(OT): UNPLUGGING GHANDI

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Kurt Anderson, in a 'thought' piece for the New York Times Op-Ed page, predicts that the 21st century will see the emergence of a civil-rights movement for machines. Noting Ray Kurzweil's notion that computers will be considered 'sentient' within the next 30 years, the author foresees the emergence of a civil-rights movement for cyber-life, and that the struggle for equality between man and machine will occupy the place of '...earlier struggles against the Catholic Church, ... and abortion." I noted the oddity of Anderson's allying a sort of 'Pro-life' movement for machines with struggles against God and God's definition of life: purposive, no doubt, but somewhat unsettling to this Catholic reader. Addressing Kurzweil directly, I would be led to ask just what it is he imagines love to be, and how it would come to pass that computers could...love. If all human content is to reducible to mere...electrochemistry...then the existentialists and nihilists were right--we are but fancy mud heaps. Establishing a parity between human life and synthetic electronic life on the one hand, and cloning increasingly more bizarre hybrid mutations of humans for organ harvest and research, man is quickly marching into the Pit, bidden by the gods of Profit, Efficiency, and Expedience. Add Inhumanity, and you've got the Four Horsemen of the Enlightenment.

-- Spidey (free@last.Amen), November 28, 1999

Answers

Actually, thinking of humans as "merely" biological/physical, and thus at least potentially imitated via technology, just puts us on the level of the rest of life on planet earth. Not a horrible place to be, in my opinion.

But no need to panic. When artificial intelligence/robotics gets beyond the level of insect abilities (not even there yet), I'll start to worry about robot rights.

-- You Know... (notme@nothere.junk), November 28, 1999.


Spidey, thnaks for posting. And God knows there is so much more about this to be said.

-- Mr. Mike (mikeabn@aol.com), November 28, 1999.

How cleanly you put truth into words, Spidey. This is truly intelligent perception. Your piece is insightful and brilliant. Bravo, Good Man, and Thank You!

-- Faith Weaver (suzsolutions@yahoo.com), November 28, 1999.

Haha! Up pops this wispy memory of a story where sentient machines were destroyed when someone asked them: "Why?" The map is not the territory.

-- Faith Weaver (suzsolutions@yahoo.com), November 28, 1999.

Forgot to mention that the last line described the emergence of a 21st century robot-Ghandi.

-- Spidey (free@work.now), November 28, 1999.


Reminded of Stephen Hawking's prediction: that genetic manipulation will be mankind's only recourse in the struggle to compete with ever-evolving electronic life. Grim thought, that.

-- Carter Grouping (Barking@Mad.England), November 28, 1999.

Computers have reached the intelligence level of a slug at this point in time. Slugs don't have much to look forward to from us besides a good stomping on. Our nearest animal relatives are still tortured and killed as a matter of routine. Man's barbarism towards fellow man reaches new heights every day.

I see little hope for computers.

-- Y2KGardener (govegan@aloha.net), November 28, 1999.

The question; "Can a machine think?" was answered definatively by Lady Ada Lovelace, the first computer programmer. She said, "A machine cannot be said to think as it can only do what we tell it to do."

AI is an interesting field from a philosophical standpoint, but most research on designing "intelligent machines" has been given up. Most computer scientists feel that it's just too hard.

-- John Ainsworth (ainsje00@wfu.edu), November 28, 1999.


Faith,

I believe that was an episode of the British TV show, "The Prisoner", that you're having the wispy memory of.

-- Bokonon (bok0non@my-Deja.com), November 29, 1999.


I do hope some of you who contributed to this thread will find and appreciate this quote from The Urantia Book:

-- Faith Weaver (suzsolutions@yahoo.com), December 05, 1999.


I do hope some of you who contributed to this thread will find and appreciate this quote from The Urantia Book (p. 2077):

-- Faith Weaver (suzsolutions@yahoo.com), December 05, 1999.

(Whoops. Sorry. Here's the quote:)

-- Faith Weaver (suzsolutions@yahoo.com), December 05, 1999.

(Whoops. Sorry. Here's the quote:)

To say that mind "emerged" from matter explains nothing. If the universe were merely a mchanism and mind were unapart from matter, we would never have two differing interpretations of any observed phenomenon. The concepts of truth, beauty, and goodness are not inherent in either physics or chemistry. A machine cannot 'know', much less know truth, hunger for righteousness, and cherish goodness.

Science may be physical, but the mind of the truth-discerning scientist is at once supermaterial. Matter knows not truth, neither can it love mercy nor delight in spiritual realities. Moral convictions based on spiritual enlightnement and rooted in human experience are just as real and certain as mathematical deductions based on physical observations, but on another and higher level.

If men were only machines, they would react more or less uniformly to a material universe. Individuality, much less personality, would be nonexistent.

-- Faith Weaver (suzsolutions@yahoo.com), December 05, 1999.


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