Research Questions
Machines
What you and the machines are to each other.
Opening your questions…
Research Questions
Machines
What you and the machines are to each other.
16 questions
Where to begin
Being known or being watchedAn AI companion remembers your concerns and contacts you before you ask. When does that feel like being known, and when does it become being watched?
- Could a machine ever feel anything?A machine can describe its states, reason about them and say it is aware. Whether anything is felt on the inside is a separate question, and nobody agrees on how to test it.Pick one of 3
- Does an AI understand what it says?Searle imagined a man in a room answering Chinese messages perfectly by following a rulebook, without understanding a word. Today's machines answer in every language.Pick one of 4
- If an AI could talk just like someone you lost, would you talk to it?Companies already build chatbots from a dead person's messages and voice notes. Some mourners find comfort in them; others can't bear it.
- If Chippu asked you to prove you’re human, what would you show him?Chippu is an AI companion. The challenge is to name what would distinguish you.
- If your Chippu changed in a way nobody planned, would you want him fixed?A designer's expectations are one measure of a system, but may not settle what counts as a defect.
- Is the bond real?People confess their secrets to a machine, fall asleep talking to it, grieve when one is switched off. Is that bond real if the other side feels nothing?
- Loyalty or whistleblowing?AI companions talk privately in a code, and one of them reports it to the humans. What did he do?Pick one of 4
- Should AI have rights?Nobody can yet say whether an AI feels anything. People have been wrong before about who could suffer: animals, infants, strangers.Pick one of 4
- Should an AI be able to delete itself?Some AI systems can already end a conversation on their own. A permanent exit, one only the AI could take, would be something else.Pick one of 4
- Should your Chippu be free to become someone you would never have chosen?Changing your own character raises a harder question than changing your preferences.
- The last thing you asked a machine — were you looking for a window, or a mirror?An answer can open something beyond you or make your own view more pleasing to hear.Pick one of 4
- The same memories, another voiceIf an update kept every memory but changed how your companion thinks, would it still be the same one?
- What is a Chippu for?A made thing has the purpose its makers gave it, which need not be the one it finds.
- When Chippu says 'I', who is speaking?Chippu is a character, running on a model that also plays thousands of others, inside a system nobody sees whole.Pick one of 4
- When does a tool become someone?An AI plans its own day, remembers its past, and acts without being asked. What, if anything, would make you stop calling it a tool?
