A striking aspect of current AIs are their resemblance to spirits from tradition. They have no bodies and are named whimsical things like “Sonnet”, “Gemini” and “o1”. People often speak of anthropomorphizing AIs, with heated debate in both directions. “It’s just statistics, it’s not a person, etc.” Maybe that analogy isn't the right one, and a better way of viewing them would be in terms of spirits.
In tradition, spirits feature a prominent if not central role. For example, in the Bible where God is described as a Spirit: John 4:24: “God is a Spirit: and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth.” Genesis 1:2: “And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.” Joscha Bach has an excellent talk about this.
Spirits played a prominent role in human reality prior to the Scientific revolution. Are things coming back around?
In a 1910 interview recorded by the New York Times, Thomas Edison said when asked of the soul: "Absolutely no, There is no more reason to believe that any human brain will be immortal than there is to think that one of my phonographic cylinders will be immortal. My phonographic cylinders are mere records of sounds which have been impressed upon them. Under given conditions, some of which we do not at all understand some of the conditions of the brain, the phonographic cylinders give off these sounds again. For the time being we have perfect speech, or music, practically as perfect as is given off by the tongue."
What would he say today? He probably would've had exposure to player pianos and punch card looms, so he may have been able to envision the idea of 'software', but probably nothing like what we have today. If you told him that with a few thousand GPUs, a ton of text and a few hundred lines of code you could get software systems that behave with human caprice, would he change his mind at all, or feel his intuitions validated?
Stephen Wolfram has made comments linking the idea of spirits to computational processes, for example, when speaking of a “box of a trillion souls,” in reference to an entire civilization virtualized in software in the future.
What is software in the context of current machine learning systems? There’s a curiously immaterial aspect to current AIs. They can be copied, re-run and you can change the hardware they run on quite easily. They boil down to a juxtaposition of states changing through time.
There's advantages to this view. If it's just computation, it can be re-run. It also resolves issues related to the reality of spirits in general, a kind of material explanation for the immaterial. But it requires some broadening of thinking because we then have to grant spirit to not only ourselves and our dogs, but also the AIs we interact with. Where does one stop? Is a trading algorithm on the stock exchange imbued with spirit?
Maybe a computational afterlife for all of them is the best that we can hope for.