![]() Paul Davies, a cosmologist, suggested “life” is simply a quality that switches on when a given system achieves an (as yet unidentified) critical mass of complexity. In “Are We Alone?: Philosophical Implications Of The Discovery Of Extraterrestrial Life,” Dr. ![]() Maybe we shouldn’t differentiate between living and inanimate at all. ![]() We’ve all got that friend who dropped her mobile face down on concrete or into the pool, precipitating its “death” in a very real sense. Or just look at the other properties of what we call “life.” As the dictionary defines it “the condition that distinguishes animals and plants from inorganic matter, including the capacity for growth, reproduction, functional activity, and continual change preceding death.” Ever seen a computer controlled robot arm build a car on a production line or the 3D printer designed to make copies of itself? It might not be biological reproduction, but in principle it’s just like us ingesting energy (food) to produce the building blocks of the next generation (gametes) and create a copy (a baby).Įven computer malware is called “viruses” because of their biological-seeming behavior of reproducing or copying themselves and moving through an ecology of host organisms. Those mental artifacts are simply data points, and if we have enough computing power, disk space, and software architecture to program them into an AI agent, couldn’t it similarly make what looks like a subjective choice? They feel subjective, but, in reality, they’re just a swarm of influences in your consciousness that generate a decision. If we choose between staying in to watch Netflix or going out to dinner, the decision is based on countless imperceptible nuances of memory, experience, sensory input, emotion, and nervous cues (neurons in your gut might be telling your brain you’re hungry, for instance). Maybe that’s a position we need to rethink. There’s even ongoing debate about plant consciousness, but nobody would describe a computer or robot as being “alive.” We’re alive, sure, but what does that even mean? We assume chimpanzees are alive and self-aware, as are dogs, cats, fish, and every other animal down to single celled eukaryotic organisms in decreasing levels of complexity. Attributing intelligence, creativity, self-awareness, or similar “human” qualities leads us to the question of exactly what a human is. ![]() From “Westworld” to “Hardware,” “Blade Runner” to “The Stepford Wives,” and “Frankenstein” to “2001,” pop culture is replete with the idea machines will develop souls and try to oppress or destroy humanity.īut to figure out if it could ever happen (the intelligence, not the mass killings), we need to take a step back. Nowhere can you see more examples, prophecies, or warnings about the dangers of artificial intelligence than literature and film. Just like a brain generates a conscious being inside it, could the internet do the same thing, synthesizing the disparate but combined knowledge of the digital age and emerging as a discrete consciousness all its own? If it did, what would that teach us about the way brains do it? What Is Life? Put enough of them together and you get a structure like a hippocampus, a temporal lobe or a medulla, jigsaw pieces that can encode memory of past experiences, apply emotional context, or imagine things that don’t exist, all in the viewpoint of a self-aware observer.ĭoes the idea of a huge number of simple parts remind you of anything in the invented world? Almost every PC, mobile device, server, or data center on Earth is connected nowadays, and they’re all single units that contribute data storage, energy, and processing power to a system that only exists as a principle rather than an entity, but which is nevertheless coherent. Drill right down and a brain is comprised of a huge number of very simple parts, many of them “dumb” nodes whose only real power is in their hyperconnectivity and seamless communication with each other. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |