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Article 1871 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: scot@catzen.GUN.de (Scot W. Stevenson)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Man vs. Machine?
Message-ID: <Yp4.IpvQB4k@catzen.GUN.de>
Date: 5 Dec 91 05:34:26 GMT
References: <2621@richsun.cpg.trs.reuter.com> <YAMAUCHI.91Nov27024148@indigo.cs.rochester.edu>
Reply-To: scot@catzen.GUN.de
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Hello Jerry,

>If one considers history, one will see that it has long been the
>practice of human beings to attempt to replace not only other
>species (wolves, for instance), but also to replace each other
>(consider Europeans vs. Native Americans).  

I'm not sure if this comparison will work. Humans compete with wolves for
food, or rather wolves eat things that humans would like to eat, and
are a danger to humans. It goes without saying that humans compete with
other humans. In which way are humans in competition with machines? They
can't eat grain and I have little use for electricity. 

Add to this that machines do not have the inbuilt drive to preserve the
'species' or rather gene identity that all biological systems have - 
unless we are stupid enough to give them one. 

>I submit that the true danger is not in machine superiority per se,
>but in machines' belief in their own superiority. 

Rrrrrr, this assumes all kinds of 'ego' questions, a sense of status and
social ranking of the same type that humans have. Even if (when)
computers become superior in a larger number of fields, this does not mean
this will mean anything to them. I have a chess program that can and does
utterly destroy me on the board - so? 

I doubt very much that intelligent machines will just be a machine copy
of humans with all of the human emotional attributes - the 'interface'
or part that humans will deal with will obviously have to be able
to simulate and cope and understand human emotions just for communication
reasons. But why give them self-preservation and all of that?

I have always felt that this is a major fault of the Turing Test - it does
not test for an intelligent machine, but for a machine that can simulate
a human. Humans are more than intelligence; the nuances of human communication
and language should be part of the interface and not of the machine itself.

Let's have a Turing Test so that the machine must simulate a dog...

							Bye, Scot



>If machines are
>truly superior, and therefore wield power over us, and if they
>believe themselves to be superior, would they not attempt to replace
>us, as we have attempted to replace other biological creatures?
-- 
          Scot W. Stevenson at scot@catzen.GUN.de in Essen, Germany 
		Thank you for telling me what a Nostromo is!


