Machines Like Me

I still didn’t know whether he actually saw anything. An image on some internal screen that no one was watching, or some diffused circuitry to orient his body in three-dimensional space? Seeming to see could be a blind trick of imitation, a social manoeuvre to fool us into projecting onto him a human quality. But I couldn’t help it: when our eyes briefly met and I looked into the blue irises flecked with spears of black, the moment appeared rich with meaning, with anticipation. I wanted to know whether he understood, as I did, and as Miranda surely did, that the issue here was loyalty.

We would need to persuade him. There it was, “hate it,” “persuade him,” even “Adam”—our language exposed our weakness, our cognitive readiness to welcome a machine across the boundary between “it” and “him.”

We create a machine with intelligence and self-awareness and push it out into our imperfect world. (..) Do we want our new friends to accept that sorrow and pain are the essence of our existence? What happens when we ask them to help us fight injustice? (..) there’s nothing in all their beautiful code that could prepare Adam and Eve for Auschwitz. (Kindle locations 2372-2388)