Wednesday, March 16, 2011

What seperates Humans from Machines? Anything?




What do you think differentiates a human from a machine?
Do you think we will be replaced? Do you think Turing’s test is a good representation of deciding which is which?

The question of consciousness and sentience seems simple by definition. The things that make us human and animals is our ability to emote. Things like communication, working together, and adaptation are all traits of things like plants and other non sentient things. The same question is proposed with robots. If a robot could emulate humans in every way from learning to communicating, will it ever cease to be an imitation of life? If the machine could simulate emotion based on it's history of learning and understanding of it's surroundings how is it different from us? Even though our brains are wired differently, we could still think and learn to arrive at the same conclusions. If a robot can arrive at the prospect of emotion from a purely logical standpoint based in a perspective of it's history, then how is it different? Could the emotions, passions, and etc. we experience purely logical aspect of the human experience? Technically the feelings we have are the results of a series of complex chemical interaction responding to electric stimuli with the environment, is that necessarily different with the electric repines of robots to their environment? We are told to be unafraid to question the nature of humanity itself, but perhaps the conclusion more depressing than we wish to think. Our emotions could be essentially empty, only unique in that they are easily created. If our emotions could be recreated by a machine, then perhaps they are no more unique than our ability to walk, reason, and see things. Creativity could befall the same fate of emotion under the same circumstances. I suppose you could ask a replicate from Blade Runner if they ever feel a part of the human experience, certainly they feel prejudice and injustice.

The Turing test is a fun and simple exercise to get people to think differently, but it is purely a psychological test. The level of subjective in these experiments don't properly evaluate what traits make us human. The question of what makes us human may be just beyond our reach, if there is something distinct at all (outside of the obvious human species of animal.) Perhaps a robot is simply a percentage of human based on how closely it imitates each aspect of what we can do. So yeah short answer, No. The test is however a good examination of the quality algorithms and psychological knowledge of what the majority of people think is human.

No comments:

Post a Comment