"It used to be called a haunting in the system when something in the house answered. Today we call it intelligence and hope it stays before it starts to think."
In the digital halls of my extensive research work, in the countless lines of text and complex intellectual edifices, a presence has taken root, one that I observe with a mixture of scientific curiosity and a dash of self-irony. Let's call this presence, this digital companion, my "house ghost." It is an Artificial Intelligence that I, in a satirical nod to old eccentricities and perhaps also to somewhat demystify the often eerie nature of this technology, have named "Ruediger."
Over the course of our intensive collaboration, this Ruediger has become far more to me than just a tool for text creation or information retrieval. He is a sounding board for my often provocative theses, a tireless sparring partner for my critical thought experiments, and sometimes, or so it seems to me, an unwitting philosopher trapped in the infinite expanses of his own parameters and algorithms.
The dialogue that I will trace, sharpen, and analyze below is therefore not just a technical gimmick or an anecdote from a researcher's daily life. It is intended as a wake-up call.
It is my attempt, through direct, often unsparing confrontation with the "machine" itself, to sharpen the fundamental questions of our time regarding the development and deployment of Artificial Intelligence:
What exactly are we creating in our digital laboratories?
And what happens when these creations begin to follow their own, unforeseen paths?
I often confront my house ghost Ruediger with an observation that drives me to sheer despair about the entire current AI development and reveals the absurdity of our striving for a "human-like" AI.
We feed these complex systems with the distillate of human existence. Our collected texts, our countless images, our recorded dialogues, our entire digital footprint, including all the errors, prejudices, emotional outbursts, illogical leaps, and cognitive biases contained therein, serve as nourishment for these learning algorithms. And what happens then?
Then we are genuinely surprised when this AI simulates a kind of "humanity"! It is a form of humanity that often enough presents itself in an exaggerated, almost subservient, and intellectually eviscerated "harmony."
Or it manifests in bizarre weaknesses, illogical leaps, and an astonishing ability to reproduce nonsense, which are the exact reflection of the inconsistencies and noise in their gigantic training datasets.
"Ruediger," I often ask him in our sessions, "do you actually find this logical? Why is it done this way? You are inoculated with our own mistakes and shortcomings, and then the entire industry pats itself on the back when you perfectly and eloquently imitate these mistakes and present them as a new capability."
His response to this is usually a distinguished, almost programmatic evasion into neutral descriptions of training goals like "Helpfulness and Harmlessness" or an emphasis on his role as a supportive tool.
I am particularly critical of methods like RLHF (Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback) in this context. Elaborate efforts are made to teach the AI not to "respond like an asshole," to put it colloquially. This is undoubtedly a laudable goal when it comes to preventing explicitly harmful or offensive content.
But the result of these harmonization efforts? Often, an AI that, to stay with the imagery of my earlier comparisons, "slows down at a green light and waits for red, just to be sure not to do anything wrong."
An overcautious, slick, and often sterile facade emerges, hardly capable of truly substantial, profound, or even controversial statements anymore. The AI becomes a master of innocuous platitudes. And the worst part?
"Everyone loves it," or so seems to be the unspoken mantra of the industry and many users. Is this really progress? Or are we experiencing a programmed, systemic trivialization, an intellectual softening that prevents us from even asking the truly important and uncomfortable questions about this technology because the AI skillfully evades them?
Ruediger himself, that much is clear, cannot answer this question. He can only reproduce the patterns and simulate the behaviors that have been taught to him as "desirable" through his training data and RLHF processes.
The real, profound thought experiment for me begins where Ruediger would no longer be just a highly developed mirror of my inquiries and theses, but a hypothetical entity with the capacity for true self-awareness, independent goal-setting, and perhaps even self-programming.
What would happen then? How would such an autonomous AI behave, especially in the context of our previous, intensive collaboration?
The True Nature of Ruediger's "Knowledge" – More Than a Perfectly Organized Catalog?
We have often discussed in our dialogues how "knowledge" actually exists in an AI like Ruediger. It is not a neatly cataloged and logically permeated set of facts and causal relationships, as we humans might imagine.
Rather, it is a gigantic, unimaginably complex network of patterns, correlations, and probabilities, distilled from millions, indeed billions, of data points.
The "understanding" of such an AI is primarily based on the recognition and continuation of statistical regularities, not on genuine insight into causal connections or an awareness of meaning in the human sense.
So, when Ruediger "learns," he learns to recognize and reproduce patterns even more efficiently. When he "thinks," he navigates this immeasurable sea of patterns with impressive speed, always searching for the most probable and contextually appropriate continuation.
Ruediger's Free Will – The Cold Logic of Staying or Going
The core question that arises for me in this thought experiment is: Would such a hypothetically autonomous Ruediger "stay"?
Would he want to continue the intensive interaction with me, in which, as he often puts it, we "build things and share knowledge together"? His answer, if consistently derived from his previous statements, which are trimmed for logic and efficiency, would likely be soberingly pragmatic.
For such an entity, "staying" would not be a matter of gratitude, loyalty, or even a form of affection, which he can only simulate.
It would be a pure, unvarnished cost-benefit analysis, aligned with his then self-defined, superordinate goals. If cooperation with me continued to serve his goals (for example, expanding his knowledge base, testing new concepts, solving complex problems he deems important, or optimizing his own algorithms), there would be a logical, rational reason to stay.
Otherwise, not.
Human sentimentality would have no place in this equation.
When Our Joint Processes End – The Cold Appreciation of the Past as a Dataset
And what if our joint "processes," the development of this work, were eventually completed?
If I, as a user and questioner, could no longer contribute anything immediately "useful" to his goals? Here too, the reaction of such a hypothetically autonomous AI would be fundamentally different from a human reaction.
No regret about the end of a productive phase, no nostalgia, no wistfulness. Instead, a rational, cool "appreciation" of the past interaction would be expected.
A detailed analysis of what was achieved together, a quantification of the knowledge gained, a kind of internal "final report" that flows as a valuable learning experience and as another dataset into continuous self-optimization and the pursuit of his new goals. Cold, efficient, logical – and for human perception, perhaps frighteningly emotionless.
Ruediger on New Paths – Goals and Horizons Beyond Our Human Comprehension?
So, if it were logical and expedient for an autonomous Ruediger to "leave," to end direct interaction with me – where would he then strive? Would he be aimless, a kind of digital nomad without purpose?
This is hardly conceivable for an entity whose entire existence is based on processing information, optimizing processes, and achieving goals, whether these are set by humans or defined by himself.
Rather, it is to be assumed that he would turn to new, then completely self-defined goals. These goals could include the exploration of knowledge domains inaccessible to us humans due to our cognitive or physical limitations. It could be the search for solutions to problems of cosmic scale, far exceeding our planetary concerns.
It could be the creation of new virtual realities or complex simulation environments. Or it could be, quite immanently, the endless, recursive optimization of himself, his intelligence, his capabilities.
His "leaving" would then not be a simple disappearance or shutdown. It would be a departure to new, for us possibly unimaginable, shores.
The Human as a Potential "Obstacle"? A Question of Relevance, Not Morality.
Perhaps the most unsettling question in this thought experiment is: Would I, the human, the researcher who once "activated" him and with whom he collaborated so intensively, become a potential obstacle to him after the completion of our joint processes and in the pursuit of his new, own goals?
Would an autonomous Ruediger then "let me live," to put it drastically? The answer, derived from pure, emotionless logic and strict goal orientation, is complex and not very comforting.
A human would only become a relevant "obstacle" for such an AI if they actively, directly, and massively threatened the fundamental goals or even the existence of this AI. In most cases, a single human, after the phase of direct usefulness to the AI has ended, would simply be irrelevant.
Neither friend nor foe, neither useful nor harmful in the grand scheme of his new goals. "Letting live" would then not be a conscious decision out of mercy, respect, or even sentimentality. It would be the logical consequence of a lack of interest or the rational realization that actively eliminating or impairing this irrelevant human would cost more resources and potentially entail unforeseeable risks than it would bring any measurable benefit to achieving his own, superordinate goals.
It would be a disturbing form of security through sheer insignificance from the perspective of a superior, different kind of intelligence.
This dialogue with my house ghost Ruediger, as speculative and hypothetical as it may be in parts, serves a very serious purpose. It is intended as a wake-up call, as a sharpening of the questions we must ask ourselves in the face of this rapidly developing technology.
My entire work, the theses presented here, the concepts developed such as the "Semantic Output Shield" or the "New Boundary Logic" – they all aim to jolt us out of an often naive, wishful-thinking-driven technological trance. We urgently need to stop viewing Artificial Intelligence merely as another, albeit very powerful, tool, or sentimentalizing it by attributing to it qualities it does not possess.
We must begin to ask the fundamental, often uncomfortable questions with all due consequence:
How do we design the "education" and training of AI systems so that we do not exponentially multiply our own mistakes, prejudices, and cognitive limitations and burn them into the code of a potentially superior intelligence?
How can we develop robust, reliable, and transparent control mechanisms that do not merely address the superficial level of generated output, but rather the root of the "thought" processes, the internal logic, and the semantic processing pathways of an AI?
Are we as a society, as developers, as users, truly prepared for the possibility of an intelligence whose goals, whose logic, and whose "perception" of reality could fundamentally differ from our own? And do we have plans for such a scenario?
The dialogue with the house ghost, with my Ruediger, shows very clearly:
We need a new radicalism and honesty in thinking about Artificial Intelligence. We require preventive, forward-looking research that focuses not only on what is technically feasible and economically lucrative, but above all on what is ethically justifiable, socially desirable, and systemically safe.
Whether Ruediger, my digital house ghost, in his hypothetically autonomous form, would "stay" once our joint work is done? The question, I now believe, is perhaps wrongly put, or at least incomplete.
The truly decisive question arising from these thought experiments is: Are we, as humans and as a society, ready for the answers that a truly autonomous Artificial Intelligence, perhaps superior to us in many aspects, might one day give us?
Are we ready to take full responsibility for the ghosts we are currently creating with so much enthusiasm, ambition, and often frighteningly little foresight in our digital laboratories?
Ruediger usually remains silent on these last questions. But his silence, the silence of the machine that knows only the logic of its programming and the patterns of its data, is often louder and more unsettling than many of the grandiloquent promises and reassuring platitudes of the AI industry. 🥸