Isaac Asimov and Philip Dick in novels about robots and androids often explored what it means to be human. In doing so they have noted that Artificial Intelligence is mostly about thinking and being conscious of thinking. But what about feeling? How about emotions? Can androids “feel” like humans, forge...
Category: Mind and machines
Are we zombies?
What is the difference between thinking and appearing to be thinking? How can one tell them apart? An interesting answer comes from philosophy of mind in the shape and form of zombies. A philosophical zombie (or “p-zombie”) is a hypothetical being indistinguishable from a human but without conscious experience, or “qualia”. When pinched, a p-zombie...
Unfriendly AI: tales from the battlefield
Isaac Asimov, confronted with the problem of imagining future intelligent machines with potentially destructive capabilities, suggested his famous three laws of robotics. The first law forbids a robot from harming a human; the second compels it to obey human commands unless they conflict with the first law; the third demands...
Measuring the IQ of intelligent machines
How can we know if intelligent machines are getting smarter? The simple answer is by measuring their IQ. Nevertheless there are some obvious, and perhaps some less obvious, problems with such an approach. The most obvious hindrance is the plethora of AI approaches and methodologies that technologists follow in building...
Machines that feel
A recent study in machine learning reported a high degree of accuracy in machines understanding the character and intentions of humans. Mario Rojas and colleagues at Barcelona University together with researchers at the Department of Psychology at Princeton University developed software that can learn to “read” human traits from human...
Robotic eunuchs in space
Robonaut R2, the first human-like astronaut robot was awakened at the International Space Station in August 2011, and happily started tweeting to its thousands of human followers on Earth. The humanoid robot sports a torso with two human arms and hands, wears a golden helmet with a visor and looks...
Intellectronics and living computers
The Polish writer Stanislaw Lem (1921-2006) is one of the most influential science-fiction visionaries of all time. Mostly known for his novel Solaris (1961), which was later made into a film by Andrei Tarkovsky, Lem has been prolific in his fiction, often blending social satire with engineering fantasy. Space travel, human contact with alien...
Animism and AI
Animism transcends all human culture. It is considered the proto-religion of our species, the first explanation we humans had about the workings of the world. Animism comes from our cognitive inability to distinguish between our psyche and the external world of animate and inanimate objects (read my post of Piaget’s...
Ghosts in the machines
The Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget noted that in children’s’ minds there is an implicit understanding of the world in which all events are the product of consciousness or intention. Things happen for a reason and never by chance. Piaget’s discovery has tremendous repercussions in the way we understand ourselves and our relationship...
Dreaming of electric sheep
Renown neurobiologists Christof Koch and Giulio Tononi recently suggested an alternative Turing Test to examine whether an intelligent machine is conscious or not: instead of having a human-machine conversation they propose a psychological test where the machine decides through a dialogue if a series of photographs are “right” or “wrong”. Their strategy assumes that...