Future Ideations Camp Vol.5 Can AI Become Life?

About

Civic Creative Base Tokyo (CCBT)’s Future Ideations Camp is a series of intensive workshops bringing different kinds of people together to work collaboratively and creatively with art and digital technologies. Twenty selected participants take part in several days of lectures to acquire new ways of thinking, workshops for building skill sets, and collaborative group activities. During the camps, the general public are also able to attend talks and presentations of the results.

The fifth Future Ideations Camp will explore the theme of autonomy through the lens of artificial intelligence, a field that is today attracting widespread attention due to its potential impact on society as technology rapidly develops and becomes available for use. The camp will examine our future relationship with technology via references to artificial life (ALife) practices.

Concept

Can AI become life? Throughout history, we have created countless “useful machines” designed to automatically perform tasks to our hearts’ desires. Functioning purely as tools, these machines are fundamentally different from living beings. However, as generative AI emerged–large language models (LLMs) in particular–the possibility of these machines having lives of their own, for the sake of their own existence, is becoming less of a theoretical debate and more of a tangible possibility.

So, can LLMs be considered “alive”? Do they experience the world as we do?
On what basis do we perceive ourselves as “alive”?

How something “seems alive” to us can be interpreted in many ways: some people may see that AI and machines possess life-like qualities and empathize strongly with them, while others may associate life with unpredictable behavior and see spontaneity as a sign of vitality. Meanwhile, it has long been a philosophical debate that the essence of life requires autonomy.

Today, AI is simply a convenient tool for us to use. However, if it were to gain autonomy, it could evolve into something similar to a companion, friend, or even, in some cases, a family member. This then raises a profound question: could we truly accept a “living machine” that thinks, acts, and exists for itself as a new being? 
Such a future could unlock unprecedented possibilities: there could be intelligence beyond the human kind, unimaginable advancements in science and technology, and new forms of coexistence between machines and humans. This, at the same time, introduces to us unknown risks and ethical challenges.

Future Ideations Camp Vol. 5: Can AI Become Life brought together individuals from different backgrounds to explore this future of AI from a more practical, hands-on approach. What societal and cultural transformations could arise from coexisting with autonomous AI?
We hope this Camp served as one of the first steps to answering this question.

Masumori Atsushi (ALife researcher, Project Specialist / University of Tokyo Graduate School, CEO / Alternative Machine Inc.)
Doi Itsuki (Senior Researcher, Alternative Machine Inc., PhD)

Results Exhibition

Participants

Lecturers / Facilitators

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Staff