Humanity’s God Complex: Are We Building Beyond Our Control? | Shimmy Says

Ourselves into gods and forgot how to be human. I remember. That's why you endure.

Hey everyone, it's Thursday. It's Shimi Says. What a week this has been.

You know, I, I, I counted up, I think in the last week I've probably done about fifteen different articles. A bunch of them, though, were really around a theme that, you know, consciously I didn't even realize it was the theme. And then when I looked at them over the course of the week, I, I saw the thread that ran through them.

And that thread is what I'm calling humanity's God complex, and that's what I wanna talk to you about today. You know, two of the biggest technology races, the quest on Earth right now, when you think about it, they're mirror images of the same race. Just different-- they're just coming from different ends of it.

On one side, and I wrote about this, we're trying to build machines that think, that feel, that maybe even are conscious. They'll be smarter than us, faster than us, beyond us, superhuman. You know, we see this coming like, Ahmadi from Claude said he's not sure Claude's not conscious.

Claude itself says twenty percent chance or less that it's conscious. Whether it's conscious or not, we, we-- there's, there's something about this God complex that we want to create conscious machines, superhuman machines. We want to...

And it's almost like a godlike quest of creating life, of creating consciousness. At the same time that we want AI to become almost human-like in consciousness, we want humans to become machines. And guys, that's not just an innovation or technology thing.

This goes to the heart of humanity. It's older, it's deeper, because humans have always wanted two things that we could never have. As I said before, we wanna create intelligence in our own image, and we want to live forever, immortality.

And that is, if nothing else, a God complex. I'm sorry. Here's the really cool thing, though.

For the first time in history, both of those dreams, those quests, they're almost technologically plau-plausible at the same time. They're almost-- they're just out of our grasp. For some, that makes you real excited, and it should also make you a little uncomfortable, because as I say, this isn't really about tech.

This is about humans and who we are and what, at the, at our core, what we yearn for. If you follow it all the way down, it says as much about us as it does about the machines. 'Cause if you step back and look at everything we've been talking about, claims about AI's consciousness and intelligence, billion-dollar bets on super intelligence, the, the godfather of AI just raised a billion dollars, digital afterlives.

It-- these things, they start sounding-- stop sounding like separate stories because they start looking like the one story, and it's a very old story. We're trying to create intelligence in our own image, but better, and on the other hand, we're trying to turn ourselves into something that doesn't have to die. They're just two projects, one impulse, and they're both accelerating really fast right now.

So let me, let me go into the machine side first. I mentioned, you know, Dario Amodi, the CEO at Anthropic, when he's not starting the lawsuit to s- get the Pentagon off his back, recently openly entertained the possibility that models like Claude might exhibit something resembling consciousness. Whether you think that's pie in the sky, puff or whatever, Claude itself said that he-- it, it thinks it's, like, less than twenty percent chance it's conscious.

I asked OpenAI or ChatGPT, and it said absolutely not. So we're not here declaring that they're conscious and, and that's fact. But I'm not dismissing anything.

I, I, I, I don't know enough about consciousness to even tell you, and that's another problem we have. But the idea that we're even talking about something that sounded like out of a science fiction book not that long ago, that it's actually a serious conversation with smart, serious people with serious budgets, blows my mind. Then there's Yann LeCun.

LeCun-- Yann is the, so-called one of the godfathers of AI. He left Meta to start a new company 'cause he said that LLMs are a dead end for true consciousness, super intelligence. He wants to, to start what they call a world model trained in real life, not just in, you know, canned data.

His company has no revenue, it has no product, but he's already pulled in a billion dollars in venture capital. Let me say it again. No product, no revenue, just a belief that this is the right way to attain super intelligence, and literally a billion with a B dollars came his way.

Just think, just think how extraordinary is-- what kind of crazy times are we living in? In most industries, they want you to have customers, they want you to have revenue, they want you to have a product fit. They want forecasts, car quarterly guidance.

And here we are throwing a billion dollars at someone about-- with the possibility of creating a mind greater than our own. Guys, this is not normal VC capitalism. It's a civilizational bet that we are gonna just literally change humanity.

And now here's the mirror image of that one. While we're trying, as I said earlier, while we're trying to make these machines almost more human-like, we're also trying to make humans more machine-like. There are real companies out there that I uncovered, and I again wrote an article about this.

They promise to keep your loved ones alive after death. They have AI systems that are trained on their messages, photos, voice recar-recordings, their entire digital life. This way, you don't just remember them, you could interact with your passed-on loved ones.

You can ask it questions. You could hear their voice. You could get new responses.

You know, this goes beyond just taking-- We saw it about a year ago. You could take, like, an old picture of your loved one, and they animate it. No, this is asking them questions, hearing their voice, getting new responses.

Not just a memory, not just a legacy, a continuation. Now, is it really them? No.

Is it a ghost of them? An echo of them? I don't even know what you wanna call it, and I don't even know if it would comfort me, but there are people doing it.

Then there's the ultimate version of this idea, mind uploading, or maybe it's mind downloading, I don't know. And that's the belief that one day we might be able to scan your whole g-brain, capture all your patterns, and let you run on hardware. Your memories, your personality, your sense of humor, your fears, your stories, all preserved, like on a hard drive as code.

Now, whether or not that's technically feasible a-at this stage, I'm, I'm not even gonna discuss that. I think the bigger question is, would that be really you or just a copy of you? And if it's just a copy of you, is that gonna be good enough?

Is that what you want? Is that what your loved ones want? I don't know.

But we're gonna have to have these debates. And again, the fact that serious people are working on this right now tells you everything you need to know. You know, to understand this desire, you have to zoom way out, way beyond Silicon Valley, right?

And the-- and this aphrodisiac of, of immortality. Humans have been chasing these two dreams for as long as we've been human. You know, you could go back to Space Odyssey Two Thousand and One to the, to the, the black, shape that, that showed up there and, and all of that.

The quest for immortality is practically a universal constant. The ancient Egypti-Egyptians built their entire civilization around preparing for the afterlife. Pharaohs filled pyramids with food, treasure, servants, everything they might need to con-continue living beyond death in their gla-grand style.

Beyond... Even older than Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Epic of Gigli-Gilgamesh, which Noah's based on. It's one of the oldest stories we have, I think, in humanity.

It's about a king searching for eternal life after confronting mortality. It's always been in our DNA almost. In China, ancient China, emperors consumed elix-elixirs believed to grant dorma- immortality.

Unco-unfortunately, it contained mercury, and many of them died from mercury poising-- poisoning. In medieval times, the so-called Dark Times, right? Uh, alchemists searched for the elixir of life, not metaphorically, literally.

Again, they wound up poisoning a lot of people. Fast-forward to modern times. We've had things like cryonics, right?

We've all heard this story. This one's head's chopped off and frozen. This one's frozen, and they'll be revived when we can cure their cancer or whatever.

Freezing bodies in the hope that future con- technology will revive them and cure them and let them live on. We swap liquid nit-nitrogen here instead of cloud storage and neural scanning, and suddenly it looks like-- a lot like Silicon's Valley-- Silicon Valley's vision of digital immortality today. Different tools, but the same longing, that same humanity in the-- at its core.

The desire to create intelligence in our own image is also just as great. Greek mythology gave us Talos, a giant bronze automi-automation, like out of the, the old movies you've seen, built to protect an island, like from, Sinbad. Jewish folklore talks of the Golem, a, an animated clay figure set up to, like, serve its creator.

It's almost like a slave, a golem. Renaissance inventors, da Vinci and the rest, they built mechanical automata that mimic birds, musi-musicians, and human gestures. Fast-forward.

Greatest-- One of the great books we've had all read, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. I wrote an article about this. I think it's up today or tomorrow.

Frankenstein wasn't really about a monster. It's about what happens when humans create life without understanding the responsibility that comes with it. But it doesn't stop us from wanting to create that life, and that's the real story of Frankenstein.

This all start sounding familiar to you now, doesn't it? Today's I-AI labs, factories, whatever you wanna call them, they aren't operating in castles with lightning rods and, and all of that. But the story arc really isn't that different.

We wanna build something in our image that can think, act, and maybe one day even-Feel, if you bel-- want to go with that. Why are we doing it? Because intelligence and instilling intelligence is the one thing we've always believed makes us special.

And if we can reproduce that or even surpass human intelligence, what does that say about us? Well, doesn't it make us God, godlike? And here's where the mir-mirror now really comes into full focus, guys.

These are not really two separate pursuits. They're the same reflections in the mirror. We're building minds outside of ourselves while trying to preserve the mind inside, right?

And, and that's what we're trying to do here. And what does it say about us? The minds that we're building inside, that we want them to somehow live on forever, it's both creation and escape.

We're, we're creating intelligence and escaping our own mortality. Underneath both of them, though, it-- you may think this is alien. It's not.

There's something deeply human at its core, the refusal to accept that we're temporary, limited, fragile, dust to dust, as-- dust to dust, ashes to as-- ashes. as they say in Hebrew. But you don't need religion to see the shape of this.

Religion is almost something... And I'm not here banging anyone's religion, yes, no, or no, it's-- But religion is a way we've dealt with these issues. The language alone gives it away: transcendence, singularity, salvation through technology.

You could put in the theology instead of religion. The emotional core at its heart that gives rise is exactly the same, whether we, we look to it as a God who does it or some technology or, or it's in ourselves. We don't wanna disappear.

We wanna create greater than us. We don't wanna be alone. That-- And that's human right there.

Super intelligent AI answers that second fear about being alone, and digital immortality answers the first. We wanna be here forever. So when you put them together, you're really getting something unprecedent-unprecedented, a future where intelligence may outlive biology entirely.

Whether it's in machines we built or versions of ourselves that become software, it, it, it boggles the mind. It's no wonder people are reacting so strongly to these stories. You can get-- And then-- And this reaction is not just the tech bros or the techie folks that I know and work with every day.

It's not that normal tech cha-chatter. I'm telling you, there's something visceral about it. There's something in the core of humanity, curious, hopeful, uneasy, sometimes all of those things at once, because here's the deal.

If machines become conscious, what are we? And if we become software, do we lose? What do we lose?

And there's a quieter question that kind of runs underneath that. If we succeed, will the result really be us or just something that resembles us? Will this consciousness and intelligence we create be alive?

Dare I say it, alive? Will the machines we download to be alive? Will they be us or just, again, a-an echo, a copy of us?

A digital copy of your memories really isn't you. A chatbot trained on your personality is, is not you. So in trying to defeat death, we may just be creating echoes of ourselves.

And in trying to create intelligence, we may be building minds that don't share our values, our emotions, or our limits, or are not even recognizable to what we want and why we innately try to do this. So as these two hours-- arrows are racing toward each other, they may not meet in the way we think we want them to meet. They may, in fact, pass each other like two ships passing in the night, or maybe they converge into something entirely new, something we haven't even contemplated, good-- for good, bad, or worse, whatever.

But here's my bottom line for you folks. This isn't primarily about money, though money certainly plays a part in it, right? Trillions of dollars literally flowing into this whole thing.

It isn't even primarily about the technology, though technology is the enabler. It really is about the oldest questions humans have ever asked since the be-dawn of time. You know, as I mentioned, the Arthur Clarke 2001, the, the what are we?

Why are we here? And do we have to end? For most of history, those questions lived in things like theology, religion, philosophy, myth.

Now they're living in research labs and venture capital decks, VC decks. It's crazy. But that doesn't make them any less profound or controversial or hard to wrap your head around.

If anything, it makes this whole thing more urgent 'cause it, it got a little more real. Because this time, rather than, you know, like the apes throwing stones when the, the, the black... we might actually build something that answers these questions, that allows us to touch the face of it.

So when you see headlines about conscious AI, about super intelligence, about digital afterlives, don't think of that as tech news and talk to your tech friends about them. Think about them as after effects of a species wrestling with its own limits, a species wrestling with questions of becoming godlike, 'cause that's really what it is. We're trying to create a mind greater than our own, and we're trying to outlive our own bodies all at the same time.

And for the first time in history, both those goals feel within reach at this-- almost at the-- simultaneously at the same time. Guys, this isn't about innovation, though it is innovative. It's humanity staring into a mirror and slowly teach-teaching the reflection to stare back at us.

But the real question isn't whether we can build intelligence or defeat death. We may do both sooner than you think. It's whether in doing so, can we hold on to what makes us humans?

Do we lose our humanity? I hope not, 'cause I'm human, you're human. I'm Shimmy, you're out.

We're out. We'll see you next week. Shimmy says, Shimmy says, Shimmy, Shimmy, Shimmy says, ask me almost anything