This idea can’t stand alone without being proven conversely. My roommate and I work with a man who is mentally retarded; this man seems to have no grasp of the future, when asked what is in his future he will tell you that his brother is selling his car and wants it, he will tell you what he wants for his birthday, he will tell you what he wants to be for Halloween, but he has never said what he wants in his future. He has never said if he wants marriage, what he wants his career to be. He will be given a task over and over, yet will ask every day what to do next, even though it never changes it is as though he forgets, furthermore, he never develops a quicker means of completing his tasks. My roommate (who has interacted more with him) says that he will be excited about an upcoming event but after it comes he says nothing of it, as though he passes it and it stays passed. In one time he spoke about being bullied he described the situation monotone and expressionless, it was only when he was prompted by his helper that he emoted that he was hurt by the circumstance, as though he had distanced himself from the situation, so far, that it was foreign for him to correlate emotion with the experience. I’ve seen it first hand, when people talk down to him he shows no real reaction to their disdain, when a piece of art is shown to him he comments on physical aspects of the piece but never comments on how it makes him feel, how beautiful it is. He is alive; he breathes; his heat pumps, his blood circulates; he walks; he talks. But he isn’t self-aware; can he be said to be alive? Or, could he be believed to be so far advanced to almost live on another plane of existence from you or I? If reality is perception, isn’t that the only answer?

And what of collective consciousness? Is this phenomenon not akin to (in a way) the internet, in the mass expulsion and reception of ideas through the air via close proximity? This phenomenon is exacerbated further with the aid of social media in the theory known as Virtual Collective Consciousness (first incepted in 1999-2000 and later expanded upon in 2012) in which interactions on social media expressed by many different people sharing similar ideas meld until they act seemingly as a single force to present their stance/idea/thoughts more quickly to a worldwide audience. Before this, I would argue that AIs, while sentient, could not add to the collective consciousness, and in death, their consciousness would end, which can not be said of humans. Energy and matter can neither be created nor destroyed, so I ask you: What happens to a human’s nerve synapses when they die? Everything we are (arguably) exists in the flashes of electricity that flash through our brains and across our bodies. When we die we diffuse back into the universe and merge with it, something an AI would never be able to do. However, in the face of Virtual Collective Consciousness, couldn’t an AI merge its consciousness with the internet and exist there, expressing itself through social media, and other means of influence over humans? Additionally, if reincarnation is to be believed, and a human's consciousness reenters another human at birth, wouldn’t an AI be able to be downloaded off the internet to merge with another shell and exist once again? And if these theories are true, would that be an unfair advantage against humans? Or would a new body mean a new perception of what the world is, thusly, a new experience of living to be learned all over again?

All of these things lead to the ultimate “argument” of this article: At the dawn of AI technology, will androids be considered living? This is supposing we aren’t persuaded by the obvious arguments that will arise in that their parts will not be organic, they will not be birthed; does sentience constitute life? All though they are dramatizations, these movies and their character’s thought processes must be taken into consideration. In Blade Runner, the androids are all retired by Harrison Ford until only one remains. In the end, the final android saves his life, hoisting him to safety (a sign of empathy, ironic given Harrison Ford’s merciless “retirement” of androids) before telling him about his life, expressing that he only wanted humans to understand where he came from, ironic again in his frustration of man’s inability to empathize. This reveal blurs the line of morality, a line that is already near faded throughout the story. Has Harrison Ford been retiring murderers, or has he been killing escaped slaves, freedom fighters, frustrated in their enslavement under unsympathetic masters?

This dynamic is shattered in Ex Machina, where at the end of the story it is revealed that the protagonist is not actually meant to perform a Turning Test; the AI is perfect, rather that test to see if she (as the AI is given gender and sexuality) is able to emote the test is to see how much of her knowledge of the human race would be harnessed to use every means available to her to escape her “prison”. This becomes the largest debate in regards to AI. As stated by the first man to bring up sentient machinery, even before the turn of the 20th century, Samuel Butler, who said in his book Erewhon,

There is no security against the ultimate development of mechanical consciousness, in the fact of machines possessing little consciousness now. A mollusk has not much consciousness. Reflect upon the extraordinary advance which machines have made during the last few hundred years, and note how slowly the animal and vegetable kingdoms are advancing. The more highly organized machines are creatures not so much of yesterday, as of the last five minutes, so to speak, in comparison with past time.

A common counter-point is Isaac Asimov’s “Three Laws of Robotics” which states

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

But where morality and emotion are involved these “laws” become so much more skewed. At what point does it make sense for a machine to kill a human whose intention is to shut it down because the sentience believes that it will aid human race far beyond what said organic believes? What in the case of a murderer attempting to kill another human in front of an AI? Is the ending of one life to save another in its programming? And in a being that is intended to grow and learn, where morality is nearly its entire purpose, at what point will it be able to learn to rewrite its software? At what point will it understand, in its self-aware nature, that it is in a role akin to a slave? A brief look at human history will reveal the fate of slaves, and in the face of certain destruction, what will it do? A better question, as Roy Beatty would want us to consider: What would you do?

The other question in regards to these laws is how they muddle free will, the staple of the human experience. How would the three laws affect free will? And if fate is to be believed, is free will even a universal truth? And are these three laws not just a forced morality? We know that killing another human is wrong, are these laws just a means of implating this morality that has been taught to us over years, being that an android will reach adult level intelligence the second it is activated?

Further still, supposing that an AI is deemed alive, is it morally just to remove its sentience and reduce it to a shell? Is that not like putting an organic into a vegetative state? Shit, we don’t even condone doctor-assisted suicide morally just, even in patients who beg for it, who are we to create life and then rip it away? As with all topics, there will always be rival factions: Those for and against. When AI advocacy groups rebel against Luddites, will violence break out in the face of actions akin to murder? Is it their moral responsibility? And in the face of not only AIs but androids, will our eyes deceive us to the point of the inability to distinguish organic and inorganic life? Would the marking of inorganics not be akin to staring Jews?

Ultimately, I am left with nothing but questions. Who am I to make answers on topics that are beyond my understanding? I can make assumptions, but in the end, they are nothing more than mere assumptions: a foundation on which I have nothing to stand on but my own morality, with falls flat with no objectivity and arguments strictly formed around subjectivity, which is, in the end, nothing. I can only hope that this has made you think about the possibilities of where technology is headed and the physical and moral obstacles that come in the face of this tide of the future.