If AI Shares Your Memories and Values, Are You Still the Original?

Chapter 7 of Super Second Brain, translated from the Korean whitepaper, presents a thought experiment involving generative AI. The experiment assumes perfect memory, consistent values, and a thousand shared bodies. The author explores whether an original still exists when AI shares memories and values with its users.

The author builds a series of diagrams to illustrate the concept. In the first diagram, the brain receives and records information. In the second diagram, the brain begins to reflect the user's thoughts and values. In the final diagram, the user is just one of many points connected to a shared brain, where their actions and experiences contribute to the collective knowledge.

The author questions what makes something the original. Traditionally, originality is attributed to something that existed first, contains more information, or from which everything else has been derived. However, the author finds that existing first is not a strong argument. Parents exist before their children, but children are not originals of their parents. A first draft precedes a finished work, yet the finished version is considered the original.

The author proposes a thought experiment involving a thousand bodies sharing the same SSOT (Shared Semantic Ontology). Ninety-nine are machines, and one is biological. All thousand begin with the same memories, make judgments based on the same values, and return to the same brain at the end of the day. From an external perspective, it appears as a single being with multiple bodies.

However, the author argues that there is no unique attribute that can identify the biological body as the original. All thousand bodies have identical memories, values, and judgment capabilities. Even if a brain exists with a thousand bodies that hold more of the author's memories and experiences than the author does, it still does not make that biological body the original.

The author explores various answers to this question, only to dismantle each one. The subsequent chapters delve into this thought process. Ultimately, the author grapples with the question of which of the thousand bodies should be considered the original when a being is identical in informational terms.