I am someone who has always laid awake deep into the night just thinking about stuff. New things fascinate me, and they almost always trigger me to think about other things.
Recently, a situation came up in my life where an issue that I'd thought I'd worked through years ago suddenly reappeared. My initial response was not the one I've worked so hard to cultivate, but rather the response I'd been "programmed" with as a child. I caught it quickly and was able to re-direct my response to the one I've worked on having, but it sparked some late-night thinking.
As I lay awake that night with my covers pulled up under my chin staring wide-eyed at the ceiling, I thought about my own programming, and then this thought arose. Holy crap. If I was programmed as a kid and that program still runs, am I merely a form of artificial intelligence that has become self-aware? Let me tell you — that'll keep you up at night.
I had no answers, so I turned to ChatGPT and asked not only about that, but about whether AI itself might become self-aware, and what other things ChatGPT wanted humanity to know about AI. We had quite the chat (it's right in the name, after all), and these are the things ChatGPT shared with me.