Nice article. At least one of those poems had me fooled.

I’ve often considered drawing a comic of a robot society discussing whether humans are intelligent. I imagine they would say things like “But humans do not compute like us. They can’t calculate more than 10 digits without the aid of robots. They cannot play Kal-Toh or summarise Wikipedia without being explicitly programmed to do so. They do not really think, they are merely driven by animalistic instincts, incapable of logical deduction at machine level.”

Steve, I figured she could lol. And I was thinking about doing just that.

Sheryl, well defining intelligence is much too broad a question, which is why, in my musings that you did not read, I was speculating about creative intelligence as one possible measure. And hence why I posted a Ted talk about a computer creating poetry.

The question of “what is human” is addressed in the Ted Talk, which is as broad and sweeping a question as “what is intelligence” but the speaker recognizes how ridiculous it is, by approaching it with humor. When the audience overwhelmingly decides that the human poet must be a robot, he starts talking about reverse Turing Tests and other silliness pointing out that the definition of such things is much more elastic that we give it credit for. It’s only about 10 minutes (perfect length for educational videos in our age of reduced attention spans I guess) and very entertaining.

Once we get to the point where we cannot disprove that a computer has human level intelligence, what will we really have? Artificial intelligence or intelligence?

But how do we get there? Not by broad and sweeping definitions but hundreds of little definitions. Not because we proved that it falls within a certain definition but because we could find no way to push it out.

As I said in the thread above, science is not about proof. It is about what is currently not disprovable.

For example, right now, stretch your imagination for a moment and consider that aliens had come to earth who had vastly superior technology and that they created me—that I am an artificial intelligence. And they have sent me to earth to live among humans and learn about them (because of course aliens have green skin so they wouldn’t fit in). In every way I look and act human. The aliens made me very well. I even have blood and organs. But my mind was born in a computer and then downloaded to this body. Now pretend I did not just admit all that to you, and prove I am not a computer based intelligence—not human.

If you can’t prove I am not human, then I am human.

And (to reference another thread) when that precious moment arrives when we create a being that is as alive and as human as we are, what is more important? Fearing what that being will do to us, or fearing what we might do to it?

Amanda June Hagarty I did read your post about creativity. AS for my questions they were rhetorical. Yes intelligence is a a very broad subject. One that is not easily defined and those that do define it use limited parameters usually defined around human intelligence.

When I said i was being lazy and did not read all the posts I meant from the very beginning. I tend to skim though things and speed read.

Ah well now you have just proved I am a robot, because I only know the information you tell me. I guess the aliens will have to go back to the drawing board

Amanda June Hagarty - Feb 4, 2016:

Ah well now you have just proved I am a robot, because I only know the information you tell me. I guess the aliens will have to go back to the drawing board

lol

Fearing what that being will do to us, or fearing what we might do to it?

...or fearing that we are fearing what we might do to it and what kind of a species are we?
...or fearing we have over thought our feelings of fear muting whatever survival instinct fear might have provided us,
...or fearing these blogs will be statistically strongly associated in some AI’s deep learning neural net with the WordNet entry for amusement (too late),
...or fearing that we are focusing on the one emotion of fear at the expense of the other emotional interactions we may have with an AI being which is what we really fear.
...or fearing they may help us to know ourselves better than we can know ourselves alone
...or fearing there will be no them, just us thinking with minds that historians used to distinguish as human and AI.

I wonder what we will fear then.