Data from Star Trek was an android. He was perfect perhaps as an android but was he a man? No and he realized this and this is why he longed to actually be a man. He realized that he was made to be a machine, the ultimate machine…and he did everything in his power to evolve but just how far could he go?
Human beings can “perfect” in a sense machines but remember how long it has taken for the process to make a human being a human being.
Unless this human simulation has consciousness, an organic body, human DNA, which bleeds, feels love and hate, a sense of wonderment, has great imagination - has literally evolved into a human being as evolution planned, it is still a simulation, not a human being.
Why would a machine need to look like us in the future?
A machine that looked just like me sometime in the future might in some real sense be more perfect than me but then again, since it could not be human like me, it could never be as perfect…even if it could be more functioning.
Our kind of consciousness sets us apart, don’t you think?
And perhaps organic life is merely the necessary precursor to the perfected mechanized life form, otherwise incapable of forming on such a planet as Earth.
Perhaps like the ape to the human or even the parent to the child, you are but the caterpillar to your much superior replacement.
Perhaps the wisdom is that each stage keeps replacing itself until it finally reaches a level of intelligence to understand how to not go any further - to learn how to be joyfully and successfully stable (aka “The End of Days”).
for any machine to look like you in the future, it would need help, from you and from those surrounding you. And if it were to create a perfect copy of you, still would not be perfect.
But what if a perfect human simulation becomes indistinguishable from the human, and no data remains on what the keys with which to appraise authenticity, to remote future civilizations?
What if, sometime far away and in the far future, technology can produce perfect simulations?
Will there remain, even a scintilla of a need to sustain a different name?
I agree that there should, but will they , whoever ‘they’ will be even find it useful or advisable?
Or more poignantly , what if, the perfect simulation may become ‘alive’, living at some point? In that case the definition of man may alter the non-humanness of a simulation.
As long as human beings can distinguish themselves from machines, however (by knowing the development or by knowing the design … a.s.o.), they should call a machine “machine” and a man “man”.
Racism?
Certainly at no time would society attempt to promote the notion that women are equal to men nor that blacks are equal to whites, so certainly they would never promote that extremely intelligent, skilled, and autonomous machines are equal in rights to humans. Seriously?
I can’t agree with that one. Biology is not what constitutes life. Life is the spirit, the effort and behavior, not the physical mechanisms involved.
The question was whether humans can be distinguished from machines even then, if the machines have already become almost indistinguishable. I think that in that case it is only possible to distinguish them biologically.
For now, yes. However cannot a proposition be made
that sometime in the future, living Being can be made in the laboratory, where those would be living, biological, yet artificiality created beings?
There are ethical standards that stymie that effort, now, but once it has become acceptable, just like
assisted suicide, testube babies, artificial
insemination ,transplant of artificial organs, it may hold a future.
It is possible, that there will be no human culture anymore but only a machine culture. So that the humans will only have a chance if they will coexist in the sense of an adaptation to the machines (and not the other way around).
In an economical sense, the “Industrial Revolution” means this: Human beings are needed in order to replace them by machines till the time when they will not be needed.
So the “Industrial Revolution” seems to be a paradox when it comes to the general development of human beings.
Economization as a rationalization seems to contradict the evolution of human beings.
This paradox or contradiction can only be solved, if we interpret our machines as something that can dominate us.
What shall we do?
It is unlikely that we will be able to get before the “Industrial Revolution”, unless we will have a global dictatorship that will forbid machines or a natural catastrophe will lead to the xtiction of all intelligent machines and the survival of a few human beings.
