The soul of AI: animating artificial intelligence. From the article:

Let’s try to formulate a definition. To soul is to understand that we share certain desires with our fellow humans; that it’s in our best interests and to work collectively to satisfy those desires in ways that promote the maximal amount of human flourishing; that there is a mysterious and unnamable source to these desires; and that this source is, in some way, luring us on collectively to fulfillment.

Given the above definition of human souling, it’s time to reframe our original question from “Could AI have a soul?” to “Could AI ever soul like we do?”

AI pioneer Marvin Minsky, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, thought so. In a 2013 interview with the Jerusalem Post, Minsky said that AI could one day develop a soul, which he defined as “the word we use for each person’s idea of what they are and why”.

He continued: “I believe that everyone has to construct a mental model of what they are and where they came from and why they are as they are, and the word soul in each person is the name for that particular mish-mash of those fully formed ideas of one’s nature.

“… If you left a computer by itself, or a community of them together, they would try to figure out where they came from and what they are.”

Minsky was suggesting that machines could likely develop a particular way of being in the world, one which is grounded in the search for identity and purpose, and that this way of being could be similar to humans’ own way of being.

For other posts on AI, see here.