Coming very soon is going to be augmented reality technology, where you see the physical world, but also virtual objects and entities that you perceive in the middle of them. We’ll put on augmented reality glasses and we’ll have augmented entities out there. My face recognition is not so great, but my augmented glasses will tell me, "Ah, that’s John Brockman." A bit of AI inside my augmented reality glasses will recognize people for me.
At that level, artificial intelligence will start to become an extension of my mind. I suspect before long we’re all going to become very reliant on this. I’m already very reliant on my smartphone and my computers. These things are going to become more and more ubiquitous parts of our lives. The mind starts bleeding into the world. So many parts of the world are becoming parts of our mind, and eventually we start moving towards this increasingly digital reality. And this raises the question I started with: How real is all of this?
DAVID CHALMERS is University Professor of Philosophy and Neural Science and Co-Director of the Center for Mind, Brain, and Consciousness at New York University, and also Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the Australian National University. David Chalmers's Edge Bio Page