What Does it Mean to Be Human?

Technology, depending on how you view it, can either make us less human or enhance our humanity. This much is clear from the readings and from our in-class discussions. But what exactly makes us human? Is humanity attributed to a specific set of characteristic for all of humanity or is it on an individual basis? And how does technology affect these characteristics?

In class we addressed the subject of free will. If an individual had free will, if he had the ability to make his own choices and decisions, then we considered him human. This seems easy enough to understand; if you can make your own choices based on your own opinions and understandings, then you are human. But then what about people who are brainwashed, people who are suffering from Stockholm syndrome? These people are not really making decisions based on their own opinions, their feelings are manipulated by a controller and they are made to think and act a certain way. So then, are these people not human? No, we still consider them human by our standards. Even if they do not completely have free will, we still see them as human.

This brings up the question about whether or not AI’s are human. Artificial Intelligence systems are programmed by a controller to have a data bank and to think a certain way, certainly. But this is no different than people who have Stockholm syndrome, or who are brainwashed. In addition, AI’s are simply a compilation of all of the data it is given and has gathered. Humans, similarly, know only what is given to them and what they have access to. So does this mean humans, by how we define AI’s as non-human, are also non-human? Or can we classify AI’s as human?

Humans are, generally, capable of free will. To this definition we added that an individual must also be capable of empathy in order to be considered human. Empathy is the ability to understand and share the feelings of another. To be able to empathize is important in human relationships because it enables us to understand each other’s motives and from that allow us to modify our own understandings of the world and humanity in order to make better decisions.

The idea of empathy as an indicating factor in what is human and what is not human is a common theme of science fiction novels and films. In Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep empathy tests were utilized by specialized detectives to indicate who was a renegade robot out of the human population. A series of questions were asked of a suspected individual and the answers of the individual, as well as their bodily reactions to the questions, were analyzed to for signs of empathetic responses. If the individual lacked these indications, then they were deemed to be an android. Interestingly enough, while these highly advanced, humanoid robots lacked the proper answers to the empathy questions, they seemed to show empathy and emotions in other ways. In the case of the death of another fellow android, one of the remaining androids seemed to show regret at his demise and feel the impact of his absence from existence. In another instance, a female robot seems to show vindictiveness to being spurned by a human male. The emotions conveyed by these supposedly emotionless robots is a parallel to the emotionless attitude displayed by the main protagonist’s wife who seems to not care for anything, even life itself.

Despite the assertion in the beginning of the book that emotion and empathy was an attribute of humans, not robots, the characters of the book seem to show the opposite. Androids show more emotion for each other and for other things, than some of the humans of the book can. Even in class we singled out having empathy as characteristic of humans, but yet in society we can pinpoint certain individuals who, by their very definition, do not demonstrate it. These people, sociopaths, are people who have a personality disorder which results in extreme antisocial behaviors and a lack of a conscience or empathy. So then are these people not human? While we might want to say that they are not human, we know that, biologically, they are human.

Our definition of “human” has several holes in it. We cannot disregard the anomalies to create a succinct definition of the human race to just being able to empathize and make decisions of our own free will. To do so would subject several hundreds, even thousands, to not falling under the category of human. Perhaps we should rethink what it means to be human.