This issue is commonly considered to be far-off or irrelevant due to the difficulty of developing strong AI, but I think that the reasoning behind that judgement is faulty.
We are unlikely to develop strong AI any time soon, but it is far easier to create the convincing impression of sentience. Humans are naturally prone to pareidolia and the pathetic fallacy - we see faces in potato chips, we convince ourselves that a faulty photocopier hates us, we attribute personality traits to automobiles.
Looking back to the 1960s, many people experienced strong emotions when interacting with ELIZA, a program that is laughably simple by modern standards. Today, there are numerous accounts of soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan holding funerals for bomb disposal robots and decorating them with honorary medals.
Machines don't need to be as intelligent as humans for us to begin forming deep attachments to them, they don't need to pass the Turing test, they don't even need to match the intelligence of a cat or dog - they only need to appear plausibly sentient, which I think is a far lower bar than most of us realise.
Personally, I think we're on the cusp of a profound change in how we interact with computers. We'll see it first in cases like these, people with limited capacity for reasoning - children, the learning disabled, elderly people suffering from cognitive decline. Machines that aren't smart enough to fool a skeptical observer, but that represent a perfectly satisfactory stand-in for Rex or Tiddles. The natural human tendency to see patterns and project ourselves onto the world will meet the machines in the middle, glossing over their deficiencies.
We'll dismiss it at first, framing it as the slightly pitiable self-delusions of the vulnerable and lonely. Change will come imperceptibly gradually, creeping in from the edges as the technology improves and filters out into the world. We won't really notice that society is being reshaped, just as there was no shocking moment of realisation that a whole generation had grown up with ubiquitous access to communication technology. We'll just have a vague "huh?" moment, like the first time you were sat on a train and realised that nearly everyone on board was staring at a small glowing rectangle. Huh, my elderly mother spends most of her time talking to a bot. Huh, my child's best friend is a bot. Huh, these students are passing around a petition for bot rights. Huh.
Comments
This issue is commonly considered to be far-off or irrelevant due to the difficulty of developing strong AI, but I think that the reasoning behind that judgement is faulty.
We are unlikely to develop strong AI any time soon, but it is far easier to create the convincing impression of sentience. Humans are naturally prone to pareidolia and the pathetic fallacy - we see faces in potato chips, we convince ourselves that a faulty photocopier hates us, we attribute personality traits to automobiles.
Looking back to the 1960s, many people experienced strong emotions when interacting with ELIZA, a program that is laughably simple by modern standards. Today, there are numerous accounts of soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan holding funerals for bomb disposal robots and decorating them with honorary medals.
Machines don't need to be as intelligent as humans for us to begin forming deep attachments to them, they don't need to pass the Turing test, they don't even need to match the intelligence of a cat or dog - they only need to appear plausibly sentient, which I think is a far lower bar than most of us realise.
Personally, I think we're on the cusp of a profound change in how we interact with computers. We'll see it first in cases like these, people with limited capacity for reasoning - children, the learning disabled, elderly people suffering from cognitive decline. Machines that aren't smart enough to fool a skeptical observer, but that represent a perfectly satisfactory stand-in for Rex or Tiddles. The natural human tendency to see patterns and project ourselves onto the world will meet the machines in the middle, glossing over their deficiencies.
We'll dismiss it at first, framing it as the slightly pitiable self-delusions of the vulnerable and lonely. Change will come imperceptibly gradually, creeping in from the edges as the technology improves and filters out into the world. We won't really notice that society is being reshaped, just as there was no shocking moment of realisation that a whole generation had grown up with ubiquitous access to communication technology. We'll just have a vague "huh?" moment, like the first time you were sat on a train and realised that nearly everyone on board was staring at a small glowing rectangle. Huh, my elderly mother spends most of her time talking to a bot. Huh, my child's best friend is a bot. Huh, these students are passing around a petition for bot rights. Huh.