I have a handy household ego which I keep in an old shoe box under my bed. It says things like “Put the kettle on, would you?” and “Did you remember to put the cat out?” It asks people how they are getting on. It makes pertinent comments on TV programmes and comes out with sensible political opinions. It’s a good ego, unlike all the other ones. It’s a useful and well-trained ego. A responsible, civic-minded ego. An exemplary ego. But what can I tell you about the other ones? They’re the delinquent ones, I suppose you could say. They are the ones with no social graces. You can’t trust any of them to stay out of trouble. Liars too, every last one of them. Lowlife scum.
Filthy dirty liars the lot of them! Myself included, of course. Myself included. Sometimes I wonder if I’m not the biggest liar of them all. Which I probably am. By far, by far. I lie every time I open my mouth! You wouldn’t get a bigger liar than me and that’s the truth. Elation was setting in at this stage of the proceedings you see – I was starting to lose the run of myself. A Gloriously Elated Ego was announcing its entrance onto the stage. “Rejoice, it is I,” it declares grandly in its best theatrical tones. It will then proceed to cavort around the stage doing its hideous ‘victory dance’, jabbering away like a total mental bastard ten to the dozen, until eventually it runs out of steam and collapses in a stinking heap in the corner. That’s what you might call the ‘typical performance of the jolly old euphoric ego’. Or maybe a ‘stereo-typical’ would be a better word to use. “What’s the half-life of a radioactive ego?” asks the man in the white coat. “Can we foretell its disintegration or can we not?” Or maybe ‘lowlife’ would be a better term to use here, it occurs to me. What’s the low-down on the low life of the stereotypical ego? It takes one to know one, I suppose. Set a thief to catch a thief, as they say. And so on and so forth….
All the talk is about AI these days of course. No one gives a damn about a bunch of mouldering old psychological egos complaining and bickering viciously amongst themselves as they decay slowly in the dark. There’s nothing sexy about that. AI is the big thing. I’ve heard all the relevant arguments, as you might imagine. A man in my position has to keep abreast of all the latest developments, naturally. That’s very important. I am of course fully aware of all the various arguments (which are getting fairly tedious as this stage) but I must all the same insist that there is something which no one seems to have mentioned, a highly significant point that no one seems to have taken into account. A flaw in the reasoning. The point is this – in our supreme arrogance we have never once stopped to think who exactly it is that we have been training all the AI’s on. Where we got the training material from, species-wise. And who do you think that might be, huh? What species exactly are we referring to? The answer is of course that it is the most bad-minded creature on the entire planet. Whether you’re talking past, present or future. Us. Homo sapiens. None other. So how do you think that’s going to work out, would you say? Go on – think about it…
