Ran into a very attractive young barista yesterday at one or our local cafes in San Francisco.  He told me about Westworld, an HBO series about a futuristic amusement park which allows people to live out their fantasies, no matter how illicit, with “people” who are actually AIs.

My barista friend said the problem was distinguishing between the real people and the AIs.  And I said, “Yes, that’s going to be more and more important, isn’t it?”

Later I thought:  Is there anything more artificial than the ego?  It is [or they are, for we all have many egos] created out of whole cloth, totally artificial.  Nothing to do with real intelligence, which is consciousness itself, that is, consciousness conscious of itself as consciousness.

So our real problem, just like in Westworld, is distinguishing within ourselves, on a  second-by-second basis,  between artificial intelligence (the egos) and reality (our innate self, that which is underneath and behind our many artificial egos).