How Does It Feel to Be a Robot?
2023; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 29; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/10848770.2023.2241300
ISSN1470-1316
Autores Tópico(s)Space Science and Extraterrestrial Life
ResumoClick to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes1. Aristotle, Metaphysics, Lawson-Tancred’s rendering in his Introduction (p. lvii) of Ti en einai, aka essence or quiddity.2. This is not identical to “man-assisted,” as in the sheep cloning experiment or in vitro fertilisation. In these cases it is easy to fall into the trap of believing that the genes of these animals are responsible for any intelligence the offspring may have. But plainly they are not, nor for any other subjective characteristics, as these arise from the autonomous coordination of the organs being built. Therefore genes would not help AI one jot in its endeavours on that score.3. Most of this research comes from tests on a fairly small number of willing subjects, or else from diseased brains asking for open skull surgery (and probably dead ones as well).4. Implying the will to survive, recognition, discrimination, memory, knowledge, know-how and sundry other attributes including foremostly autonomous agency. Without this activity there would be no evolution, but merely untargeted maelstroms of change in the physical constitution such as we find on other planets and moons.5. By dripping down, so to speak—a process that yields imperfect copies because the empirical world is after all a pretty imperfect place to begin with. But even Plato vacillated on the issue, returning to it in four of his dialogues.6. Man says to woman, both bored with the TV: “I have an idea! How about going to the pool for a swim?” Shall we call this a tacit information flow? But something tacit is not information. A better example: In the late nineteenth century, Mark Twain invested a considerable slice of his fortune in an automated typesetting machine, all of it eventually going down the drain for the lack of practicality of the devices he supported. Enter Ottmar Mergenthaler with a previously unconsidered practicable idea. Shall we admit this as an information processing scene? But this would flounder around in a space of failures, i.e., no information, until Mergenthaler’s idea created the information flow on which the future of this instrument depended. See Chappell: A Short History of the Printed Word, 190–92.7. But this won’t wash: People were fooled by computers holding a dialogue with them over forty years ago, long before the dream of “AI super” was even mooted.8. This is hardly a novel insight and has been discussed ad infinitum at least since Descartes wrote.9. Moreover (some, many of?) Robson’s robots would be built in forms resembling humans and walk the streets. How would we cope with one of them developing a fault and dangerously misbehaving? Since they’re not plugged in, will the police shoot them ‘dead’? Reminders of Blade Runner again.10. I ask the reader to attend carefully to this wording. DNA does not “build” proteins, but provides quantitative information for their self-assembly. Moreover, these proteins need not be assigned their location in the growing body—they seem to “know” spontaneously their target site and the kind of body fibre (e.g. muscle) they are to be part of.11. Isn’t this also assuming that every person experiences in the same way, on the basis of an omnilaterally shared resource of the brain?12. Gerald Edelman, Merlin Donald, John Eccles, Howard Margolis, J. Z. Young, Graeme Cairns-Smith, Rodney Cotterill, Walter Freeman, Zoltan Torey, Paul Churchland—some of them hands-on pathologists; others specifically interested in the analogies and disanalogies between brains and computers and full of graphs and charts to illustrate the “machinery in action.”13. I confess to be astonished. Is this for real, or are we slipping back to the implausible theory of wiring in the brain?14. Ryle, “The Ghost in the Machine.” One explanation for its tenacious endurance in brain theories was the emergence of the CPU in computers—too suggestive to let it go untried.
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