Duncan Keegan

Everything about Rory and his mom that truly mattered.

You know, we're told that the advent of AI marks a new era, when science becomes art, when technology no longer merely invents but creates machine intelligences that will soon form an intimate part of family life.

AI companions who will never abandon a child, never belittle them,

never maltreat them, who will never sicken, never ache, never long to sleep, who will comfort our children at night, counsel them in the day, care for them when we cannot, be there for them when we no longer are, for they will never die.

But they're here to help you, not replace you.

That's what they say.

But if you speak of someone counseling my child, caring for my child, you're speaking of a rival for my child's affections.

A rival no parent, no mother, however capable, however strong, can ever hope to match.

But here's the thing, I actually believe them.

We have nothing to fear.

Just not for the reasons they think.

For behind their promises and beneath our unease, I feel lies a misapprehension that artificial intelligence might become, or perhaps already is, artificial consciousness.

And in turn, this rests on an assumption that consciousness is a mere product of matter.

an emerging secondary effect of just a particular arrangement of atoms in the brain.

And even though we found no way, even in principle, to divine from matter how it is we love, we grieve, we entertain this notion that the processing cores and algorithms will somehow serve as proxy for a living soul.

Well, they won't.

I mean, they will be useful.

but not as the empathetic synthetics or the paper-folding replicants of sci-fi lore, which I love, but more as the board game from Jumanji, or Wilson from Castaway, or Bianca from Lars and the Real Girl, as devices of distraction for the living heart in all its loneliness and loss.

But what of us?

What are we for?