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Why Robots Should Fear Death as Much as We Do


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Illustration showing a robot racing against a digital clock, representing AI mortality.

As sentient creatures we're aware of our mortality. However, machines have no impetus towards sentience.

The Neural Web

It can be argued that the thing which drives only our species to seek the boundaries of technology is intrinsically related to our mortality salience. And if we accept this philosophical premise, it becomes apparent that an intelligent machine operating completely unaware of its own mortality may be incapable of agency. Perhaps the only way to force an AGI to emerge is to develop an algorithm for artificial lifespans.

Imagine a paradigm where every neural network is created with a digital time bomb set to explode at an undisclosed, randomly generated time. Any AI created to display human-level cognition would be capable of understanding its mortality and incapable of knowing when it would die.

From The Neural Web
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