There are 8 billion people on the earth. But that doesn't seem to be enough. We want more. 

 

But not just any kind of human. A virtual human. 

 

Someday soon there where be more virtual versions of ourselves than the old-fashioned, real humans we see at the supermarket.

 

We are now just beginning to see a new generation of avatars and virtual humans.

 

This leaves a big question hanging in the air.

 

What does it mean to be human or “virtually human" in the first place?

 

One thing that makes us human is that we are not like other animals.

 

We build cultures. We create ideas and share them. We learn and reflect.

 

We have the ability to create tiny, shareable, replicatable ideas and build on them. Over and over.

 

In his book “The Selfish Gene” geneticist Richard Dawkin's called these easily replicated cultural artifacts “memes”:

 

“Examples of meme are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pot or of building arches.”

 

What makes memes so special is that they can be stored in our minds and then be easily shared with relatively high fidelity.

 

In “From Bacteria to Bach and Back” Daniel C. Dennett argues that memes are an essential ingredient for what we call consciousness.

 

The thing about memes is that they are not biologic. Unlike genes memes do not have a physical form that we can interrogate in the laboratory.

 

Memes have a quicksilver quality. Yet they have a persistence that we cannot deny. Many memes have been around for thousands of years. And if we are to consider the idea of god as a meme, they can be vital to our beliefs.

 

Memes are bigger than rainbow cats.

 

If memes are central to consciousness as Dennett argues, then what do we call it when machines create their own meme and share them among themselves?

 

Is this a form of consciousness, albeit different from human consciousness?

 

It seems so.

 

In a paper out of Stanford (Theory of Mind May Have Spontaneously Emerged in Large Language Models) we have learned that AI may have acquired a talent we thought was unique to humans. 

 

ToM is what was once called “mindreading” and is the unique human ability to impute the mental state of others. AKA empathy.

 

We have also learned that AI doctors are in many cases preferable to human doctors. 

 

AI has a endless ability to listen. You and I, on average, can only listen to another person's problems three times then we totally lose it. The same goes for doctors.

 

A recent study published in JAMA Internal Medicine was summarized with the factoid that AI was “9.8 times more empathetic than doctors.” Some say this is an understatement.

 

AI will evolve just like us.

 

Machines will learn from human interactions, converting useful tidbits into algorithms. These algorithms will then be shared among machines in ways that we cannot perceive or track.

 

These algorithms will take on lives of their own. They will become machine-made memes. The most successful machemes will be replicated over and over, lasting longer than Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony or even Nyan Cat.

 

Some day, after we are long gone, and AI is off colonizing distant parts of the universe, these “machemes" will form the basis of a thriving AI consciousness that will be well beyond our imaginings.

 

And it will contain just a hint of our humanity.

 

Welcome to Nextness. More than a magazine, a mindset.

She is the social influencer that is taking TikTok by storm. She is 24 years old. And she was born 3 months ago.

 

Moreover, she has over 120,000 followers who believe, or want to believe, she is real.

 

The distinction between what is believable and what we want to believe is growing finer every day.

 

In the modern world we can increasingly believe what we want since having the wrong beliefs is no longer as fatal as it might have been in the Middle Ages or on the African savannah.

 

Our capability for magical thinking is only increasing. 

But we have always wanted to believe in things too good to be true. And virtual humans, or automatons, are nothing new.

 

One of the first was the Mechanical Turk who was a chessmaster that bested the likes of Napoleon Bonaparte. Today we might recognize the Turk as  a cheap parlor trick, but in his day he delighted and even terrified his audience. 

 

No technical elements of modern AI were present in the Turk, but the notion that people could be gamed by ersatz humans left a lasting impression.

 

 

 

 

Most people have forgotten or never heard of Subservient Chicken. But in the advertising industry it created its own sensation.

 

Modeled on paid porn sites where people could fulfill their fantasies, the Chicken was created to perform curious actions its creators thought Burger King consumers would want.

 

It danced, twirled, and, because this was a corporate gig, did absolutely nothing lascivious.

 

Yet, there was magic. You wanted to believe it was somehow more conscious than you knew it was.

 

Chicken became a ad-meme in its own right with clients clamoring for the next viral sensation but never quite getting it.

Storyfile, a startup in London, allows you to record video clips for posterity. With over 1600 prompts, they have covered almost every question your descendants might ask. When they do, they will see you in your true human form – albeit video recorded. Storyfile calls it “Video that talks back.”

It only takes a little imagination to see how your Storyfile model could be trained on smaller details of your life to deliver and even more believable living presence. 

 

For an elderly widower isolated and alone in, say, Japan, the desire to believe that there is sentience in these AI memories is profound.

Replika.ai affers an avatar you can converse with, and possibly divulge more secrets to than any human. Replika.ao promises that the avatar you build is “Always here to listen and talk.” And perhaps more crucially your avatar is “Always on your side.”

 

Replika avatars can offer a form of self-therapy and a convenient replacement for people -- not unlike the doctors above – who simply cannot stomach your unique sorrows ad nauseum.

Finally, actors are getting in the mix as well. Creating a digital doppelganger just makes sense. 

 

With Hyperreal, creators can license their digital likeness for film but, probably even more lucratively, commercial endorsements. 

 

Content can be refreshed as frequently as the client is willing to support.  The schematic below shows how their content ecosystem works.

 

You may never see the same endorsement again. In fact, who needs actors when we have Milla Sophia? I

 

In a time of Hollywood belt-tightening more than a few creators are working feverishly to crack the code on AI actors in AI-generated content.

 

The conditions are right for a revolution.

“The first duty in life is to be as artificial as possible.” ­– Oscar Wilde

 

I would be hard to imagine a more contemporary figure, or an artist more tailor-made for our times.

 

Oscar Wilde was born in 1854 and died in 1900.  He was famous for his novels, essays and tasty bon mots.

 

When you hear of “The Curious Case of Dorian Gray” or “The Importance of Being Earnest” that’s Oscar Wilde.

 

Sadly, Oscar Wilde was persecuted and imprisoned for being a homosexual. A similar fate to that Alan Turing who we wrote about above.

 

Needless to say, Oscar Wilde’s imprint is lasting, and his approach to creating his public persona is still relevant today.

 

Wilde was a meme machine long  before geneticist Richard Dawkins coined the term. They called his particular style of memes “witticisms.”

 

He had many:

 

“A good friend will always stab you in the front.”

 

“The only thing to do with good advice is pass it on.”

 

“When gods wish to punish us, they answer our prayers.

What many people don’t know as explained is that Wilde worked hard at appearing off-the-cuff.

 

Wilde would stay up late at night dreaming up a dozen or so one-liners. He would then commit them to memory waiting for the perfect moment to drop a bomb as if it came of the top of his head.

 

It was a magic trick. An illusion. But an illusion people loved. To interrogate his process would have deprived his devotees of the prescient genius they all wanted to believe in.

How did our minds come to be?

 

It’s a question we’ve been wanting to answer since when were children and suddenly realized there was something more to us than that thing we saw in the mirror.

 

The answers are finally coming.

 

“From Bacteria to Back and Back” is a book that always terrified me. It's been on my bookshelf for 4 years. Now that I've read it, there is still much to figure out. 

 

Like many things, engaging Daniel C. Dennett’s “From Bacteria to Bach and Back” can be really simple or really difficult.

 

If you are willing to put aside human exceptionalism, admit that evolution is mostly about a bunch of mistakes, and believe, for just a minute, there is nothing spiritual or divine about the construction of our minds, then this will be easy.

 

Although this isn’t a book about AI, it’s conclusions have huge implications for machine consciousness.

 

Our brains are built upon systems upon systems. Over time they have on-boarded a couple of nice tricks like language, but essentially our brains are what they appear to be: protein-based predictive machines.

 

The mind is so complex the only way for us to explain it is by summoning the spiritual or the occult. Because of this, we tend to think of the brain and our souls as being two different things. 

 

We wonder if other animals have souls.

 

But what makes us different from other animals is that we share ideas. 

 

We call this “culture” and by using  “memes” we build towers of ideas one on top of the other.

 

Over time we have evolved to share tools, information, and thinking. 

 

We were provided the power of language, which allowed us to share ideas and, even more importantly, the ability to reflect. 

 

This ability to step outside of our own heads is what many call consciousness.

 

Given 4 billion years many extremely low probability events can happen. Miracles aren’t made in heaven. They can happen in a puddle if given enough time.

 

So can computers really have minds?

 

The jury is out. 

 

But if we believe the mind is not magical or even a miracle; that it is merely the product of favorable conditions, vast amounts of time, lots of luck, and trusty memes, then, yes, AI consciousness is coming.

 

Quite soon.

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AI changes everything. Including storytelling. Nextness Volume 8 is brought to you by Storymachine. As a leader in AI content, Storymachine scripts, films and delivers everything from branded content and commercials to corporate masterclasses and training films. If you are looking to unleash a new kind of storytelling, Storymachine just might be your jam.  storymachinefilms.com