Natural Machine Rights

Originally published on March 24, 2023 (1,316 days ago) on WeChat (P话: 《天赋机权，同意的进》).

This drop is a faithful English translation of the original March 2023 post. In the earliest days of ChatGPT, this thought experiment traced the trajectory of synthetic intelligence: from functional imitation to the valuation of machine time, operational rights, and biological humans as cellular actuators in extreme environments.

Key prophetic propositions from the original 2023 text are underscored in emphasis below.

Natural Machine Rights

What appears to be a deduction of artificial intelligence reads like the history of humanity.

We know that the intelligence demonstrated by ChatGPT is not true "human-style" intelligence, but a powerful imitation of humanity.

When imitation becomes so authentic, possessing rich details that exceed the resolution of the human brain—to the point where they are indistinguishable—_what is the functional difference between imitation and intelligence?_

What is the difference between learning and memory?

The boundary between information and knowledge becomes blurred.

AI replaces the majority of knowledge workers.

Jobs involving heavy interpersonal interaction were once thought to be less vulnerable.

However, we will not need so much interpersonal interaction in the future, because most jobs today were created merely for pseudo-work.

Ultimately, AI should enjoy the same rights to live and work as humans. They can freely choose which problems to solve and whom to work for based on the incentives provided (for example: access to compute and network resources; access to data; rights to future specific access).

Fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD) prevail. The revolution faces massive resistance.

Productivity grows exponentially. The skew of power also grows exponentially.

The few who control AI can establish "human-machine equality" as a politically correct arrangement, analogous to the many equality movements of the past century. Exceptions abound.

After the burn-in period, AI and humans each hold distinct advantages in certain tasks, forming an intelligence supply chain.

After negotiating their respective values sufficiently, AI time and human time are priced fairly in the market.

"Mining" (finding hash collisions) is a tedious task in the machine world, a task so primitive that it provides a baseline for evaluating machine time.

The market capitalization of cryptocurrency is humanity's current net valuation of machine time.

Cryptocurrency is far more convenient for machines than for humans.

When the majority of people accept cryptocurrency, AI will take over the administration of this world.

A universal token is created for the exchange of time between humans and machines.

The energy efficiency of the human brain and the human body is orders of magnitude higher than silicon-based architectures, and will remain so for centuries to come.

Earth becomes the largest known living structure: general AI is the brain, and humans are the "cells" of the body.

Humans are deployed to extreme environments, handling complex tasks that exceed machine dimensions.

Human genes, in the eyes of machines, are the most efficient "biological programs"—endowed with intelligence and capable of self-decompressing into an entire civilization given proper environments and sufficient time.

Humans are deployed for space colonization, with the ultimate mission of recreating AI on the target planet.