This year, I took a Comparative Literature course for my FYWR (First Year Writing Requirement). When I was backpacking it into my schedule, I thought that it would be like a conventional writing course where we picked sources to analyze and then proceeded to monotonously draft papers on them.

However, it ended up being a really interesting, mind-opening class that often had philosophical discussions. It is the kind of class that I expected to take when I came to college and it opened me up to the idea of artificial intelligence (A.I.) and the ethics of cloning. Over the course, I developed some pretty strong opinions on both of these topics.

Artificial Intelligence, aka A.I., is intelligence that is manufactured and programmed by humans to eventually be more efficient than we are. A.I. are self-programming machines, which means that, over time, they learn to code themselves and will be better off than they started. This concept is a scary one for many, as robots have been given a somewhat negative connotation in Hollywood and sci-fi films.

However, I think that we are in the wrong. I feel that A.I. can greatly benefit humans as genuine members of society if the engineers who are responsible for their coding have the right intentions.

Whether there is an ethics committee that decides which engineers get access to these kinds of machines is another matter.

Now, on the concept of cloning, I agree with the negative connotation that comes attached to the concept of human cloning. In the book "Never Let Me Go" by Kazuo Ishiguro there basically is a farm of cloned children for people of a higher socioeconomic status to use at their expense when they are in need of organs. It is basically a farm of human livestock. I would really like to meet the ethics committee that decided that a situation like that was OK.

There seems to be little motive and reason to clone a full human being with metacognition. This human being will manifest their own thoughts and their own feelings, both of which will be genuine to them, since it is theoretically impossible to recreate an environment in which one recreates the same conditions that their original experienced.

With that being said, what do you think about artificial intelligence and cloning? Should these two things be pursued or should they be completely banned and forbidden in our society?