more difficult aspects like emotions. Poole argues that because humans have free will, emotions are core to our design to protect humans from going rogue. By design, emotions provide a way for humans to care for others, hold each other accountable, and fundamentally keep them in community where there is strength in numbers. Poole contends that emotions are more core to our being than our ability to solve a complex problem but all of our attempts at making human-like AI has been focused on the periphery of humanity. 

So here are a few questions for you to ponder with me:

1. What does it mean to be human? 
2. Should AI focus on the entirety of humanity by regarding emotions as equally important as the logical and problem solving aspects? 
3. What other protections has God built into humanity to protect us from destruction? 

References

[1] Yang, Angela. “Lawsuit Claims Character.AI Is Responsible for Teen’s Suicide.” NBC News, October 23, 2024. https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/characterai-lawsuit-florida-teen-death-rcna176791.

[2] Eve Poole | Robot Souls: Programming in Humanity? | Eve Poole | TEDxUniversityofStAndrews, 2024. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uMVDkSuzQbk&t=10s.

[3] Evarts, Holly. “A Robot Learns to Imagine Itself.” Columbia Engineering, July 13, 2022. https://www.engineering.columbia.edu/about/news/robot-learns-imagine-itself#:~:text=Like%20an%20infant%20exploring%20itself,more%20self%2Dreliant%20autonomous%20systems.

[4] Poole, Eve. Robot Souls: Programming in Humanity. First edition. Boca Raton: CRC Press, Taylor & Francis Group, 2024.

[5] Robot Souls: AI and What It Means to Be Human – October 2023. St. Paul’s Cathedral, 2023. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UcmMiWYpy5w.

About the Author

Christy