Blog Assingment #5 - Midterm Practice

Artificial intelligence, as defined by the standard American dictionary, is the capacity of a computer to perform operations analogous to learning and decision making in humans. The advancements in AI have been remarkably progressive since the early 1990’s. In the year 2011, it is commonplace to have some form of AI in almost any type of electronic. Cars are now able to park themselves. Video games have enemies that adapt to your attacks and formulate strategies against you. Even credit card companies have software that actively searches your normal purchase habits to ensure your card is not being used by an unauthorized person. The advancements in AI seem to take an incredible leap forward every few years. What happens, however, when an AI gets so advanced it believes itself to be the same or better than humans? We see this scenario explored in the book “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep” by Philip K. Dick. In this book, Mr. Dick introduces the character of Rachel Eldon, who holds conversations just like any other person. She is by all rights a deceptive, brash, and confidently strong woman, until of course she fails the Voight-Kampff test, a sort of empathy tester. She is an android. While she may have been artificially created, it can be argued that she was indeed intelligent and that her consciousness was as real as any human’s consciousness.

There are items within humans that separate them from other beings in this world; emotion, rationality, the ability to question their own existence (Philosophy) to name a few. If these were emulated, and if humans were unable to immediately tell the difference, they would default to being real in the sense that they would be accepted as such. An example might be a person with Alexithymia, a neurological disability which creates difficulty in distinguishing, understanding and processing emotions. This disorder is common to about 85% of people suffering from autism. Because the concept is so foreign to them, they often appear to be completely devoid of emotional expression. Many of these individuals have to learn alternate methods to simply read emotion on another person’s face. This can be seen as an artificially fix to the problem of replaying emotions seamlessly as most humans can. It is not unreasonable to assume that many people would still hold these autistic beings to still be human, which is evidence that a mastery of emotion is clearly not the sole component that makes one human.

This is just a brainstorm. More to come shortly…