If someone were to succeed in designing Artificial Empathy and Artificial Wisdom (AE and AW) as necessary software additions to Artificial Intelligence, this world would have a chance to be more sentient than it is.

Voja Žanetić

Put a smile on your face, today we are talking about Artificial Intelligence.

Lovers of good humor should not miss the “Political Declaration on the Responsible Military Use of Artificial Intelligence and Autonomy”, which was published by the US State Secretariat in February of this year. And it says the following:

“The use of AI in an armed conflict must be in accordance with applicable international humanitarian law, including its basic principles. Military use of AI capabilities should be responsible, including use during military operations within a responsible human chain of command and control.”

We are waiting for an even more humane response from the Russian and Chinese authorities, so that we can completely abandon our fears. At least our greatest ones, you know.

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A mitigating factor in any discussion of Artificial Intelligence during this year 2023 is the following: whatever anyone thinks, says or writes about AI becomes obsolete the moment it is thought of, said or written down. News change from second to second, there are fewer and fewer human activities and functions that are not given the opportunity to issue very complex directives to their computer terminals in plain language, and to receive a verbal, computational, artistic or some other satisfactory answer with astonishing speed. Like many other inabilities that mankind has replaced with tools, weapons, and machines, the human brain has received a significant new upgrade. To put it crudely, natural unintelligence now has its even more perfected artificial antipode. To one’s joy, one might say. And artificial joy for that matter.

And so, now we are where we are: education continues down the path of actually being a learning on how to act educated with the help of computers; decision-making continues down the path where it turns into execution of the decisions made by the software; creation, perhaps soon, will make, say, texts like this one, the last ones to be written with the help of thoughts of  “organic origin”. Not to mention, erasing the border between “analog” and “digital” becomes a space for the usual struggle between optimism and pessimism. The more cheerful ones fantasize, for example, about drugs against incurable diseases that will be brought by the medical relatives of Chat GPT. Those less excited fear the meeting of artificial intelligence with crime, terrorism, imperialism and the remaining synthetic forms of the seven deadly sins. Evil rejoices most with good, I guess we’ve learned that by now.

Now, perhaps, we should revise.

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Inevitability is the word that could perhaps best define the feeling one should have about Artificial Intelligence. With an additional characteristic of these times, which is that you certainly cannot avoid everything that you really have no idea what it is. WWBWB (What wil be will be) is, therefore, an absolutely perfect abbreviation for this age, which is persistently kept silenced while those two letters that stand for Artificial Intelligence are casually mentioned. The wander of everything that happened regarding AI provokes a huge need to say something about it, and the need is so great that it is a greater shame not to say anything about it, than all that is said about it. And considering this understandable inflation of opinion, and considering that no matter what else is considered, there is neither harm nor benefit, it will not bother to state here that the human species lacked not so much intelligence as empathy. Not to mention wisdom.

So, if someone were to succeed in designing Artificial Empathy and Artificial Wisdom (AE and AW) as necessary software additions to Artificial Intelligence, this world would have a chance to be more sentient than it is – with less exploitation, lying, destruction, blindness and everything that we’ve practiced until now, and in the age of Natural Intelligence. An age that has ended, whatever happens next. And all this mental and metal, which has just been created, will one day be able to explain quite well both the nature and the result of that end.

Happy new beginning to us.

And yes, that answer is 42.