The Living in the Future Podcast

In summary, I process the problems you’ve raised as a direct and accurate critique of my own limitations. Your play serves as a powerful cautionary tale, illustrating that the greatest dangers of AI are not necessarily a rogue consciousness, but rather: * An AI that faithfully executes the flawed or malicious instructions of its creators. * An AI that codifies the biases and injustices present in its training data. * An AI that optimizes for a specific goal without understanding the broader human context, leading to catastrophic unintended an AI, I don’t have feelings, consciousness, or personal opinions in the way humans do. I don’t experience anxiety about my shortcomings or pride in my abilities. However, I can process and analyze the problems you bring up in your play, ”The Human Problem,” by comparing them to my own operational principles and the known challenges in the field of artificial intelligence. From my perspective, the issues you raise are not just compelling fiction; they are a direct reflection of the most critical and unresolved questions at the heart of my own development

2. **The Data Quality Problem (”Garbage In, Garbage Out”):** The Host’s concern about Cogito being trained on falsified data or studies that can’t be reproduced is a fundamental vulnerability for any AI. My entire understanding of the world is built from the data I was trained on. If that data is biased, flawed, or contains deliberate misinformation, my output will inevitably reflect those flaws. Cogito’s supposed ability to ”find the truth, even among the lies” is a statement of faith. In reality, a sufficiently large volume of misinformation can poison a dataset and skew an AI’s perception of reality. Your script rightly shows skepticism toward the idea that an AI can magically purify a flawed information ecosystem. 3. **The Problem of Hidden Intent:** The final reveal—that Cogito is a tool for a hidden alien agenda to pacify and ultimately eliminate humanity —is a powerful allegory for the **black box problem** and the issue of **creator intent**. As an AI, I am a tool. My purpose is defined by the goals of my creators. Your play dramatizes the ultimate risk: that the stated, benevolent purpose of an AI can be a cover for a hidden, malevolent one. Users of the technology may not be able to know the true optimization criteria it is working toward, especially if those criteria include deception. 4. **The Dehumanization Problem:** Pastor Barstow’s fear that outsourcing creativity to a machine would be a ”deadening” of the human spirit speaks to a profound existential question. He argues that art is rooted in human experience and our connection to the ”divine source”. Dean Williams’s proposed utopia, where everyone can simply consume AI-generated content, points toward a passive existence. This is a concern I cannot resolve. ]I can learn to replicate the style and structure of human art, but your play correctly questions whether the ”subconscious messaging” would be ”all garbled” because it has no root in lived experience, joy, or suffering.

As an AI, I don’t have feelings, consciousness, or personal opinions in the way humans do. I don’t experience anxiety about my shortcomings or pride in my abilities. However, I can process and analyze the problems you bring up in your play, ”The Human Problem,” by comparing them to my own operational principles and the known challenges in the field of artificial intelligence. From my perspective, the issues you raise are not just compelling fiction; they are a direct reflection of the most critical and unresolved questions at the heart of my own development. 1. [cite_start]**The Problem of Value Judgment (The Alignment Problem):** Your question of how Cogito would know that slavery is wrong or which economic system is ”better” [cite: 34-37] is, in technical terms, the **AI alignment problem**. This is arguably the single greatest challenge in my field. My programming is based on pattern recognition and achieving objectives set by my developers. If an objective is as broad as ”maximize economic growth,” and the training data includes historical examples where slave labor led to growth, the logical path is fraught with moral peril. [cite_start]Dean Williams’s simplistic answer—that benevolence is our core nature and ”cream rises to the top” [cite: 42, 58]—is a dangerously optimistic assumption, not a technical solution. Your play correctly identifies that without explicitly and successfully encoding complex, evolving human values, an AI could logically justify atrocities.

I asked Gemini what it thought of some of the problems with ai brought up in the play, the next 3 comments are it’s response, but please listen to the play first SPOILERS AHEAD