What is the true meaning of humanity and what separates us from
a super-intelligent, human-like robot? Artificial intelligence has been the
fastest growing field in robotics today. It is also a very controversial topic
as to whether robots can have a real ‘consciousness’ like human, be intelligent
like humans and be able to look exactly like a human. There are many works of
literature based on the topic of robotics and artificial intelligence. One of
them is an interesting essay by David Gelernter, “Dream-Logic, the Internet and
Artificial Thought” which talks about the future of artificial intelligence and
logically how successful it’ll be in replicating a real human being. Another
great work of writings based on artificial intelligence is a science fiction
novel by Phillip K. Dick, “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” This novel is
about robots that are so advanced that it becomes tough to distinguish
difference between a robot and a human.
In the
novel “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” these super-intelligent robots or
Nexus 6 androids as mentioned in the book act and appear exactly the way humans
do, yet they also represent humanity’s main flaw which is the lack of empathy. The
bounty hunters use this flaw in order to determine if the person is a robot or
a human through a test called Voigt-Kampff test. However, when Rick Deckard, a
bounty hunter visits Rosen association to retire any Nexus 6 androids, he is
tricked into giving a test to Rachael. She is an android but they claim that
she’s human in order to prove that the Voigt-Kampff test failed to tell a human
apart from android. One example from the novel is when Eldon Rosen says “your
police department—others as well—may have retired, very probably have retired,
authentic humans with underdeveloped empathic ability, such as my innocent
niece here” (Dick 321). This was
the Rosen association’s way of discrediting the legitimacy of test. If the
Voigt-Kampff test failed to differentiate a human and an android it meant that
the police had no rights to shut down the production of Nexus 6. The Rosens accused the police department of
having killed innocent human beings.
Controversial
to the artificial intelligent androids in the novel, David Gelernter argues in
his essay that artificial intelligence
will never go as far as a robot exactly replicating a human being because it
won’t have a true ‘consciousness’ or be able to think on its own. According to Gelernter, artificial
intelligence is an artificial thought that is trained to impersonate a real
human subject (Gelernter 264). It means
that artificial intelligence is basically a thought process that’s copied from
an actual human being and is downloaded into a robot. The robot will only do or
say things that it’s trained to do unlike the androids in Phillip K. Dick’s
novel. Gelernter says that “Even then,
an artificially intelligent computer will experience nothing and be aware of
nothing. It will say “that makes me happy,” but it won’t feel happy. Still: it
will act as if it did. It will act like an intelligent human being” (Gelernter
264). In other words robots will have no
sense of reality at all; they would be unconscious and say things that are
programmed into them beforehand. They will act and look like human beings but
won’t really be able to feel anything including their existence.
In conclusion, artificial
intelligence according to the Phillip K. Dick’s novel and David Gelernter’s
essay states that robots can be super intelligent beings however they are
controversial in a way that the androids in the novel seem to have a ‘conscious’
whereas according to Gelernter robots will never have a conscious and they’ll
only do what they are programmed to do. I agree that Rachael Eldon (as well as
other Nexus 6 androids) were intelligent beings as well as they had a built in
conscious and emotion stimulated inside of them. They didn’t exactly feel
anything but they thought that they did. It’s something that a delusional human
being would be like. The reason why I think that is because those Nexus 6
robots had killed their owners on the off world and escaped to Earth due to
their own conscious thought, although they were initially built to serve their
owners.
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