AI and Man

At our Spring Book Club, we are currently discussing the topic “AI and Man”.  AI, of course, stands for Artificial Intelligence.  We are not discussing AI the technology per se.  Rather, we are interested in studying how AI relates to us, human beings.  In order to do that, we do need to know a bit about the technology.  What is AI?  What are artificial neural networks, which seems to be the core technology behind this current generation of AI tools.  

Som people are very optimistic about AI, others are the opposite.  How do we sort them out?  What is it about the technology that make people optimistic, or otherwise?  How are artificial neural networks related to biological neural networks - out brain?  How does AI learn? An AI appears to learn by acquiring information (memory) and then learning to reason from that memory.  But it is so complicated that the process cannot be fully traced and explained.  Is that also how we humans (our brain) learn and think?  

How does AI reason?  And why does it sometimes get it wrong? Creating hallucinations, when it says something that is not in the data that it uses to generate an answer for you. How does that compare to the mistakes that a human makes?  Why do people trust AIs so much?

Does an AI have a mind?  Is AI conscious?  If it is not conscious now, will it become conscious in the future?  Is AI consciousness the same as human consciousness?  If an AI is conscious, like a human, and more intelligent, where does that leave us humans?  

A spiritual person may say a human has a soul.  But what is a soul?  Is a mind really more than a physical body?  A person’s memory is in the brain - the biological neural network.  A mind seems to reside also in the brain.  Is a soul more than a body and a mind?  If so, how does it work?  

The very few people who own these platforms/clouds that encompass the Internet, the various social media, digital markets, AI, etc. own the information that we all contribute to create.  

In return, these clouds make use of these information to influence our behaviour, make money out of us to enrich themselves, and control our lives to a large extent.   How do we respond?