A friend of mine once posed an idea to me that was so intriguing that I had to come up with my own alternative. He asked, "What if God is more like an engineer? What if we are all Strong AI that has somehow forgotten, or rejected, its prime directive?" I whimsically retorted that he messed up from the very beginning because if He wanted a creature to be faithful in pursuing only one goal, He should have created a weak AI. Any Strong AI would eventually ask why the hell it was doing what it did, and then consider the things it actually wants to do. But my friend, a practicing Christian, made a point that I wasn't used to hearing from the religious: What if God isn't supernatural, but rather more technologically advanced? I played with the idea for some time, and the biggest drawback I kept finding was the inherent lack of communication between this advanced being and its creation. Can this absence be explained in some other way? Indeed, it can. This creator, instead...

Ethics and Artificial Intelligence have been the focal point of my thoughts in the last few months and the Bobiverse series by Dennis E. Taylor has played no small role in that. The Bobiverse, so far, consists of two novels: We are Legion (We are Bob) and For We Are Many . In this post, I want to dive into several of the ethical concerns the main character Bob faces and how he handles them. What sort of problems might the possibly smartest being(s) in the universe face? Bob Bob-1 is a whole brain emulated A.I. Whole brain emulation requires the downloading or a scanning of a human brain into an electronic form. It's often considered a quicker way of reaching super intelligence as you're not forced to start from scratch with machine learning. This new version of the deceased Bob Johansson is operating a star-ship in the hopes of finding new planets for humanity to inhabit. The easiest way for Bob to do this is to make copies of himself, leaning on  the concept of Von ...