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Originally Posted by Infinite Improbability
To recap, Val's points are:
1) Do robots count as self-aware, and/or as living?
2) Do we have the right to control what they think?
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1. No.
2. By necessity we must. We are the ones who
enable computers to think on any level. Otherwise they do not think. Telling a computer how to think
is a form of controlling, but the term conjures up inappropriate imagery. We direct what they think. They do things according to the program we provide. Will that ever change? I don't know, but if it does it will be a fundamentally different piece of software than anything we have yet written.
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Do we even have the right to create such things?
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I don't see why we shouldn't, but for opposite reasons than Nate. We already create intelligences as powerful as our own through our begetting, and few people have problems with that. And the idea of creating (as opposed to begetting) something in our own image is a powerful one. Some might say it smacks of playing God, but ... <insert long, uninteresting, theological discussion here>.
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3) Okay, put on your explorer hats and prepare to dash out of the Temple of Doom, dudes and dudettes! Uh, who would take away our "right" to create thinking robots? After all, if we can create machines capable of genuine thought, that'd be the final nail in the coffin of evolution.
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Okay, the "final nail" sounds like it would kill off evolution as a viable theory, but that obviously isn't what you mean.
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God would be superfluous. Souls wouldn't exist. After all, if mechanical machines can think, then so can organic machines, and we're just the result of millions of years of trial and error by random forces trying to slap a thinking machine together.
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1. I don't see how a thinking machine would make God superfluous. If anything it would support the idea that only intelligences can create intelligence.
^ Gah. That just sounds like I'm asking for an origins debate, but I'm really REALLY not.
2. Souls are a loose term that gets defined too many ways to treat intelligently. Suffice to say a thinking machine would not make everyone suddenly say, "Well, I guess souls don't exist after all," but only expand the debate as to whether machines have them too.