Philosophical thread of the week: Could robots be conscious?

[werk]

In related news, cars are quickly growing to hate humankind.

Drive carefully!

Wasn't there a King novel about this, cars (trucks) gained consciousness and hated mankind?
It was made into a movie...soundtrack by AC/DC...

I say keep making them smarter until you get a terminator/matrix issue, then back off

 

[howandwhy99]

feuerbach, nietzsche, freud, marx, and ???

Whoever proves(builds) a mechanical or alternative organic structure that can emulate the human brain will be in elite company.

We will also be one step farther from masters of the universe.

 

[buzzard]

One of the best depictions I've seen of a truly sentient machine has been in Alan Dean Foster's series Jumping Off The Planet, Bouncing Off the Moon, and Leaping to the Stars. In that near future, machines build and program other machines because they're the only ones that can grasp the insane level of complexity and deal with the computations. Once the seed programs are in place, they run and develop on their own, creating and seeking new solutions just like a human child does from the instant of birth. Only they of course live thousands of times faster than a person and can create and experience many more 'connections' than a human ever could. They're intelligent, but not very 'human' if you get my drift.

Those books are by David Gerrold.

While I am usually a fan of his, I was unable to get through the first of those.

buzzard

 

[buzzard]

I'm of the "walks like a duck, talks like a duck" school. If you can make a computer apparently indistinguishable from human consciousness, then I'd say it is. We don't very well have a proper definition of consciousness, so without that definition it remains rather hard to exclude a given example.

buzzard

 

[ssampier]

feuerbach, nietzsche, freud, marx, and ???

Whoever proves(builds) a mechanical or alternative organic structure that can emulate the human brain will be in elite company.

We will also be one step farther from masters of the universe.

I am very familiar with Marx. I fail to see how that has anything to do with robots being sentient. Unless you're implying the robots will be the new bourgeois, forcing us to be the proletariat as mass worker slaves.

 

[RangerWickett]

It's an interesting problem - I think Man is capable of creating many things, and the ultimate question will be one of *should,* not *can.*

Actually, it's more a question of *when*.