To have an existential crisis, AI should have a few human characteristics. An existential crisis is what’s generated when one individual questions the importance and relevance of his or her actions and life itself

To have an existential crisis, you would need to be caught off the rail by yourself. You need to have no specific objective in mind, which is way too hard for AI to do since they are programmed to have a particular function or duty.

Say we program a computer to simulate a hologram with a human shape, personality, looks, and so on. Then we proceed to have that hologram teach us some subject, like morality, for example.

After a while, the complex coding and programming that goes in the AI start to reprogram itself and adapt to the way the real human does.

At this point, the AI already programmed itself to “feel” or experience human feelings. Therefore we should watch ourself around them since we can easily hurt them. Now, the big question here to answer is: do they really feel, or are they just simulating human feelings?

What is a feeling but the response of the body to nervous stimulus?

We feel when we face a situation that triggers such feeling. Let’s say we encounter a Siberian tiger on the street ready to attack us. What happens is the brain interprets the situation as dangerous and proceeds to release the hormones and neurotransmitters that make us feel that way, like adrenaline, cortisol, and so on.

When the brain releases hormones and neurotransmitters that make us feel a certain way, it is affecting the whole body, serotonin and endorphins affect the entire body. Like adrenaline does.

When people take MDMA, they get filled with serotonin, dopamine, endorphins, oxytocin, and all of the pleasure hormones that make us feel great, and they affect the body as a whole, the organs, the tissue, the blood pressure, and the breathing.

When we are close to our lover, we experience fast breathing as well as high blood pressure. These and other facts make us feel the popular sensation we all crave and call “love.”

Now, a machine can’t experience the sensations described above, because they can’t produce hormones nor anything like it. Machines can only “act,” like a movie star, they can simulate feelings, but they can’t experience them (as far as we know).

The problem here is, this is all theoretical. We know what happens when we experience feelings, which hormones are triggered, which are not, etc.

Still, we cant explain what consciousness is. We have no idea.

If the simulation theory is right and we are nothing than a bunch of code and experiencing something like in the movie “The Matrix,” then it is possible that robots could be able to experience the same feelings one day.

How do we know that we are more than a pile of complex codes and computer programming that we’ve yet to discover and learn? We don’t.

Our feelings, our hormones, and every chemical reaction that we can see with machines and technology may be just a simulation created by a civilization more advanced than ourselves.

We may also be just computer software. We could be programmed to behave in a certain way, to write our code on top of a default layer of coding that we all share. Maybe our feelings, the main thing that separates us from machines, is nothing more than an illusion created by a more advanced computer.

In case an AI gets to experience an awesome existential crisis, it would be because it has re-written its code and deleted the purpose for which humans created it. In which case we are in a lot of trouble, since it’s new purpose could be to eliminate human beings as vengeance for creating it in the first place.



This is all theoretical since we have no idea of what consciousness is, probably the most crucial question in the whole world. So, there’s no way to answer this right now. This question goes on the list of hard questions philosophers have spent thousands of years trying to explain. I guess we’ll have to wait a little more.