One of the things that interested me in the book was the
chapter on whether a machine could think. We didn’t talk about this in class
much but as technology advances more and more this question in the future could
be a big philosophical debate. Right now in order to conclude that a machine
can think it must have conscious thoughts and be able to do everything a human
being could do. The debate here is how do we know that conscious thoughts are
happening and that the machine isn’t just processing inputs to produce outputs
similar to human. In place today is the Turing test which is basically an interrogation
of a human and computer by and human trying to decide which is which. This test
is run multiple times and if no more than half of the guesses are correct then
the machine has passed the test. No machine has passed this test today, but in
movies machines in the near future seem to have conscious thoughts and
feelings. They are also frequently depicted as taking over the human race or ruling
us in some fashion. Even though this as of now is a far off thought, if someday
machine are developed to be able to think and do everything a human can do will
they be able to evolve in their thinking as humans can too? If this did happen
would it be a matter of time before machines are the dominant “species”. In the
clip below of I, Robot this is shown
to some extent even with the rules of robotics in place.
In my opinion, the possibility of robots one day being able to think goes back to the materialist's arguments with other philosophies. It is not to far of an extrapolation to say that, in modern times, a materialist would believe that a human is no more than a collection of atoms and atomic bonds in a particular state.
ReplyDeleteIf sometime in the distant future we created a machine that could manipulate atoms and their states precisely, then why couldn't we assemble a biological machine that is an exact replica of our own brain? Whether or not this replica would be considered a machine or not is a subject of a different debate.
While the above possibility is not foreseeable in the near future, there are other methods of accomplishing the same thing. In the real world gravity is a very complex phenomena however for relevant applications we can mathematically simplify it something like F_Gravity = G*M1*M2/r^2. This simplification is included in many of today's video games. Instead of trying to exactly replicate the particles interactions involved in gravity we can simply use the applicable law. Therefore, while we may not be able to physically manipulate atoms and their states precisely enough to replicate a human brain we may be able to use our understanding of the brain structure to create a semantic replication.