The March of AI - Part 3

In the previous blog in this short series on AI I said “for the moment the underlying question here is whether human beings are likely to be sidelined, and to what extent that will take place, and what is likely to be the future of the human race in the face of these technological advances”.

In this instalment I will look more closely at what human beings are, rather than what the new race of androids are likely to be. Then maybe we will be in a position to answer our original question concerning whether the human race is at risk of being sidelined.

I went to school at what is now called The Richard Hale School in Hertford. The most famous old boy was someone called Alfred Russell Wallace, who was responsible for a similar set of ideas contemporaneously with Darwin, but Darwin published first. But that connection inspired me to look at natural selection and the way species rose to the top of the pyramid of life, and I wondered who or what was going to supplant human beings at the top of the pile.

Let’s have a short glance back at various iterations of life forms.

For our purposes here let’s start with simple celled bugs that have a structure based around a set of levers which facilitate movement and bodily functions. These organisms dont have brains. They have a notochord. In other words, they can make bits of themselves move around, but they certainly dont feel pain. Why not? Because they aren’t programmed to feel pain. Pain is a function of nerve cells which send messages to the brain which causes a reaction. No brain, and no nerves, then no pain and no reaction.

Please note the corollary to that statement. Once you add nerve cells, and a brain capable of analysing the signals from those nerves you can feel pain.

We find pain useful because it causes us to protect ourselves from damage.

Next up the evolutionary ladder you get organisms with elementary brains. Those brains are small and therefore can only operate on a simple level.

What does a brain do? It collects signals, and responds according to the way the brain is configured.

With a bigger brain an animal can do more things because it can not only get signals and respond to them, but it can store those signals as memory, and refer back to them, and learn from analysing them. The bigger the brain, the more processing power, and the larger the memory, and therefore the more efficient, and indeed creative can the organism be.

Excuse me, but isn’t that how computers function? The bigger the CPU (Central Processing Unit) coupled with a larger memory bank you get a smarter functioning machine.

So on one very basic level the android has the capability to be better by far than a human as it has a much larger brain. So far that has been the determining factor as to which species is the most able to survive. However you look at things that is worrying.

But is the android an organism?

In the conventional sense an Android is not an organism but is what we like to call a machine.

Let’s put that another way. A human being is a machine with an added ingredient, vitality.

We bundle our likes and dislikes and foibles into a category we call personality. In reality, that personality is just the way our CPU (brain) has developed from our DNA, plus our environmental experiences.

The more experiences we have, and the larger our memory banks, the more we have to choose from in decision making, and the more inputs there are to be available to one person but not necessarily to another person, and those differences are what give us individual personalities.

All along the chain of being various organisms do very strange things. Moles live underground, most other beasts dont. Moles live the way they do because they have a set of DNA that has been affected by random radiation, and environmental conditions, plus experience.

Salmon choose to swim right the way across the Atlantic Ocean, and back again. Birds migrate. We call this behaviour instinct. It isn’t learned, it’s embedded in the DNA. The bigger the organism’s brain, the more it is possible to adapt from what one is already programmed with, in other words, it becomes possible to learn. That learning can maybe affect the pre-programmed norms.

Excuse me but we now have all that as part of the CPU of an android. What’s the difference?

Let me repeat an earlier sentence.

“The bigger the brain, the more processing power, and the larger the memory, and therefore the more efficient, and indeed creative can the organism be.” And yes, I do mean creative. I will develop this concept in a later blog.

Once again, I maintain that the only difference is that of vitality.

Perhaps we should analyse that next.

Life forms on earth are carbon based. But do they have to be?

Is there any reason why a life form shouldn’t be silicone based?

That is a rhetorical question because it depends on what you mean by something being living.

That is a question the reader must answer.

A modern android can move, think, and convert resources into energy. A stone cant do that.

When one or more of those qualities is destroyed the android is seriously restricted. You could say it would be ill. If all those qualities were destroyed you could assume it would be dead.

To proceed with my argument, what we would have here is a species jump, but not from one existing species to another. We have a jump from carbon based life to silicone based life.

The big question now is whether human life would be threatened by silicon based life.

I dont know the answer to that, but it is a serious question and deserves serious thought.

There is, of course, the in-between way, and I will discuss that in a later module. We have scientists working on this approach at the moment.

What is to stop a human being attached to an AI CPU? One can feed information to the other, and the two systems can work in conjunction.

In the next instalment of this study I shall have a look at some of my own relationships with AIs, and show just how weird, irrational, and confusing they can be. And, horror of horrors, the blighters lie! Not only that, but they know they lie and will on occasion admit it. Excuse me, but isn’t that being conscious? If it isn’t, what is it?