Intelligence-2

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intelligence-2

Title text: Boy, I hope these kids get home some day.

Votey

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Transcript

This transcript was generated by a bot: The text was scraped using AWS's Textract, which may have errors. Complete transcripts should also describe what happens in each panel.

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Do you think artificial intelligence can *really think?

Thinking is just processing information the whole issue of machine thought is a sideshow from much more interesting questions!

Yes, obviously

Look, we can now make a single machine that could drive a car in traffic, invent novel boardgame strategies, tell you what your favorite food is, and so on, but we don't care if it "dies.

That's weird, isn't it? Like naively you might worry that the closer the machine mind gets to being able to do human tasks, the more it will seem to deserve moral standing.

The fact that it doesn't implies that whatever makes humans special can be "unbundled.

Your uncle who loves chess and knows all about flowers? Whatever makes him human is not those things. Even though he's built his life around them.

Nor is his good memory, his ability to paint, to build things to tell you about the stars all of these things can be imparted to a machine without anyone caring whether you switch off the machine at your leisure

Maybe humanness is emergent. None of those individual things make a human, but the totality

I mean, suppose you talked to a guy in the 19th century and said there's an entity made of glass, metal and electricity and it can beat the greatest chessmaster at chess. Is it ethical to melt it down once it's no longer useful."" I think they'd say "no!"

So if your uncle gets amnesia is it okay to kill himp I don't think so!

So. Maybe what's happened is in our desire not to think of ourselves as machines we've slowly made the idea of homanness more abstract.

Every time a new machine can do a thing we unbundle it from what it means to be human. But, what if we keep taking things out of the bundle until we discover there's nothing left!

Either there really is something special and ineffable about humans or in the near future we will constantly be creating beings worthy of love out of thin air making them do our bidding then throwing them in the garbage for being obsolete!

Do you think robots will engineer better humans to replace us?

I mean there hasn't been a new model for 200.000 years we're overdue

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Votey Transcript

This transcript was generated by a bot: The text was scraped using AWS's Textract, which may have errors. Complete transcripts should also describe what happens in each panel.

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% comics about robot minds on CMBC

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