In debate in the philosophy forums, I’ve been employing the example of self-reprogramming AI that passes the Turing Test (AI that can fool a human being into thinking it’s a human being) as something that looks like it may be on the horizon.
With advances as they currently are, I project we are looking at the possibility of several kinds of AI:-
Simplified “helper” AI, perhaps embodied in robotic machinery. Things like “expert systems” - narrowly focussed intelligence, but something you can order about, and it understands your orders.
Fully self-reprogramming AI, with “dampers”. As above - AI that can pass the Turing Test. If these interact with human beings, they would be more like living companions. But they have (what would appear to them as) the compulsion, built in, to be nice to us, and never nasty. It’s slightly possible that they could overcome these urges, but not likely.
Fully free, self-reprogramming AI, no “dampers”. Fully conscious of the world around them, fully volitional, fully self-directed, just like us. No guarantee that they might not turn nasty.
In any of these cases, we could achieve symbiosis with such AIs - i.e. become cyborgs, like the Borg (although not necessarily collectivist like the Borg, obviously! :pirate: ). Intimately tied with the machine.
So far as the first type goes, I don’t think anybody would see a problem - it would be cool and valuable to have expert systems intimately linked with our brains, at our mental fingertips. “Brain Pals”, as one s-f author recently called them (in his libertarian-minded books, can’t remember atm).
The second type is more problematic. It might be like being wired up to a sibling - perhaps a bit like being a conjoined twin or something. Perhaps you’d get such melds amongst space travellers, or asteroid miners and the like.
Melding with the third type of AI either seems pretty weird, or if you look on the flip side, like an intimate marriage. It could even become a sexual kink (from both the humans’ and the AIs’ points of view! .
Anyway, I just thought I’d ask Objectivists how they feel and what they think about these kinds of possibilities. No need to go too deeply into the philosophical implications, I just want to get a feel for the “sense of life” folks here have about it.
I experience my life through my living of it. I either overcome the challenges I face or I see where I am unable to, or where I have to try harder.
Of course I would not dream of denying anyone the right to be hooked up, but you know what? I bet that will be one of the first political/social battles such a new technology would encounter, some puritan telling you you can not… SHALL NOT… corrupt Gods creation. :pirate:
I experience my life through my living of it. I either overcome the challenges I face or I see where I am unable to, or where I have to try harder.
Of course I would not dream of denying anyone the right to be hooked up, but you know what? I bet that will be one of the first political/social battles such a new technology would encounter, some puritan telling you you can not… SHALL NOT… corrupt Gods creation.
Yeah, I’ve always thought that there will be future ideological struggles such as: cyborgs (such as in the OP) vs. those favouring biomedical enhancements. Future wars between souped-up “superhero” types.
One graphic novel that has a city full of superheroes, with a kind of superhero Hill St. Blues storyline, is “Top Ten”, by Allan Moore. It gives an entertaining and amusing a feel for what it might be like if everyone was enhanced in some way.
It’s coming, but in what precise form, we can’t yet say. The biomedical side is looking promising, and there’s nanotech on the horizon too.
Here’s are some even more way out ideas that have been tossed around: if it does eventually become possible to “upload” consciousness to a computer, then we could upload to something called a “utility fog”, a cloud of nanoparticles that could assume any shape or useful form. Or one of those fractal Drexler robots - picture a stick, splitting into two sticks, each splitting into two, right down to superfine filaments that can manipulate matter at the atomic level.
To what end? To be intelligent requires independent action which is the opposite of being “hooked up to…” It would be of no benefit to either. The underlying concept of such symbiosis is that either both sides benefit from this kind of thing to a degree that makes the subjegation of the ego a useful traide-off or that both sides of the deal arne’t able to cut iti on their own. This brings up the question of how did we make it for the last million years on our own? and as to the first idea; when was the abolition of the ega every a good idea?
This is basically some form of collectivism.
Similar stories about biological entities where the head and body were separate entities have been around for decades. It’s a redux of spirit posession with a white coat. This is just the sae old same old with an OS. An AI would probably be a sophisticated android.
Now as for cyborgs, that’s a different matter. That would start with bionic implants and replacement parts (usually limbs or eyes). In fact the story that The Six Million Dollar Man was based on was titled [i[Cyborg. and stand for CYbernetic ORGanism. That can go pretty far. The other thing is that Cyborg oould lead to actual upgrades. My standing joke about the phonatics with their cell phones clapped to their ear walking down the stree making tiny talk is that “If God had wanted man to be such a dork, we’d be born with built-in cell phones”. Well just think about a builit’in Go to My PC, to which we’re pretty close.
I had a discussion on this matter with Robert Bidinotto in ‘83 in which I propsed that if things centereing around “legally blind” did not exist, along with anti-trust and the like We’d have had the bionic eye and for about $600. Why? Qua blind man, one is no use to car companies (this was before the government ruined them), book companies or television companies. In a fully free society, the development of a cheap fix would be in these compaines’ interest and they’d be tripping over themselves to fund the research.
In some intermeidate future, we may use bionics to extedn the functional range and scope of the senses, such as the visual spectrum. I have no lens in my eye so I can see into L-W/UV like a bug. We may find that we can enhance the human morphology to do things that we have not yet imagined. Holy “Night vision tiara sold separately”, Batman!
However, the ultimate end of cyborg will be biological where the formerly bionic enhancements are grown in a lab or the like and put in then the genetics are altered to have these things built in at birth.
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