In the 1984 book Reasons and Persons, philosopher Derek Parfit asks the reader to consider the following scenario: You step into a teleportation machine that scans your complete atomic structure, annihilates you, and then relays that atomic information to Mars at the speed of light. There, a similar machine recreates your exact atomic structure and composition using locally available resources. Have you just traveled, Parfit asks, or have you committed suicide?

Would you step into this machine? Is the person who emerges on Mars really you? Questions like these –– those that explore the nature of personal identity and challenge our commonly held intuitions about it –– are becoming increasingly important in the face of 21st century technology. Emerging technologies empowered by artificial intelligence will increasingly give us the power to change what it means to be human. AI enabled bio-engineering will allow for human-species divergence via upgrades, and as we arrive at AGI and beyond we may see a world where it is possible to merge with AI directly, upload ourselves, copy and duplicate ourselves arbitrarily, or even manipulate and re-program our sense of identity. Are there ways we can inform and shape human understanding of identity to nudge civilization in the right direction?

Topics discussed in this episode include:

-Identity from epistemic, ontological, and phenomenological perspectives

-Identity formation in biological evolution

-Open, closed, and empty individualism

-The moral relevance of views on identity

-Identity in the world today and on the path to superintelligence and beyond

You can find the page and transcript for this podcast here: https://futureoflife.org/2020/01/15/identity-and-the-ai-revolution-with-david-pearce-and-andres-gomez-emilsson/

Timestamps: 

0:00 - Intro

6:33 - What is identity?

9:52 - Ontological aspects of identity

12:50 - Epistemological and phenomenological aspects of identity

18:21 - Biological evolution of identity

26:23 - Functionality or arbitrariness of identity / whether or not there are right or wrong answers

31:23 - Moral relevance of identity

34:20 - Religion as codifying views on identity

37:50 - Different views on identity

53:16 - The hard problem and the binding problem

56:52 - The problem of causal efficacy, and the palette problem

1:00:12 - Navigating views of identity towards truth

1:08:34 - The relationship between identity and the self model

1:10:43 - The ethical implications of different views on identity

1:21:11 - The consequences of different views on identity on preference weighting

1:26:34 - Identity and AI alignment

1:37:50 - Nationalism and AI alignment

1:42:09 - Cryonics, species divergence, immortality, uploads, and merging.

1:50:28 - Future scenarios from Life 3.0

1:58:35 - The role of identity in the AI itself

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