http://www.nationalpost.com/news/canada/story.html?id=1758391
The first thing I thought of when I read this was the movie I, Robot, about a robot who, among legions of automaton brethren, has the unique capacity to love and the ability to thwart a plot by the other robots to basically take over the world. The other robots do it because they look at what the humans have done to themselves and to each other and they conclude that humans aren't capable of managing the world themselves.
Nice thought, a robot with a heart. But really - as if.
Humans have spent thousands of years discovering ourselves, mentally and biologically. Even now, we can't explain some of the processes that go on inside us, because they are so incredibly intricate. I think this is even more pronounced with the brain - at the heart of it, we don't know how it works. If we disregard the supernatural, we don't know why we are the way we are, or how we got that way. We don't understand the soul, emotions, the way we think.
But we think we can recreate it?
Have fun with that one.
3 comments:
Hm, that's an interesting article. There's another movie that I thought of, "AI: Artificial Intelligence." It's basically about what the guy is talking about - an android boy is built to love. And things don't go too well...
I'm a big fan of android stories, so I could ramble on and on, but I'll try to restrain myself and just comment on the last part of the article :P
"The key is raising them right," he explains, "and they will inherently love us."
Uh-huh. Sure. Just like loving parents raise their children as best they know how, and the children still rebel. The key is hard wiring the android with the 3 laws of robotics, plus the zeroth law (A robot may not harm humanity, or, by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.)
I think I've been reading too much sci-fi.
I agree, though. We might be able to build robots that are smarter, quicker and stronger than us, but we can't give them true emotions or souls. Of course, that won't stop me from writing my own android stories :P
completely unrelated: a friend from school posted this - http://www.patricialadd.com/2009/06/dewey-decimalogy-a-guide-to-predicting-your-future/
and I though you would enjoy it, seeing as you also work at a library.
I went to Google just now to read the article. I copied and pasted your link into the Google search line. The first and second link was the article in the National Post. The third link on Google was "Feet of Shadows". I thought it was kinda neat.
Yes, I agree that humans have been evolving for a long time - rejecting what's bad for the species and fine-tuning and fine-tuning what's good. I think this has been happening with our bodies, but also with our emotions, and with our "hard drives". When I ponder this, I'm always humbled by the enormity of it.
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