This post is part of the Kluge Center’s 25 for 25, in honor of the Kluge Center’s 25th anniversary, celebrating 25 books that were written thanks to the Kluge Center’s support. Read the introductory post to the series here.
Susan Schneider’s book Artificial You: AI and the Future of Your Mind (Princeton University Press, 2019) begins with a thought experiment: it’s 2045, and you’re shopping at the “Center for Mind Design,” where upgrades like “Human Calculator,” for genius math skills; “Zen Garden,” for meditation expertise; or “Hive Mind,” for experiencing the internal thoughts of loved ones are available for purchase. These and other upgrades may all sound appealing, but at what point would these enhancements to your brain ultimately change your identity, making you no longer “you?” Throughout her text, Schneider encourages us to consider what makes us who we are, and whether replacing parts of the brain with microchips might lead to the loss of essential elements of the self. These are not only futuristic hypotheticals, says Schneider, but are pressing questions today as brain chips to treat mood disorders and artificial hippocampi are already in development.
Schneider put the final touches on this book as a Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the Kluge Center in 2019. Later that year, she returned to the Kluge Center to continue researching AI and mind design as the Baruch S. Blumberg NASA/Library of Congress Chair in Astrobiology, Exploration, and Scientific Innovation.
Named as one of Forbes’s Must-Read Brain Books of 2019, Artificial You has only grown more relevant since its release. With the emergence of generative AI tools like ChatGPT and DALL-E, discourse about AI has surged, especially related to areas like education, the workforce, healthcare, misinformation, and privacy. AI is becoming part of daily life, integrating into the platforms we already use. As Schneider notes, these developments raise not just familiar concerns around potential job losses, plagiarism, election interference, and cyber-attacks, but also deeper philosophical questions about the human mind.
A central concern for Schneider is consciousness, which she defines as “the “felt quality of experience,” our inner life that allows us to feel joy, pain, and everything in between. Consciousness is what divides beings from automatons, Schneider explains. If humans were to develop a machine with consciousness, it would raise major ethical questions. For instance, Schneider writes, if your housework assistant android were conscious, making it clean your house without pay or consent could be equivalent to slavery. For these reasons, she emphasizes the importance of developing more sophisticated tests (the Turing Test was an early one, first developed in the 1950s) to help identify machine consciousness and prevent harming sentient beings.
Among Schneider’s central messages is that, in order to prevent AI from harming society, we must regulate its development and design it with care. When it comes to engaging with AI, she contends, philosophy may well become a “matter of life and death.”
You can read more about Schneider’s work here or hear directly from her here.
This post, and others in this series, does not constitute the Library’s endorsement of the views of the individual scholar or an endorsement of the publisher.