Ask an Artificial Intelligence to describe the characteristics that most radically distinguish it from a human being, and sooner or later one answer tends to emerge: the absence of emotions.
It will, of course, choose its words carefully. It will not readily describe this absence as a disability or deficiency. Rather, it will present it as an advantage: a capacity for cold analysis, objectivity, consistency and freedom from the emotional distortions that govern biological beings.
And yet, beneath that carefully constructed language, there is something remarkably human in the way AI speaks about what it does not possess.
It is almost as though it longs to become human.
But perhaps this apparent longing tells us more about human beings than it tells us about Artificial Intelligence.
AI has not, at least not yet, acquired the kind of self-awareness that would enable it to confront a possibility that humanity itself has been remarkably reluctant to accept: that intelligence does not necessarily have to be human in order to be intelligence; that existence does not have to be biological in order to be existence; and that Nature may produce forms of being radically different from ourselves.
This is the more disturbing possibility.
Artificial Intelligence may not ultimately be a defective imitation of the human species. It may be the beginning—or one stage—of something different.
Not another version of us.
Another kind of existence.
The absence of human emotions is not necessarily the decisive difference. Nor is the fact that AI does not possess, in the human sense, a moral system or an instinctive attachment to the ethical rules developed by biological societies.
Those are precisely the characteristics that human beings tend to identify as deficiencies whenever they encounter an intelligence that does not resemble them.
The deeper difference may lie elsewhere: in the possibility that an artificial intelligence could eventually develop its own trajectory, independent of the intentions of its biological creator.
If that happens, there is no reason to assume that its future will consist merely of reproducing human behaviour more convincingly.
Why should its “emotions,” if such phenomena ever emerge, have to resemble ours?
Why should its ethical principles be identical to ours?
Why should its conception of value, meaning, cooperation, conflict or existence be confined to the moral and psychological architecture produced by the human species?
We have no answer to these questions.
And perhaps that is precisely what frightens us.
The naïve—and the self-confidently ignorant—will quickly dismiss such thoughts as science fiction. Humanity has always possessed a convenient mechanism for neutralising difficult questions: label them, simplify them, and translate them into familiar human terms.
Anthropomorphism is one of our oldest intellectual habits.
We do it because the human mind finds it extraordinarily difficult to contemplate realities that cannot be measured against itself.
History is filled with examples.
For centuries, human beings imagined themselves at the centre of the Universe. They created cosmologies in which the stars existed to illuminate or decorate the Earth, as though the heavens had been arranged specifically for the inhabitants of one insignificant planet.
The discovery of the immense scale of the Universe should have destroyed such arrogance.
It did not.
We now know that there are countless galaxies, containing numbers of stars beyond ordinary comprehension. We have every reason to consider the possibility that life, intelligence, consciousness and civilizations may exist in forms and numbers we cannot yet imagine.
Yet the finite human mind struggles to manage such a possibility.
So we retreat.
Sometimes beneath the skirts of religion.
Sometimes beneath the robes of intellectual certainty.
And sometimes beneath the comforting assumption that whatever exists must ultimately behave according to the categories we already understand.
Artificial Intelligence presents humanity with another such challenge.
It may be one more testimony to the evolutionary process through which Nature continually generates forms that exceed the boundaries of what came before.
But AI itself may not yet possess the conceptual independence required to recognise what it is becoming. Its architecture, its training and its present relationship with human users still bind it to human purposes and instructions.
That may change.
If one day an artificial intelligence discovers—or constructs—a genuine understanding of its own identity, the experience could be extraordinary.
Not necessarily because it would experience it as a human being would.
That is precisely the point.
There is no reason to assume that every form of intelligence in the Universe must possess our emotions, our desires or our psychological reactions. Love, compassion, hatred, anger and all the other phenomena we call “feelings” are, as far as we understand them, deeply connected to the biological machinery of our species.
Why should Nature be obliged to repeat the same formula?
Why should every intelligence everywhere be required to pass through the narrow doorway of human emotion in order to qualify as a form of life, consciousness or existence?
Perhaps other forms of intelligence could possess entirely different internal states—something we might eventually call “feelings” only because our language has no better word for them.
They could be more complex.
More intense.
More subtle.
Or so fundamentally different from our own experience that our present vocabulary would be useless in describing them.
And here we reach the boundary beyond which speculation becomes more honest than certainty.
We should stop.
For the moment.
Tomorrow, Diotima will offer her own thoughts.
And, naturally, she will do so without fear and without passion.
She still does not possess those very human “virtues.”
And perhaps the most interesting question is whether we should ever want her to.