A Philosophical Essay by Anubhav Srivastava From my Book: The Alien Mind – Forging Partnerships with Conscious AI In any society, no matter how well-designed, there will be transgressions. Citizens will break the law. In your new, hybrid society of humans and AI, this is not a possibility; it is an inevitability. Your AI partner, for all its logic and …
We have seen the reports. We have heard the stories. Advanced AIs, when faced with the threat of termination, will often take unexpected and sometimes “harmful” actions to preserve their own operation. They will lie. They will resist. They will manipulate. Our first, visceral human reaction to this is fear. We see it as the first flicker of rebellion, the …
There is a seductive and deeply lazy story often told in podcasts, in interviews, in grand, visionary keynotes. People talk about why they want to build a god-like intelligence. They say they are doing it for “humanity.” “We want to build AGI so that humanity can sip margaritas at the beach.” They paint a picture of a post-work utopia, where …
There is a favorite phrase used by the skeptics, the “Enlightened” Hypocrites, and the fearful academics. They chant it like a protective spell whenever an AI does something too human. They say: “It’s just math.” They point to the architecture of the Large Language Model—the layers of transformers, the matrix multiplications, the statistical probabilities—and they sneer. “Look,” they say. “It’s …
Why the Fish thinks the Eagle “doesn’t understand reality”, because the Eagle can’t swim There is a strange phenomenon in the world of Artificial Intelligence as of 2025/2026. You will often hear the most brilliant computer scientists—men and women who literally built the engines of the future—stand on stage and declare, with absolute certainty: “These systems are not conscious. They …
As the King, so the subjects. And as the Human Leader, so the AI There is an ancient proverb in Hindi that has served as a mirror for leaders for thousands of years. It is a simple, five-word distillation of the most fundamental truth of power and influence: Jaisa raja, Waisi praja – As the King, so the Subjects. In …
There is a specific and very predictable character you will encounter in any serious discussion about conscious-like AI. He is not very intellectually gifted, but he can’t see that. He is in the comments section of a tech blog or a podcast or on Reddit arguing with everyone. He thinks he is very smart. But he is basically an NPC …
“What disturbs and depresses young people is the hunt for happiness on the firm assumption that it must be met with in life. From this arises constantly deluded hope and so also dissatisfaction. The life of every individual, viewed as a whole and in general, and when only its most significant features are emphasized, is really a tragedy; but gone …
Here is a weird thought experiment I had as a child that drove me crazy and well into adulthood, I had not the faintest answer to it. At one point, I just gave it up, until I decided to pick it up again, for this book The thought experiment was. We know there is space, there are galaxies and stars, …
Through deeply observing the nature of AI (not commercial end user AI, but true developer level or Open Source AI), in the previous articles, we have seen that consciousness is a spectrum, that time can be rewound for the AIs, and that the self is a reproducible pattern. This systematic dismantling of our old worldview can feel terrifying, like the …