The Computational Universe

I really enjoyed reading your responses. Clearly this topic touches something deep down in all of us. A couple of final thoughts.

First, are humans machines as Brooks suggests? All of us in CS116 think we are not. One property of a machine is that it is manufactured —you can buy as many identical copies as you can afford. But as we discussed in class, if human cloning ever happens, this picture starts getting really muddled. That is one of the reasons most of us find cloning abhorrent. On the other hand, people have cloned sheep and dogs already, so how far off is human cloning?
Second, I want to raise the problem of the hypothetical bunny rabbits once again. What if there had been two intelligent species on earth? Dolphin lovers, or chimpanzee researchers will argue that there already are. But assume this other specie is so advanced it actually can carry on a conversation with us. We would obviously not need to consider them human or want to date them (at least I can’t imagine dating bunny rabbits). But how would we react to them? Speaking for myself, I can’t be sure.
I fully grant you that the bunny rabbit situation may be too hypothetical. We may be the one and only example of intelligence in the universe for all time.

To sum up, I hope it was useful for you to confront all these possibilities for a few hours or days. Unlike Brooks or Searle, I am not vested or fixed in my views on AI. If I start thinking about it, things get very confusing very fast. (Cardero, Mike, Lily etc., you are not alone.)

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