Can Artificial Intelligence Become Essentially Human and What Constitutes Humanity?
Reflective Piece after reading Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? In speculative fiction, artificial intelligence is a common theme, and these entities experience very different realities, from Bender’s complete freedom in Futurama to the robots in Isaac Asimov’s Robot series, who are under human control. But as our society moves closer to achieving true, conscious artificial intelligence, we need to ask ourselves some tough questions in preparation for our future living with conscious, manmade entities. If artificial intelligence is self aware, conscious, are capable of feelings and do not function fundamentally on logic alone, what sets us apart from them? What even constitutes being human? Are they fundamentally human and therefore deserve the
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The minds of humans and conscious manmade artificial intelligence (as I defined in the first paragraph) are simultaneously very similar and also worlds apart. In my speculative form of AI, they would function on the basis of both logic and emotion, as humans do, but they may have very different ideas of what is moral and what is not. It could depend on the human who creates it. A real-world example of this are the ethics systems coded into self-driving cars. The person coding the protocols for what passengers to save in a crash have to make decisions about the ethics. Someone may choose to save the people in the backseats, as they are often children, and some may choose to save the person in the driver’s seat. It depends on the individual. This is an issue we may come across. Ethics and morals are very personal. The decision surrounding the ethics of AI may be left to a few select people. We cannot leave the interior and exterior ethics of what is essentially a new species to be decided by a token few