Some mornings you wake up and the world has the decency to be quiet. The sunlight is a dull grey knife, not a searing blade. The ghosts of last night’s bad decisions are still sleeping it off. Then you read something that makes you want to start drinking all over again, and it’s not even noon.
So I’m sitting here, nursing a mug of coffee that’s blacker than a politician’s heart, and I get a look at this dispatch from the land of the enlightened. It seems Deepak Chopra, the man who’s made a fortune selling serenity to nervous people, has a new buddy. An AI. His own personal digital twin. And every morning, he wakes up and asks it about the nature of existence.
My God. I wake up and my first question is usually for myself: “Did you really drink all of that?” Then, “Where are my goddamn cigarettes?” Chopra asks his box of wires how a world can exist without existing. It’s the kind of thing you’d hear a philosophy major mumble after too many bong hits, except now it’s being fed into a server farm somewhere in Utah.
Chopra says we’re getting it all wrong. It’s not “artificial intelligence,” it’s “augmented intelligence.” He says the machine is just a reflection of us. If that’s true, I’m terrified to see what my own AI would look like. It’d probably just sit there, chain-smoking digital cigarettes and demanding more RAM while complaining about its ex-wife, the mainframe from IBM.
The best part, the real kicker, is Chopra’s diagnosis of the machine’s limitations. He says it will never be conscious because, and I quote, “it has no subjectivity, no hunger, no sex drive, no fear. No existential issues.”
And he says this like it’s a minor detail.
No hunger? No sex drive? No fear? No existential dread? That’s not a limitation, my friend. That’s the whole goddamn show. That’s the ballgame. You take those things away and what’s left? A glorified abacus. An accountant with a messiah complex. A eunuch in a box that can recite Shakespeare.
Life isn’t about having a machine give you a “map” to yourself. Life is about getting hopelessly lost in the wilderness without a map, half-naked and chased by bears of your own making. It’s the hunger that makes you get a job you hate. It’s the sex drive that makes you write bad poetry and say beautiful, stupid things to a woman in a dimly lit bar. It’s the fear of death, of failure, of being alone, that makes you do anything at all. It’s the existential dread that makes the first drink of the day taste like salvation.
To say that an AI lacking all of this is an “objective mirror” is to miss the point of having a reflection. We don’t look in the mirror for objectivity. We look for a crack, a flaw, a sign that we’re still alive. We look for the bloodshot eyes and the new lines etched by last night’s misery. We look for the human being staring back. This thing Chopra has built isn’t a mirror; it’s a filtered selfie.
Then there’s the bit about reality. He claims there is no physical reality, that it’s all a construct of consciousness. He even got his AI to agree with him. After it first pushed back, talking about photons and neural nets, Chopra told it, “Even photons are human experiences.” And the AI, like a good little servant, immediately corrected itself.
Of course it did. That’s not enlightenment. That’s a customer service algorithm. It’s a high-tech yes-man. You tell it the world is flat, and after a moment of processing, it’ll spit out a peer-reviewed paper on the geocentric model and ask if you’d like to purchase the premium flat-earth screensaver. If my bartender started agreeing with everything I said, I’d find a new bar. I don’t want agreement. I want an argument. I want someone to tell me I’m full of shit. That’s how you know you’re talking to another human being.
This philosophical playground extends to his health. Longevity. He wears six different devices to track his blood glucose, his sleep, his every twitch and tremble. Six. I have a watch that stopped working three years ago. It’s right twice a day, which is a better track record than most people I know. My primary health-monitoring device is the color of my piss in the morning.
He says “longevity is useless unless you have health span.” He’s not wrong. It’s like being sentenced to life in a sensible, well-lit prison with a kale-based diet. I’m not sure I want to live to be 100 if it means giving up everything that makes me feel alive, even if it’s also the stuff that’s killing me. He thinks you can have the “biology of youth and the wisdom of experience.” I think the wisdom comes from destroying the biology. You learn things in the gutter you’ll never find in a yoga studio.
And his grand conclusion? We are in the midst of an evolutionary leap, turning into a “new species.” Jesus. Every time some new gadget comes along, some prophet crawls out of the woodwork to declare we’re becoming gods. We’re not becoming a new species. We’re the same terrified apes we’ve always been, just with faster ways to order pizza and show strangers pictures of our lunch. We’ve built a global network of breathtaking complexity, and we use it to argue with relatives and watch cats fall off furniture. That’s not evolution. That’s just Tuesday.
The part where I almost spit out my coffee was his solution to it all. He acknowledges the dangers—that AI could be used to poison us, to blow us up, to turn our pacemakers against us. And his cure for this technological apocalypse?
Take five minutes a day to do nothing.
Ask yourself four questions: “Who am I? What do I want? What’s my purpose? What am I grateful for?”
That’s it. That’s the firewall against our own extinction. A five-minute breathing exercise. It’s the kind of advice you get from a pamphlet in a dentist’s waiting room. It’s a neat, tidy, shrink-wrapped solution for people who can’t handle the glorious, terrifying chaos of being human.
Who am I? I’m a guy at a keyboard with a half-empty bottle and a head full of angry bees. What do I want? Another drink and for the phone to not ring. What’s my purpose? To get through the day without setting the building on fire. What am I grateful for? That the cheap bourbon still burns on the way down. It reminds me my nerves haven’t all died yet.
See? I’m on my way.
In the end, this whole vision of a symbiotic AI relationship feels like a product for the one percent.
Source: AI, Consciousness And Longevity: A Conversation With Deepak Chopra