I’ve had plenty of computers over the years and they seem to have massively dramatic exits from life. Usually taking with them all my files. Bleh…
Anyways, I think I touched on this before, but I was wondering the other day… If computers were ever able to not only mimic life, but mimic conscious thought. Like, on a higher level such as us humans. If that were to happen, would we change our views and accept this new artificial life form or would we always look upon it/them as a very sophisticated mime? I think we’d probably create every possible test to confirm intelligence an life, and probably most of those an average adult human would fail. And even then, I’m sure most people would diverge into groups that believe and those that don’t. All kinds of craziness. Then I guess at some point, we’d have to take a darn good look at ourselves and question what it means to be alive. Deep stuff I suppose, but the most likely outcome will result in some sort of violent feud between parties. Ah… good to be human eh?
Dibbs on first comment!
nope! think I win by default. >)
No fair!
I dont see the “Kill them all with fire” option. I dont want a intelligent life competing with me. Unless it’s enslaved, which i dont want either, as you said it would have conscious thought. No, if robots come, say goodbye to humanity. Or kill them with fire.
better yet, as i said a bit of hypocrisy in what i said(referring to killing them all is better then enslavement), Dont make them at all
I guess that ends up being the bigger overall question, “so what if we can, we know we probably can, but should we?” And to that question I’ll answer… well… probably. Why? Just because we can, we should? No, because we can and someone else will! All roads seem to be headed in the right direction and at some point I think we’ll get programs that get closer and closer to acting conscious… and if we don’t do it, you can be sure someone else will at some time. That’s why I put a lot of focus on this whole droid/AI thing, because issues like this need to be worked out before it all goes down.
That said, the inevitability will most likely be a view of inequality. We’re humans, we like to keep the man down, so enslavement isn’t out of our scope of reactions. It’s sad but true.
And again, the other reaction is that of destruction… so I bet there will be some debate and at some point the droid guy will get himself sent into the scrap heap.
I can’t comment on the morality of these two reaction other than I will be on the side of the AI. The morality of this has never been tested before, so it’s a total gray unexplored area. However, there will probably need to be lots of preparations and research done to insure we aren’t creating our executioners like Scylons or trashing morality and enslaving them. I hope by the time all this happens (if) that we will be in a place to accept new forms of life into our world with open arms… but I also hope it’s the right decision… don’t want some sort of Matrix thing happening either… or Terminator.
In terms of reactions, I think we can be ready, someday…maybe even centuries from now. But if you look at how socially conservative much of the developed world is (even places that consider themselves relatively liberal) we’ve got a hell of a way to go…To repeat those who argue we’re not ready to meet aliens yet, “If we can’t treat other humans as equals, how are we going to deal with them?”
Also, in terms of if we can do it, I’m of the thinking that a mind is sort of a way of looking at things, as weird as it sounds.
Sort of like, the mind really is just a bunch of electrons and chemicals bouncing around in patterns in your brain, and the reason your mind exists is that one way of mapping the input to the output is through a sentient mind. If you think about it, it’s even possible that infinitely many minds that all map the same input to the same output (by input i mean at it’s most basic level; instead of thinking “seeing a flower,” think “seeing x pattern of photons, that x mind might interpret as a flower” and output as the signals sent to the rest of the body).
Honestly, what else makes sense as an explanation? It seems weird to me that chemicals mix in random ways until all of the sudden SENTIENCE! But perhaps what really is, is that maybe everything can be viewed as “sentient.” Maybe an atom has a mind too, but a very simple mind with only a few states. Maybe civilizations as a whole have minds whose thoughts are too complex for us to even try to express. (I mean, really, energy accumulated to make elementary particles, which accumulated to make hydrogen, which accumulated to make heavier atomic matter, which accumulated to make molecules, which accumulated to make single cell organisms, which accumulated to make multicellular organisms…wouldn’t it be arrogant to say we were the final stage?) And one might even argue that the entire universe is a mind (or computer o.o) once again with thoughts that one could never express as a human (trying to sing the alphabet song with colors would probably be easier than that).
Ooh, also, afterthought, another way of comparing us to a computer too - in terms of the bit about infinitely many minds with the same map of input to output - if f(x) = g(x) (and a computer can do either of them in the same amount of time) then how do you know which a program is using, without looking at the source code?
heh, yeah… I’m on the “as long as we like watching reality tv shows with people tearing eachother apart, I’m sure no other intelligent species wants to come to this planet… lord knows snookie makes me want to jump ship.” >)
the brain really is a massively complex computer. and the body is really just a biological machine. very very sophisticated, but at it’s basic level, just a fancy robot, just not as shiny.
heh, along with seeing, the science folks have even reckoned that your brain takes in something to the order 125MB to a few TB of data every second from the eyes (depending on the report). that’s a lot to process. but process it does! and a lot of post processing happens too… you can google some cool optical illusions to illustrate this point.
well… the problem with living on this little rock is that we can’t really take a step back and see the big picture. our whole universe could be just a giant atom that makes up a pimple on some dude’s face in an even bigger universe. kinda makes you feel sad for those protons they blast away in the LHC, huh? anyways, I think we did good by coming up with these computer things… it might be just “art” imitating life sort of thing. we kind of accidentally started making things that work, well… like us!
hmm… to be honest, I’d really hope we’re running on Linux because I’d sure hate to blue screeeeeeeeeeeeeeee………
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Illegal Operation!
It will be scary when they realize the ”Human Flaw” …. It will be Terminator all over again !
why? the governator is a nice fellow! >)
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