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Strong Artificial Intelligence and imago hominis: The Risks of a Reductionist Definition of Human Nature
Abstract
The last decades have witnessed an unprecedented development in Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) and Artificial Intelligence (AI), which have modified the way that interpersonal relationships are established and could also modify the way that human specificity is understood, even challenging the concept of human specialness. These technological advances have led some authors to anticipate that soon there will be machines built in our own image and to which we will relate as equals. However, we understand that subjectivity is a key element of all expressions of intelligence and emotion and is pivotal to consciousness itself, despite being overlooked in many reductionist arguments. We propose to bring the concept of authenticity to the discussion to distinguish different values in the possible expressions of intelligence, consciousness or emotion. Authenticity in this context would be deeply linked to subjective experience: for instance, an emotion is only authentic if it is felt in addition to being expressed. These subjective experiences, by definition, cannot be objectively measured. In order to overcome this limitation, we propose to use emergence as an objective surrogate for this authenticity: when behaviour is authentic, it emerges from lower-level domains rather than being imposed by programming or conditioning. In this paper we provide a framework for these concepts, with a double aim: stressing the importance of subjectivity and the difference between simulated processes and real ones, and proposing a filter based on emergence as a first guide in assessing the authenticity of these processes in AI.
There are several lessons that can already be drawn from the current research programs on strong AI and building conscious machines, even if they arguably have not produced fruits yet. The first one is that functionalist approaches to consciousness do not account for the key importance of subjective experience and can be easily confounded by the way in which algorithms work and succeed. Authenticity and emergence are key concepts that can be useful in discerning valid approaches versus invalid ones and can clarify instances where algorithms are considered conscious, such as Sophia or LaMDA. Subjectivity and embeddedness become key notions that should also lead us to re‐examine the ethics of decision delegation. In addition, the focus on subjective experience shifts what is relevant in our understanding of ourselves as human beings and as an image of God, namely, in de‐emphasizing intellectuality in favor of experience and contemplation over action.
The aim of the article is a comparative analysis of human intelligence and artificial intelligence, as well as the search for a methodological approach that would allow resolving the contradictions that arise between different areas of knowledge in their understanding. It is proved that comprehension of the essence of artificial intelligence reaches a paradigmatic level and the solution of discussion issues at the level of a culture-centric paradigm is proposed. Through a comparative analysis of human intelligence and artificial intelligence, the insufficiency of both the techno-scientific approach to their perception, which significantly narrows the understanding of phenomena and the philosophical approach, which takes science to the level of high abstractions, is proved. It is recommended to switch to the sociocultural dimension of artificial intelligence and human intelligence, which, recognizing the merits of technoscience and philosophy, on the one hand, takes into account the specifics of the sociocultural context and, in this regard, removes the limited perception of artificial intelligence as an element of the technosphere and reveals the numerous connections of the technosphere with other spheres of life society, and on the other—thanks to the last circumstance, it concretizes the philosophical vision of intelligence. Recognizing the highest value of man as the creator of culture and the result of its creation, the authors of the article emphasize that human intelligence, due to the presence of special substrate components that determine its existence in the space-time continuum, is incommensurable with artificial intelligence.
Technology is part of all life forms. This does not mean that all technology is beneficial for life. Technological evolution in the human sphere holds promises to attain the status of singularity. This identifies the so-called Fourth Industrial Revolution. What is at stake includes the emergence of intelligent and conscious super computers and robots, conscious materialism, the possibility of human immortality and the emergence of the trans-human. In the ambit of a new artificial environment in which humans will live, the question of being must be addressed again. How will all of this affect the question of being human and new conceptions of 'self'? To what extent will the possibility of techno-religion replace traditional religions with its promise of eradicating poverty, illness and death? This article focuses on these and related issues to identify possibilities of a new artificially envisaged lifestyle.
Children have been increasingly becoming active users of the Internet and, although any segment of the population is susceptible to falling victim to the existing risks, they in particular are one of the most vulnerable. Thus, some of the major scourges of this cyber-society are paedophile behaviours on the Internet, child pornography or sexual exploitation of children. In light of this background, Negobot is a conversational agent posing as a child, in chats, social networks and other channels suffering from paedophile behaviour. As a conversational agent, Negobot, has a strong technical base of Natural Language Processing and information retrieval, as well as Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. However, the most innovative proposal of Negobot is to consider the conversation itself as a game, applying game theory. In this context, Negobot proposes, first, a competitive game in which the system identifies the best strategies for achieving its goal, to obtain information that leads us to infer if the subject involved in a conversation with the agent has paedophile tendencies, while our actions do not bring the alleged offender to leave the conversation due to a suspicious behaviour of the agent.
Chatterbox Challenge is an annual web-based contest for artificial conversational systems, ACE. The 2010 instantiation was the tenth consecutive contest held between March and June in the 60th year following the publication of Alan Turing's influential disquisition 'computing machinery and intelligence'. Loosely based on Turing's viva voca interrogator-hidden witness imitation game, a thought experiment to ascertain a machine's capacity to respond satisfactorily to unrestricted questions, the contest provides a platform for technology comparison and evaluation. This paper provides an insight into emotion content in the entries since the 2005 Chatterbox Challenge. The authors find that synthetic textual systems, none of which are backed by academic or industry funding, are, on the whole and more than half a century since Weizenbaum's natural language understanding experiment, little further than Eliza in terms of expressing emotion in dialogue. This may be a failure on the part of the academic AI community for ignoring the Turing test as an engineering challenge.
Telling lies often requires creating a story about an experience or attitude that does not exist. As a result, false stories may be qualitatively different from true stories. The current project investigated the features of linguistic style that distinguish between true and false stories. In an analysis of five independent samples, a computer-based text analysis program correctly classified liars and truth-tellers at a rate of 67% when the topic was constant and a rate of 61% overall. Compared to truth-tellers, liars showed lower cognitive complexity, used fewer self-references and other-references, and used more negative emotion words.
This paper provides a theoretical perspective for dealing with the initial entry stage of interpersonal interaction. The seven axioms and 21 theorems presented suggest a set of research priorities for studying the development of interpersonal relationships. The paper concludes with a discussion of some of the problems to be considered if the theory is to be extended beyond the initial stages of interaction.
How much do we humans enjoy our current status as the most intelligent beings on earth? Enough to try to stop our own inventions from surpassing us in smarts? If so, we'd better pull the plug right now, because if Ray Kurzweil is right, we've only got until about 2020 before computers outpace the human brain in computational power. Kurzweil, artificial intelligence expert and author of The Age of Intelligent Machines, shows that technological evolution moves at an exponential pace. Further, he asserts, in a sort of swirling postulate, time speeds up as order increases, and vice versa. He calls this the "Law of Time and Chaos," and it means that although entropy is slowing the stream of time down for the universe overall, and thus vastly increasing the amount of time between major events, in the eddy of technological evolution the exact opposite is happening, and events will soon be coming faster and more furiously. This means that we'd better figure out how to deal with conscious machines as soon as possible--they'll soon not only be able to beat us at chess, they'll likely demand civil rights, and they may at last realize the very human dream of immortality. The Age of Spiritual Machines is compelling and accessible, and not necessarily best read from front to back--it's less heavily historical if you jump around (Kurzweil encourages this). Much of the content of the book lays the groundwork to justify Kurzweil's timeline, providing an engaging primer on the philosophical and technological ideas behind the study of consciousness. Instead of being a gee-whiz futurist manifesto, Spiritual Machines reads like a history of the future, without too much science fiction dystopianism. Instead, Kurzweil shows us the logical outgrowths of current trends, with all their attendant possibilities. This is the book we'll turn to when our computers
Darwin did not focus on deception. Only a few sentences in his book mentioned the issue. One of them raised the very interesting question of whether it is difficult to voluntarily inhibit the emotional expressions that are most difficult to voluntarily fabricate. Another suggestion was that it would be possible to unmask a fabricated expression by the absence of the difficult-to-voluntarily-generate facial actions. Still another was that during emotion body movements could be more easily suppressed than facial expression. Research relevant to each of Darwin's suggestions is reviewed, as is other research on deception that Darwin did not foresee.
My conversation with “Eugene goostman,” the chatbot that’s all over the news for allegedly passing the turing test
- S Aaronson
Chatterbox challenge as a test-bed for synthetic emotions. Creating synthetic emotions through technological and robotic advancements
- J Vallverdú
- H Shah
- D Casacuberta
Information ethics, its nature and scope
- L Floridi