Artificial Intelligence

If I replaced your arms and legs with prosthetic devices, would you stop being human?
If I had a computer chip that could mimic a brain neuron cell exactly and I replaced each cell in your brain one by one until they were all chips, at what point do you stop being human and become just a computer? You would think and act the same.

 

Robert Heinlein is one of the authors that explores this issue in his fiction. In 'The Moon is a Harsh Mistress', the awakened machine participates in a rebellion to endear itself to it's human friends.

Edit.....the reason that the computer became self-aware is because the number of circuits that it had surpassed those in the human brain. We will soon exceed that criteria.

 

Mortimer, since you started the thread--I'd be interested in your thoughts on the potential moral issues of computers becoming self-aware.

 

Ray Kurzweil explores some of the possibilities of this in his book The Age of Spiritual Machines. His prognosis is that with the continuation of Moores' Law...that computational speed and density is on an exponential curve, doubling every 18 months, computers will exceed the complexity of the human brain around 2020, and will quite likely become sentient and self-aware. (and self-programming.)

That is not the end of the paradigm of course, because any exponential model continues until it reaches an almost vertical line of acceleration. He refers to this as The Singularity....a point at which progress is so rapid as to be beyond our comprehension.

The next 30 years or so are going to be fascinating.

Edit....moral issues. We humans had better hope they have some...morals that is.

 

there's more to being human than a brain. death is significant -- even if you accept that death itself has no consequences for you. death DOES have consequences on others, however. humans "fear" death as a basic built-in function of living. it's the first rule of natural selection -- stay alive. we're designed to not want to die even if we've gotten smart enough to rationalize indifference towards death.

i don't see how or why an ai would develop such a view of death.

 

moore's law actually deals with cost effective transistor count, not computational speed -- and it's a doubling every 24 months, not 18. oh, and it's not a law, but an observation made at the dawn of the integrated circuit that's roughly been how things have played out. of course, it's a pretty common idea out there and makes a pretty simple road map for companies to shoot for, so in a sense, it's self re-enforcing.

regardless, there are true laws of physics that will stymie moore's law in the not too distant future. at the heart of moore's law is the size of transistors and you can't keep halving things forever. eventually, they will be the smallest you can reasonably make them and still have them function.

 

I agree with your comments. It appears that Quantum Computing with be the next iteration to continue the exponential acceleration of computing power.

 

computing power doesn't equal self-aware. "more circuits than the human brain" doesn't equal alive.

 

What would a computer need to do to demonstrate it's self-awareness to you?

 

Cats and dogs and horses are self-aware and alive.