competing Cyberspace systems might very well overlap into skooshing plenty of people in the same way that competing male elephants will trample any mice unlucky enough to be in the way.
You offer many interesting thoughts, but when it comes to human intelligence we are like those blind philosophers examining an elephant: the guy who grabs the tail says an elephant is a thick rope; the other scientist who came upon the leg states as an empirically established fact that an elephant is a column.... the fellow who grabbed the belly is convinced that an elephant is a barrel. And so on.
I think it is entirely possible that we will have computers with some degree of self awareness who can pass the Turing test, and yet we may discover that we would not want those computers as friends or companions; that something is missing.
Even Kurzweil in his "spiritual machines" allows for the possibility that human brains use types of processing information which are entirely different from anything else we're familiar with, and that we may never be able to emulate that type of intelligence.
So, what is that "something" which we might find missing in super-intelligent cyber beings? Dunno, maybe it's the God-given soul. Maybe it is our unconscious, without which, as non-mathematical as it may be, we are not human. Maybe it's that in some small way each one of us reflects everything that ever was, and will be. Maybe it's the continuous interplay between different sides of our beings, between our observations, feelings, intuitions.... I could go on, but I'll leave it to you to expand the list some more.... :)
Long story short, we may prove to be more unique than any computer may be able to imagine. |
