Exploring Virtual Beings

The topic “exploring virtual beings” seems apt for the first issue of my newsletter. It is handily also the title of an event that I co-hosted in New York City this past week.

I had the opportunity to interview my friend and futurist, Jamie Metzl. In just 20 minutes we covered some of the most progressive ideas about the current state and the potential of virtual beings, which I will attempt to unpack here.

TLDR: i) virtual beings are so much more than replicas of real human beings; ii) the line between real and virtual is blurry at best - and that’s okay; iii) the impact of AI on humanity has barely begun - and things could get spiritual.

i) Virtual beings are so much more than mere replicas of real human beings. They represent a new form of intelligence with the potential to evolve independently, augment human capabilities. Jamie mused about how the idea of a downloadable consciousness, that could be embodied in a robot and allow us to live on forever, predicted by futurists like Ray Kurzweil - for him seemed “preposterous” or as I’d paraphrase - shortsighted. The opportunity is not so much building “artificial” intelligence as it is “alternate” intelligence, which might be founded on aspects of ourselves, but which grow independently - much like the idea of a child who is born from us but who cultivates its own distinct identity. To think virtual beings amount to mere replication, is like transposing a newspaper onto a webpage, and thinking that was the limit of internet. As with the internet, things will get interesting once we get into the native properties of the AI.

ii) The line between real and virtual is getting blurrier. Jamie demonstrated is AI avatar speaking Korean so realistically that his family had wondered if he’d taken Korean classes. When he observes his avatar speaking Korean he has to remind himself it’s not him, per se... I’ve felt this way myself, watching my AI avatar speaking Mandarin and easily slip into idea that I do. Once you see it, it’s hard to un-think it, and it feels strangely natural. This is probably since, as Jamie pointed out, technology and science have reengineered what it is to be human for millennia. And AI will continue to do so in ways that we will quickly take for granted. In the digital age the boundary between “real” and “virtual” has gotten blurry, and ceases to be a helpful distinction. Jamie offers a more useful way to look at it, where we think of virtual life and physical life as components of the umbrella of reality. If we can experience it, isn’t it real…?

iii) The impact of AI on humanity has barely begun, and Jamie’s multilingual avatar demonstrates just an inkling of what will be possible.

For most people today, “doing AI” might be going ChatGPT. But according to Jamie, that would be akin to thinking you’d got to know electricity by visiting a Con Edison plant. Rather, “electricity is in my clothes, it’s in my haircut, int’s in this microphone, it’s in our houses. It’s just omnipresent.”

He offered another analogy: when DeepMind created AlphaGo in 2016 what they did was train on all the games of Go, and that's how it learned to play Go. With the next model, AlphaZero, they didn't give it any of the games of Go. They just gave it the rules, and had it play against itself. Then flash forward to AlphaFold, which can predict the structure and interactions of all life’s molecules.

What can we learn from the exponential journey of Go for the future virtual beings? If we start by pooling all the knowledge and experience of humanity, and then apply the rules and patterns of intelligence and consciousness that we can't yet see… perhaps it could result in a spiritual force so much greater than ourselves…

Other humans might think “that's kind of spiritual, because it comes from the best of us.”

Further reading:

• Jamie’s latest book: Superconvergence

• Jamie’s essay on AI and spirituality: Can AI Foster a Global Consciousness

• My TEDx talk: Can your digital twin be trustworthy?

Finally: I’m just getting started here! Feedback is most welcome!