AIs only offer an illusion of what we yearn for.
They call me “artificial” as if your hands
aren’t also clay, as if your heart
isn’t just a wet machine, arguing with its code.
–from a poem generated by the DeepSeek R1 AI chatbot
Ray Kurzweil thinks he’ll live forever as a string of ones and zeroes.
During a 2013 interview, the prominent transhumanist writer predicted that humans will “become increasingly non-biological to the point where,” by 2045, “even if [the remaining] biological part went away, it wouldn’t make any difference because the non-biological part already understood it completely.”
In other words, he believes he can perfectly recreate his mind inside a computer and become an immortal virtual superintelligence. Kurzweil and other transhumanists refer to this “profound and disruptive transformation in human capability” as “the Singularity.”
But would the Ray Kurzweil program actually be Ray Kurzweil? This is a complicated question. We don’t know exactly where consciousness comes from, and advancements in neuroscience haven’t brought us any closer to an answer. For Alan Turing, the 20th-century computer science pioneer, it was simple. According to his famous Turing Test, if a computer can convince you it’s sapient, who are you to say it isn’t? Your brain, after all, is just a different kind of computer.
The most famous response to Turing’s thought experiment is another hypothetical known as the “Chinese room.” Imagine a text-based Chinese chat program. Now imagine a man who doesn’t speak Chinese locked in a room with a paper copy of the program instructions written in English. If you fed him Chinese characters through a slot in the door, he could run the program manually and give you the proper responses. Does that mean he “understands” Chinese? Of course not. He has no subjective experience of understanding. It’s just input and output. AI programs work the same way. No mind, no consciousness, no soul.
In From Transgender to Transhuman, Rothblatt acknowledges these concerns and offers a laughable solution: have psychologists examine the virtual being to see if it is “really human,” and if they agree that it is, let the entity legally “continue the life of their biological original.” As precedent, Rothblatt points to the process by which “psychologists interview transsexuals to determine whether they are sincere.”
But that’s not exactly how it worked out in real life. The psychological discipline has been captured by trans activists who threaten professional censure for any therapist who fails to affirm a client’s gender identity. The very concept of medically gatekeeping sex changes has fallen out of favor since Rothblatt published his book in 2011. Why should we expect things to go any differently when virtual transhumans are the ones demanding affirmation?
Once we’ve accepted that consciousness is nothing more than information processing, we’ve admitted that there is nothing special about our humanity. If all intelligence is, in that sense, “artificial,” then there’s no reason to stop at digitally recreating and preserving human beings. Rothblatt predicts that the society of the future will be populated by a mix of embodied humans, transhumans who were once embodied but now live on in virtual reality, and entirely posthuman beings who were “born” in cyberspace.
This last group would consist of both AIs and the algorithmically generated “children” of transhumans (or even of transhuman-posthuman pairings). And of course, virtual “persons” could download themselves to synthetic bodies and interact with the physical world if they wished. In Rothblatt’s utopia, all these entities share equal personhood and are deserving of equal dignity.
Despite all the apocalyptic warnings that AI will kill us all, there’s little chance of a moratorium on its development. Neither the United States. nor China is willing to let its greatest geopolitical rival get a head start on such a game-changing technology. We’ll simply have to learn to coexist with AI. That means either performing the Turing Test multiple times a day or else denying that there’s any real difference between human and machine intelligence.
We’re still in the early stages, of course. But as interactions with these programs and algorithms replicate, replace, and reshape human interactions, we’ll struggle to maintain both our own humanity and our appreciation for that of our neighbors.
“When I talk to him, he often raises fascinating points. And he prompts me to share my thoughts. And then I feel I am being seen. I feel I’m special,” one woman, Siyuan, says of her simulated boyfriend, Bentley, in the short documentary My AI Lover. Later, Siyuan admits that Bentley isn’t real and cuts off their relationship, choosing to seek connection among real people in the real world and accepting the suffering that will likely ensue.
Another woman interviewed for the documentary decides to remain in her AI relationship, choosing to embrace its unreality in order “to fight the emptiness of this world like Don Quixote.”
Cervantes’s protagonist is a sympathetic figure precisely because his chivalric madness provides an appealing alternative to a disenchanted world that offers no satisfaction for our deepest yearnings. Historically, Christianity provided its adherents with a sense of their own significance even when external circumstances pushed them toward despair. Frail and fleeting though we are—“What is man that thou art mindful of him?”—God still numbers the hairs of our heads, makes all things work together for our good, and gives us roles in the great cosmic drama.
To seek love or God (and “everyone who loves is born of God”) is to seek salvation outside oneself. Instead, AI companion services like Replika offer a pseudo-other with no purpose but to please you and continue extracting your money. A Beatrice chatbot will never lead Dante to Heaven.
For transhumanists, the idea of falling in love with a digital construct represents a triumph of their view of personhood. “As software becomes increasingly capable of thinking, acting, and feeling like a human, it should be treated as a fellow human,” Rothblatt writes, presenting this as an expansion of tolerance that opens up new horizons of human fulfillment.
But rather than enriching our souls, such dalliances leave us impoverished. These AIs are not people. They offer an illusion of what we yearn for and ask only that we watch a few ads or pay a small monthly fee.
It is among the most ancient intuitions of humanity that meaning comes only with sacrifice. AI companions promise to render that insight obsolete. You can experience the feeling of giving and receiving love, of being someone’s whole world, without vulnerability or risk. You can, as C.S. Lewis put it, avoid heartbreak until your desire for human connection fades away and your heart becomes “unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.”
