What Does a Person Lose When Technology Starts Living for Them?

AVAlexander Volchek

Artificial intelligence already makes it possible to create digital copies of people, and even after a person dies, you can keep talking to that copy. There was a case in which a man created a digital copy of his deceased fiancée and continued communicating with her. And I was asked: what is actually being copied? What happens to a person who interacts with a system like that? And can you truly replace someone close to you with their digital copy? That is what we will talk about today. This is an interesting point about bringing back people who have died. An acquaintance of mine is a fairly well-known American businessman, a grown man. We lived near each other here. He moved from New York to the Valley to build a startup, initially around the idea that a person could create a copy of themselves before they died, so that people could then interact with that copy, spend time with it, be with it, and so on.

What is interesting is that when you talk to this man, or to many other people, they explain very convincingly, incredibly convincingly, that today the level of artificial intelligence… I put ‘today’ in quotation marks, because people were saying this three years ago. That today artificial intelligence can copy a human being completely. And they talk about this and think about it in such extraordinary ways. It amazes me, for example—well, it does not amaze me. I perceive and understand it very clearly spiritually, and even psychologically it is very understandable.

And psychophysically it is very understandable from the perspective of the material world. People say they want to create artificial intelligence that is stronger than a human being, to surpass a human being. The very notion of ‘surpassing a human being.’ And you say, ‘But it will not have sense organs. It has no physical sense organs; it has no hormonal makeup. Or do you want to give it a hormonal makeup?’ There is a very interesting point here. Look, suppose we think in terms of the framework used by people who strongly promote the idea that humans will have robotic parts in their own organs, while robots will have human organs.

There really is such a movement, a heavily promoted movement in robotics. If someone sees a human being simply as a piece of meat and a set of functions, then of course they can approach their children by saying, ‘Listen, I have hired a robot for you, and a complete digital copy of me is in this robot. I will see you in, say, five years, or whenever I want. In the meantime, interact with it. It will answer everything just as I would, tell you everything just as I would, do everything just as I would.’ And what does ‘just as I would’ mean, Kolya? What does it mean? Because fundamentally, if we look at human development, a person does not want to give up things that go against values, does not want to think that all people are good.

They do not want to keep paying attention to how they treat other people. They do not want to acknowledge that their anger and aggression destroy other people. Fundamentally, a person does not want to look at simple, basic things. So now a robot has been invented that can do this for you. On the face of it, that sounds very interesting. Some kind of structure has appeared in my place that will handle difficult things, spend time with my child when I am nervous, for example—that is what the person says. Or run a meeting in my place as the CEO. I will deal with the company's important matters. Or it will act in my place as the owner.

Or, as an owner somewhere, I have made my money, I will relax, and let artificial intelligence or some particular machine work in my place. In fact, I will live forever, because I will be able to run my corporation forever. There will be laws under which I can appoint my AI double as the responsible owner. And this artificial intelligence of mine will be able to perform absolutely every action, every function, everything, everything, everything—it will be able to do absolutely everything. Essentially, what will artificial intelligence do? Essentially, a person wants artificial intelligence to do everything that the person fundamentally does not want to do.

Or does not like doing. This is a huge industry. A huge number of companies promote the idea of handing the tasks of an ordinary person's working day over to artificial intelligence. For example, I have a garden. I happen to be filming this video in part of the garden. I have, I do not know, hundreds or perhaps thousands of different plants growing here. Do I need artificial intelligence to plant them, weed them, clean them up, look after them, and so on? At the moment I do all of that myself, entirely on my own. Someone helps me here rarely, very rarely. But I could hire other people to do it. Or I could stop doing it altogether. I do not have to do it at all.

I do it because I enjoy doing it, because I want to do it, because I want to be with it and spend time with it. And if I stop wanting to do it, I will either dig up all the plants and plant grass, or there will simply be bare ground, which is what this plot originally was—just bare ground. Or I will hire people to look after it. But once again, the most important aspect here is what I experience while doing these things. Do I really need to replace these activities? Do I really need to remove them? It is like when I bought a dog two years ago. My mother was incredibly opposed to the purchase. She talked about how difficult it would be, what a responsibility it was, and so on.

She probably would not have opposed it if I had said, ‘Listen, I have ten housekeepers who will look after the dog, and dog trainers hired separately, full time, to work with it.’ But when I wanted to take that action, I did it because I had an impulse to do it, not because it was a mechanical action. There was an impulse in me; for some reason it arose. I needed to encounter that event. So now we are moving toward what a person wants. People have always wanted to avoid a huge number of impulses. And because they wanted to avoid so many impulses, the dark system took an incredibly powerful hold on the human being, drew the human being into itself, and began destroying the human being.

The world of cause and effect appeared; death appeared. First, diseases appeared, death appeared, causes and effects appeared, karma appeared. So that a person would have to live through certain events because that is what must happen, not because they wanted it out of their own ego-driven motives. Because that is what must happen. Because that is the law of the universe. Now a person wants to arrive at a tool they can tell, ‘No, no, no, I do not want things the way they must be. I want them the way I want them.’ There are a huge number of examples of people trying to extend their lives. Let us look at what is actually happening to them, what trend they are creating, what idea they really carry. What are they actually bringing into the world? What are they bringing?

What idea are these people promoting? There is one American man. It is simply horrifying. What he is creating is horrifying. It is horrifying. He is showing everyone, the whole world, this Ahrimanic system of development, of inhuman development. The man eats a hundred pills a day, lives according to a predetermined schedule, tries to hack his physical body. He constantly has an incredible number of problems. He spends a huge amount of time on it. He is clearly in an inadequate state of perception. The energy with which he perceives the world, different states of experiencing the world, different states of the day, is completely extinguished. And he presents this to people as something important. Millions of people actually watch him and believe that it really will be possible.

Now, that man who was building this system—one of the very first videos about it was even filmed in Germany, where a person was dying. And he supposedly made his own avatar back when GPT-like systems were just emerging. It was clearly a kindergarten-level system. He does not consider it kindergarten-level, but it was clearly a kindergarten-level system. This same man then started a project to create an artificial intelligence system that would interact with children. He came by more than once to tell me about it, saying that this system was so great: ‘Can you imagine? It will be able to read a child a bedtime story. Or the child will be busy doing something in the evening.’ Doing what?

Let my child go outside, walk around, and throw pebbles into the woods. Count ants. Pick up a hammer and hit a nail. Put together some kind of construction set at home, move blocks around, build something. Quarrel with a brother or sister, or play, run around, jump. Pick up a badminton racket, throw something, pick up a basketball and toss it around. Sit with me, talk, draw, simply look ahead. Instead of switching on some device that starts telling a story or memorizing this child's psychological profile. Or imposing on my child a particular system of thinking and development for a universal robot.

Not for a child as an individual, not for a human being as an individual, as someone unique, as an independent spiritual system in the world. This is slavery. If we look at it, this is not freedom; it is utter slavery. He told me about it very confidently, but never once in his life asked what I thought about it. He kept telling me as though I thought the same way, but I did not. First of all, I do not think he will create such a great system. He is unlikely to succeed with a project like that. If he does, well done, no problem. But he is unlikely to make it work in the market, given the technology in the current market, the business side, and everything else. As for telling a story, though, I think Amazon Alexa and a huge number of devices could already read a child a story ten years ago.

Just turn on YouTube and it reads you a story. What is so difficult about reading a story? Having a conversation? That is what brothers, sisters, and parents are there for—you can talk to them. Or talk to yourself. The ability to talk to yourself, to be with yourself, to be with a large number of people when it is time for that, and to be with yourself when it is time for that, alone, when no one else is nearby, when there are no other people around, when you are alone. Of course, the idea that you can create a system that copies a person's individual characteristics is all absurd. It is completely absurd. Completely absurd, because the person does not understand how thoughts come to a human being. If they see the world as one in which thoughts arise in the brain and the brain generates thoughts for you, that is one thing.

But if a person understands that thoughts come through your soul, and it sends a thought down to you—unless you live only in the dead thoughts of the brain—then how will you copy a person's soul? How will you copy the fact that at this particular moment the person is supposed to feel this particular thing? How will you copy that? How will you copy thousands of states of perceiving nature, or millions of states of perceiving nature? How will you copy ten million states of perceiving another person you live with? How will you copy that? How will you copy why you look at your wife today and do not like her, then look again ten minutes later and seem to like her? How will you copy that? What model will you use, what formula? Thirty percent dislike, seventy percent like? How will you do it? How will you create it?

Those who want to create this, those who talk about it, are people infected by utterly dark worlds. There are good things you can do with modern technology. Wonderful, exciting, good things. And then there is plain deception. It is simply deception, simply fake, just fake. Yesterday I read an article in which someone wrote about Elizabeth Holmes—there used to be a company called Theranos, and she told everyone it could perform some super test. The article said she lived in the era of the 2010s, when people lived in a world of ‘fake it until you make it.’ It was the era of TED, of TED talks. People went onstage and talked, talked about a great deal that did not exist, all sorts of things that were not real, received money for it, and built businesses. And now, it said, you cannot do that.

But if you look at the actual number of people talking nonsense now, there are an incredible number of them. Just an insane amount of deception—concrete, obvious, unmistakable deception. Just listen to the founders of artificial intelligence companies. They deceive everyone every day. They say one thing, then another, then one thing, then another, then one thing, then another. Or they assign probabilities: a twenty percent chance humanity will die, an eighty percent chance it will not. Just absurd probabilities. Well, as far as I am concerned, okay. Humanity finds it interesting to play these games. I even saw something interesting three days ago. Tesla showed a car at its presentation that rose into the air a little and landed. The energy itself is very interesting there.

Why did that presentation cause such a stir everywhere? For example, in Half Moon Bay—it is a thirty-five-minute drive from here, from Silicon Valley down to the ocean. We showed it: several years ago, a flying-car project was launched there. The car really does take off quietly; you can see a few leaves flying up around it. It lands, flies forward, and lands. My wife even drove past once—there is a small airport there—and they were testing this car. I drive there often, but I have never seen it. And now they have shown this presentation with jet engines. It does not impress me at all, because obviously, if you can launch a rocket that puts satellites into space, you can clearly put some miniature rockets on a car that will take off, flip over, or do something.

It has no effect on me at all. It is a question of the amount of money spent and the desire of a particular person or group of people to do it. Although, once again, I deeply respect a great many of Elon Musk's achievements as a businessman, and his company. I own shares in his company. I really like all of that. I like a great many of the technologies and the rest of it, in general. But look at the energy this stirred up in the world. The next question is: where does that energy come from? Why did people like this particular event? My wife says to me at home, ‘Did you see what happened?’ This time we were sitting in the room in the evening, and she said, ‘Please put on that video and show Damian’—my little son—‘that they have invented a flying car.’

When she said that, I remembered the nineties, sitting in a kitchen in Belarus, when your grandmother or mother would say, ‘Did you see what happened? They are about to show it on television.’ And you watch something on television that seems beyond your reach, something incredible! In fact, Tesla's California office and the xAI office are five minutes down the road here. That road you can hear below is the street where their office is. It is close, a very short drive. And the children go to school across the street from them at Stanford. Right there in Stanford, Palo Alto, their office is directly across the street. Of course, the children go to school in Silicon Valley, on the Stanford grounds. The teachers tell them all about how… In elementary school, the teachers tell them, ‘You know, we are now moving into a different era.’

For example, Tesla cut back on car production to produce robots. Igor is in fifth grade, and they tell him this in class—or they told him in fourth grade. But what an effect it has! For my wife, the effect, the whole energy of it, was as though the world had invented a pill that would let everyone live for a thousand years, even though nothing had happened at all. Nothing had happened. When we were going to bed, my ten-year-old son said, ‘How much does it cost? Did you hear, Dad? It costs five hundred thousand dollars.’ And you think, ‘So what?’ It is as though it cost a billion dollars. Social energy, the social atmosphere, energy that takes hold of a person, that really, truly takes hold of a person. Just like the energy that takes hold of people around the idea of copying them. Because people like the idea itself: getting rid of difficulties through copying.

To stop feeling grief over someone's death. ‘We will have your avatar; everything will be fine. Go ahead and die.’ But look again: people do not want that. People want to live in freedom, not slavery. Because as soon as this happens, it is pure slavery. It also reveals everyone's ego system: on the one hand, they want to live in freedom, and on the other, they want to make everyone else a slave. It will not work that way. In this particular case, only the dark world wins. Everyone will be without freedom, absolutely everyone, including the creators of these systems. Notice, by the way, that the creators of all these systems are slaves too. Whatever happens, a clone of them is guaranteed to be created, one that can do all of this and put it all to use.

Of course, they think they are incredibly unique and will not be able to be cloned. So of course there will be a trend toward making a copy, and someone will say—some modern state or politician will come up with a story for the hype—that a law can be lobbied for allowing artificial intelligence, after someone dies, to make decisions for a husband or wife, or a company owner, or to take part in their children's lives and future development if the children were left underage after the adult's death. Absurd! But we will move toward this; we will move toward this. There will be projects like that. There will be projects like that. Such startups are guaranteed to appear now, guaranteed, if they do not exist already. There are certainly startups for cloning, for copying a person, but legal startups for this legal copying will appear.

There will be a society that resists: you cannot copy me, you cannot copy music, you cannot copy a color, you cannot copy a brand. But that is just kindergarten compared with what it means to copy a human being. How will you prove and defend a person's uniqueness and the uniqueness of the person being copied? It is absurdity on top of absurdity, because the uniqueness of copying a person, and a person's uniqueness in general, can only be defended through the spiritual world. If you look at it through the physical world, there is no uniqueness. No uniqueness at all. Moreover, today there is no law prohibiting someone from changing their face to become a copy of another person. There is no such law in the world. You cannot use someone else's image, but there is no law prohibiting you from copying their face onto yourself. Judging by where humanity is heading, though, this will clearly be possible.

So what are we going to do about it? The question that remains fundamentally most important is, on the one hand, to know how to use and apply artificial intelligence technologies properly in your life, in your basic everyday life—to really use them, to understand what they are, to live with conscious perception of this, real perception of it. On the one hand, do not run away from the present time or try to get ahead of it. On the other hand, of course, work on truly developing yourself as a human being. And understand that no technology will ever be able to copy you as a human being. It is impossible.

But here is what you can do: you can either develop as a human being, work and put effort into quite difficult things in order to bring love to other people, or you can turn into a vegetable and yet another robot carrying out someone else's orders and the will of a written program. It does not matter who wrote it: another person or a computer. It does not matter who. Few people in the world recognize simple things about technology. Technology has long, long since surpassed human beings in its ability to control and direct a huge proportion of the Earth's population.

Take Windows, which is installed on an incredible number of computers around the world—probably, you could say, most of the world's computers. None of us knows whether it has a special function that will shut down all computers at a particular moment.