How should we treat thinking machines and human-like robots? David Gelernter, is a professor of computer science at Yale University, says that Jewish thought offers us a way to proceed:
One way to discuss the problem is in the terms developed by Martin Buber, who created an ethics and theology based on relations among I, you, and it. For Buber, I and you can enter sympathetically into each others’ lives; our mental worlds flow together. But I and it are permanently separate. When I converse with an it, I do not actually converse at all; I conduct a monologue in which one party is me and the other is also me. This “other” is my own private, personal conception of someone or something else.
Buber used these terms to describe relations among human beings and between human beings and God. But we can press them into service in a different, simpler context. We can say that an I always has moral duties to a you. But ordinarily, an I has no moral duties to an it.
Does a machine, once it has become intelligent, make the transition from it to you? Or do I sometimes have moral duties to an it as if it were a you? Could I have moral duties to a mere thing that is unconscious, has never been conscious, and never will be?
August 2nd, 2010 | 11:47 am
“When the first thinking machine rolls out of the lab — and it will, one of these days — it will seem human.”
…
“Still: it is only a machine. It acts the part of an intelligent agent perfectly, yet it is unconscious (as far as we know, there is no way to create consciousness using software and digital computers). Being unconscious, it has no mind. Software will make it possible for a computer to imitate human behavior in detail and in depth. But machine intelligence is a mere façade.”
I wonder how the author defines “thinking machine.” On the one hand he assures us it is inevitable that a “thinking machine” will roll out of the lab eventually, on the other hand he states that it will be “unconscious,” with “no mind” and that its intelligence will be a “mere facade.”
Human thinking necessarily involves electrochemical brain activity but is intrinsically irreducible to physical brain activity alone, as it involves the immaterial: reflective self-awareness, abstract concept formation, and free will. It seems to me a thinking machine will never roll out of a lab simply because one can’t produce immaterial effects with material causes, regardless of the intricacy of the series of causes and effects.
August 2nd, 2010 | 4:15 pm
Joe,
Are you familiar with the concept of a Turing Test?
Suppose an intelligent computer became an avid reader and commenter of the First Things blogs. Furthermore, suppose that you, personally, were unable to identify it from the crowd, given that the written word is the only way for you to conceive of us (individually and collectively) versus it. In what way would your conversations with it by any different than your conversations with us?
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