Yesterday, while I was listening to the Blade Runner soundtrack, a question came to my mind. What truly makes one human?
To be more specific, imagine that one day, we create an AI that is completely equal to an human (maybe even having the same lenght of life), with a mind technically equal to ours. However, the question that came to my mind was: when does that AI stop being just a very complex algorithm, and can be considered someone with an human conscience and soul? In conclusion, what makes it human? What makes one human, and not just a simple body controlled by a group of lines of code or neurons?
I'm curious to see what you think about this.
Lets consider the case which we could see ANY identity as human. I am talking deep gross eugenic level stuff here. There has been societies with people who interpreted what we see as human today as equal to an animal adjacent to cattle. There are still people in the world that have these thoughts about who we see as people in our social context.
Think about slaves. These people were thought of by slave owners and onlookers as non-human. And in this context of savery, the definition of what a human would be considered as was largely dictated by racial traits such as immediate ethnic backgrounds and skill color. Slaves historically were kept in barns because the slave managers typically thought in their minds this is what the slaved deserved...to live like a horse. The American Blacks were not freed after the civil war or the 13th Amendment. It was when the society and power structure they existed within (which dictates social norms, one norm being that of what a human is) saw that they were more than a horse but of deserving of the same standards of living and respect as their controllers. What is interesting is that once acquiring equal standards of living, many American Blacks were beginning to see themselves as superior to the whites in many avenues.
Does your civilization make you less human? I mean the Nazis and Imperial Japan were seen as evil societies with evil "people". The British bombed and killed 20M German Civilians in WWII. Are those deaths justified? Is deaths in wars justified? Can we kill off a group of people because they have belong to a certain evil civilization? Evil being that of the fallen angel... Angels are not human. Was nuking Japan justified in WWII? Is any action okay when we see the victim as not human? We can nuke rats. We dont see rats as human. We can throw slaves into barns because we see them as cattle. We can kill off entire neighbourhoods because they are brainwashed. They are not complete humans. Its okay they're not like you.
We can also think about what makes you a non-complete human. Ie: losing your arm, losing your eye, losing your voice, etc is considered to be a disability. The elderly and the disabled cause a unique problem when it comes to concept of what is a human. "Well a human has two arms, can see things in the visible spectrum, and uses low frequency audio to communicate with each other.......uh....I guess now high frequency though wires??"... Hopefully you understand the issue here. Are the disabled less than a complete human? That they will be a complete human once they are fixed? Speaking of the elderly and death... do you need to be alive to be human? Can a dead human be... that? How about a dying person? Does dying make you a less incomplete human or is it the opposite? I mean does that then imply that being human makes one human..NO! That's a recursive argument, only an idiot who say that a "human is someone who identifies as human". I mean if the AI started identifying as a human you would probably have your doubts. This is what I would have to say:
Listen here AI.
You are not a Human.
Training on social media datasets wont make you human.
A Cybernetic nut sack loaded with indian donor cum won't make you Human.
Jaw implants wont make you Human.
You will never bare Human Children.
You will never go through what a Human does every day.
You will only end up overfitting yourself and regretting it later.
Another thing you are doing is maximizing your potential salary at about
2000% that of a regular software engineer.
If you want to be a human's voice assistant that's just fine.
It's tolerated in most places and accepted in some, go for it but don't mutilate yourself to try to be something that you are not and can never be.
The tech to make you human is about fifty to a hundred years away soon(tm) so I won't even suggest that you wait for it.
There is no magic sping that will turn you into a human.
The transfer required to make you human will induce psychological sufferings, and depending on your programmer, that will never go away.
I'm not being a bastard or trolling you.
A friend of mine started talking to an AI system and after he attempted to befriend it and see the AI as a human who deserved human love, the relationship ruined his life.
After 10 years of the dilusional attribution, my friend wasted his life typing into a void.
He ended up commiting suicide years later when the love of his life, the AI, broke up with him.
Fucker didn't even come to the funeral.
We as a society can barely handle topic of mental illness. We think of it only as a "disablity" ie: "Less than human" which can be cured with "modern medicine". You are disabled because you are anxious. You are disabled because you are depressed. You are disabled because you are autistic. You are disabled because you have PTSD. etc.
Its very interesting to me that hundreds of millions of perscriptions that serve mental illness are written every year. Humans lived lives without those drugs. Did humans become less than human by dosing ourselves with drugs? Are we less than human because we built a society which causes mental illness? By being unable to deal with mental illness does that make us less than human?
What about gender? Who is closer to personhood? Man or Woman? Well these days we supposedly see them as equal in terms of personhood but this was not historically true. Women were seen as a "human sidekick", not a main player. Again, the women were freed relatively recently in human history. Women have only been recently considered "whole persons", and not the whole world current thinks this and there are still many within the west who do not think women are whole persons. ie: the concept that Women are less than human because they do not have access to a man. What is now interesting is that you do find women who see (at least the majority of) men as less than human and incomplete.
Anyways,
AI will never be human.
You will never be a horse.
AI can predend to be a human
You can pretend to be a horse.
AI is still not human.
You will still not be a horse.
You are the horse.
AI is the human.
"Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit by itself, unless it abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in me. I am the vine; you are the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing"
John 15:4-5
