00. Why this book

Artificial Intelligence is a very hot topic and a lot of contents have been produced already to teach its basics and engineering constructs, demonstrate how it can be used and how is changing our lives and speculate about the possible outcomes for our near and long term future.

By the way there is also a lot of fiction that anticipated many possible future worlds, that surely inspired also the scientists, entrepreneurs and engineers that transformed those visions in technology that is now before our eyes.

Being involved in the technical aspects of Artificial Intelligence myself, more precisely in the role of consultant, driving companies in complex path of adoption of this new paradigm, I am literally immersed in a flow of contents regarding all the different aspects of this revolution, but there is one aspect that I found surprisingly less represented in the global debate: the fact that while we are learning to build more and more capable digital minds, we are getting unprecedented means to understand our own mind with profound implications on several important levels.

First of all, when we are unlocking new capabilities, for example language understanding, creativity, emotional intelligence, advanced reasoning and more, … at each step we will find a natural analogy to how our own mind works. The interesting part is that we are not, in this new era of AI, truly trying to mimic how our mind works, it is happening the opposite, through testing different approaches the emerging patterns, while built on possibly different underlying structures, at a higher level, are surprisingly similar to our own patterns.

When we progressively make more capable minds, then some more fundamental questions arise, including if some features of our intelligence should be replicated in the digital minds for their intelligence to evolve further (for example: consciousness, emotions). While some authors still question if current AIs are capable of “true” reasoning or are just “simulating” reasoning, the same debate could also be transferred to future step of their evolution: consciousness and emotions.

In fact, while we may have the technical ability to create digital minds that behave as being conscious or having emotions, we will have to decide if it is necessary to followup this path and, in case we do, we will probably have the same philosophical debate we are having now for reasoning: many will question that their consciousness or emotions will not be “real” but only simulations.

Apart from safety concerns, and social implications (for example we may found value in emotional AIs to delegate customer interaction, health care or education tasks), there is a profound implication if we accept that these kind of minds are conscious, and, for example, do not “simulate” suffering but “are” suffering, because in this case they might deserve rights.

There is the opportunity for different disciplines to converge and be gifted from the others new tools and insights, and also new semantics: engineering, philosophy, psychology, sociology and other disciplines have the opportunity to find a common ground and advance in the understanding the inner working of our mind, explore with different tools the concept of consciousness, and prepare all of us, not only for a world where we could have a better understanding of ourselves but also to reimagine our identity and role in a world that is about to change in a very significant way.

This is the main reason for which I decided to write this book: to try to create a bridge among different knowledge domains, to share these insights that may be trivial and self evident for those working in the AI field but much less evident for everyone else.

I hope that everyone, even outside the specific domains of AI, philosophy of mind or psychology will find the contents of this book non trivial but at the same time understandable and enjoyable.

Happy reading.