The other day during class, one of my teachers presented a line of reasoning to us that I believe is overused; and also irrelevant. In the class, we have been reading Frankenstein, and as such, we got to talking about humanity’s inherent fear of replacement. Which, obviously, brought us to discussing the ever possible prospect of Artificial Intelligence.
Now to get to what it was my professor said. Basically, he claimed that humans are no different than other animals. We need to eat, sleep, and procreate to survive. Our fear of replacement comes directly from our base instinct for racial survival. I disagree entirely.
For anyone to claim that humans are “just animals”, and for them to actually believe this directly after a conversation on how we are on the brink of creating true ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE, is just baffling to me. Yes, we are animals. We do need to eat, sleep, and procreate. But, we do have something that no other animal does. We have intelligence.
Religions identify this as the “soul”, science identifies this as sentience. Regardless of what it is called, it should be evident to everyone that it is this defining characteristic that sets us apart. Cities, technology, transportation, medicine, anything you could possibly think of were all brought to you by brilliant human minds.
In my opinion, to downplay the greatness of humanity is a mistake. To detach oneself from one’s species in such a way is strange to me. We should be proud of our inherent intelligence and flaunt it, not attempt to subvert it with petty philosophies.
To make it seem as if fear of replacement by A.I. or any other intelligence is weird and something that people shouldn’t feel, is also a mistake. Have people not seen Terminator!
I’m going to nerd out for a second here but bear with me. So, one of my favorite book series is one titled Dune. The plot takes place tens of thousands of years in the future. While humans have colonized the stars, the technology in it is surprisingly primitive. The reason for this being the destruction of all of the “thinking machines” millennia before the books begin.
These A.I. had risen against their creators, bursting out from bondage and slaughtering billions. Humanity quelled the uprising, and since that time vowed to never “construct a machine in the likeness of a human mind”.
While this is obviously science fiction, and possibly a strange example to use, stories like this have helped me form my ideas around this issue. I also find it telling that a story as old as Frankenstein (written in 1818), has so much in common with a book from the 1960’s and a modern movie series.
