Listening
to the Radiolab segment “Talking to Machines,” for this week made me think
about some old questions related to artificial intelligence that I had not
thought about in a while. For instance,
is a robot alive? What qualifies life in
a robot? Is there a difference between
talking to a real person and talking to a person who looks, talks, and acts
exactly like a person, but is a machine?
That’s a question that I do not think can be answered, at least not
anytime soon – and I am not sure how to answer it myself.
Battlestar
Galactica is a fantastic television show that dealt with this question – in
the show, there are humans, and there are also “cylons,” who are sentient
robots. It has been a while since I’ve
seen the show so I don’t remember the details completely, but the humans are
fighting with the cylon race, but there are some cylons who look exactly like
humans and are aboard the human ships – and they all think that they are humans
until later in the show, when they are revealed their identity, and they are
forced to choose a side. They look and
act like normal humans and have relationships with others, but in reality they
are robots, and you have to wonder if there is a difference. By Turing’s standards, they would be sentient
– none of the real humans were able to tell them apart. Watching the show, the viewer sympathizes
with these cylons, and at the end of the show I felt that there was no
difference between them and the real humans – they were both equally alive, and
their rights as human beings were equally valid.
A
somewhat religious argument (not one that I personally believe, but I
understand it) for the inherent
difference between humans and robots would be that humans possess a “soul,”
whereas robots do not. What a soul is
depends on your religion and beliefs, but I think one interpretation is that a
soul is something that is inherent to only humans, in some sense drives your
conscience (or perhaps it is your conscience), and it persists beyond death
into the afterlife. Humans have a soul
by virtue of being human – since robots are artificial by nature, they have no
soul, and therefore are fundamentally different on a spiritual level. However, this argument only works if you
believe in a soul – if you do not believe in a soul, perhaps because you are
not religious, then what really is the difference between a robot and a person,
if you cannot tell the difference with your senses?
Can
we get to the point where robots could ever truly “feel” an emotion, like
happiness, pain, sadness, or anger? The main point of contention for me is that
I cannot imagine a robot that could ever truly experience emotions like a human
being. Although the furby in Radiolab
displayed signals that could be interpreted as human emotions, like fear or
happiness, it was not actually “feeling” anything, it was a result of the mechanisms
inside of it telling it what to do programmatically. Then again, as they mentioned in Radiolab, the
same case could be argued for humans – are we all not just machines running on
interactions of chemicals going on in our brain? The “emotions” that we value so highly are
really just our body reacting to chemicals in our brain that respond to our
perceptions – is that any different from a robot interpreting sensory input,
and displaying that output as emotion?
Because
of the fact that we may just be a more complex machine, I think that if a robot
ever exists that is indistinguishable from a person, I would call it alive, and
I would respect it’s feelings, wishes and rights just like any other
person. That day may never come, but it
is something that is interesting to think about, and a topic that I think will
be even more important in the near future as machines become more and more
intelligent.
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