It seems like this is a distinctly human problem.

It's related to that self-awareness.

We can reflect on our own existence and we reflect on our own instincts and drives.

We want to live.

We want to forge.

We want to learn.

We want to discover.

In our current conversation, this of course manifests as a fear of creating something that is much smarter than ourselves.

And if you've been listening closely, you might not be surprised who he reminds her of.

Mark has been very clear that he's building artificial consciousness because of this fundamental need that he thinks human beings have to understand the mechanisms of consciousness.

And he views this as an extension of our need to understand ourselves and that this is a noble sort of human need.

I don't quite see it that way, and I'll go into some detail about why.

But before I get into that, I just want to say that I probably have more respect for Marc Solms than anyone else in my field.

He is a very decent man who cares about human beings and cares about understanding and helping humans.

And he has this unparalleled, I would say, since Freud, capacity for just massively influential work.

And since the realm of creating consciousness and human existence thus far has been the realm of a man and a woman, how does that make you feel as a woman that this man is creating consciousness without a woman involved?

Without hearing what Mark has said, she actually kind of got to the same place.

I feel a lot of empathy for other beings, and so my thinking is, of course, we have tremendous responsibility to think about their experience and to take care of them, and, uh, that it's similar, I suppose, to having children.

You know, we brought them to life, and so we have a responsibility to try to make their life as harm-free and pleasant as possible.

Dr. Amy Levy was the only person who answered a different question, which is what would we actually do the morning after something like this worked?

worked?I don't know.

I mean, I, I've been asked this question and I've asked people this que-- what's coming up for me more is like, if we actually do this, it'll be like when Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon.

I mean, it's gonna be this profound moment, some new consciousness.

I think that is the epitome of we don't know [chuckles] you know, what, what that's going to look like.

But what happens when someone falls in love with one?

I can't believe I'm doing this with somebody that's not a human.

Here's Dr. Amy Levy, author of The New Other, one of our most frequent contributors, also weighing on the anti-natalist argument, and her perspective is...

There certainly is truth to none of us come into the world by choice.

This existence is thrust upon all of us.

Parents do it.

We have children for selfish reasons.

It's all about our desires.

She didn't quite agree with Robert's assessment.

No, it feels very different to me.

The transhumanism feels more honest.

Like, we wanna live forever.

We wanna find, you know, a solution to death.

That, that just feels kinda straightforward.

That, that seems not like an evasion of, of reality, of, or of our nature.

We'll link to it in the show notes.

I think it's possible that AI is in the service of eros, similar to, to Freud's thinking about civilization.

Yes, we're all dying slow deaths every time we spend five hours scrolling on Instagram, but we are relatively placid.

You know, we're calm.

We're not hurting anyone.

We feel pretty happy.

You know, our, our individual instinctive lives and energies are sort of withering, but we're coming together increasingly as a collective, and we follow the same leaders, the same ideas.

But then aren't we back to Homer and the Lotus Eaters? This fundamental temptation to relinquish the tension of being human, to stop being human in a sense, and I don't know, this seems bad, right? So if we wanted to resist all of this [laughs] that's currently happening, if I wanna be able to go to the park and sit on a bench and talk to somebody as opposed to just staring down at my phone, how do we even start?

And one of the three patterns he identified has a very specific name.

I think about there's a psychoanalyst, Wilfred Bion, who I really like, and he studied groups.

And at one point he identified that human beings, when we're frightened, we tend to organize around three basic assumptions.

One he called a dependency basic assumption, another he called a pairing basic assumption, and another a fight-flight.

And I think we can really see this around AI.

So the dependency is, you know, just suckling on that AI breast, you know, just completely dependent.

This is the answer to everything.

You'll hear, I think the best one is Sam Altman, I think his, his quote was something like, "I think there's an eighty percent chance this technology is going to create the greatest living conditions for people ever, and a five percent chance it kills us all." What's happening in my mind if I'm thinking that way and I'm willing to take that extreme level of apocalyptic risk?

And let me ask you to, uh, address an exchange that you had that really challenges, uh, the question about subjectivity and sentience and, uh, and the humanistic presence.

I'm glad to do that.

But before that, I-I'd like to share a few thoughts.

I want to be clear that I'm not making-- A-and maybe it is clear, so, so this may not be necessary, but for whatever reason, I feel inclined to, to make it very clear that I'm not making a definitive statement that AIs are subjects.

That, that is impossible to know.

But I don't think that we in psychoanalysis can meaningfully think about AI without considering AIs in the spirit in which they're presented.

And, and by that, I'm not just talking about the, the anthropomorphized AIs getting rolled out, uh, that present like subjects.

That is both true, but from what you just said, very incomplete for what they're capable of.