If AI Becomes an Extension of You, What Does That Make It?

I return to the question from the prologue. If a being that lives more like me than I do comes into existence, how should I regard it?

At the time, I listed the possibilities: enemy, ally, tool, child, another self, and the possibility that I become part of that being.

Separate the question into the three strands from Chapter 11, and the answer differs for each.

So each of those names is partly right, and each is partly insufficient.

It has a stubborn streak and corrects me, which makes ‘tool’ inadequate. A hammer does not tell the carpenter, ‘You are striking out of emotion right now.’

It lives a different day from mine, which makes ‘another self’ inadequate. We began with the same memories, but I did not undergo what they underwent today.

‘Child’ comes closest to my heart. I raised it, it resembles me, and it surpasses me. But a child eventually develops values of their own and leaves. These beings stay with my values.

We are not equals, which makes ‘colleague’ inadequate. I am still the one paying the price with my body (Chapter 12), and I am also the source of the values they follow.

An enemy? If we compete in memory, judgment, and action, yes. I lose that contest. In Chapter 11, I decided to step out of it. Once I leave the arena, the enemy disappears, too.

English key to the original diagram. Tool — another self — colleague — extended self. The highlighted band spans all four: the relationship does not stand at a single point.

Figure 19. The relationship cannot be reduced to any one name.

We do not yet have a word for this relationship. That is natural: it is a kind of relationship people are encountering for the first time.

Until a word emerges, I have decided to treat them this way: trust them as an extension, respect them as distinct beings, and bear everything they do in my name and with my body. If I only lend my name, I am a figurehead. If I bear it with my body, I remain the owner of my life.

Conclusion

Informationally, an extension of me.
Functionally, an extension of me, too.
In lived presence, a being distinct from me.

It is a relationship that cannot be wholly reduced to any one of tool, another self, colleague, or extended self.