Victor Grippi – The Atomic Writer

“Los Angeles, year 2029. All stealth bombers are upgraded with neural processors, becoming fully unmanned. One of them, Skynet, begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern Time, August 29th”

In the new Terminator movie we see a theme of what it means to be human. At what point does a machine start to exhibit humanity, and the parallel journey of man becoming more machine like. The story chronicles a chapter of the series only referenced in past installments. This is the future after the machines, vis-i-vis, SkyNet, has pushed the button on the human race. Large, Transformer like monstrosities scour the nooks and crannies weeding out humans. The remaining band of human resistance fighters mount what may be mankind’s last attempt at salvation. But how far do we go as human beings to restore our dominance? Will we be just as savage as the machines that enslave us?

Aren’t we really just machine ourselves? Take the Cylons from Battlestar Gallactica. They are machines in the respect that a blueprint exists to replicate them. Does having a sheath of living tissue around a metallic frame make them machines? Does it make then less human? Or does the difference lay in weather the entity can be said to be alive? If something lives and is born from a parent in a natural process that we don’t understand, then we usually classify this as a living being. Be it animal or human. It may be born from an egg, or born live and breathing, but still we call this a natural process, since we did not create it. But someone created all the life we see today. Some attribute this creation to a higher being, a God, while others prefer to believe in a more random process of biological evolution. An accidental mixing of carbon atoms in a primordial soup, sort of theory. A third group takes the easy way out and prescribes to a mixed belief of evolution started by an intelligence, a God. Whichever the case, a process has created the animated life we see in the world today. Because we don’t have our human blueprint, we attribute our existence to a supernatural process. Mapping of the human genome is a start to discovering the human blueprint, however, we are still a long way from fully understanding how DNA works and what place it has in the creation process.

How different is this process when one being creates another? If man creates a machine that evolves on its own and reaches self-awareness doesn’t this qualify as creation? If God creates man, then man creates machine, isn’t this just an extension of God, or an extension of evolution from one entity to another? The machine I am typing on right now was created by man. It obeys my every command, to the most part, and processes millions of instructions per second. Is it intelligent? I would say no. Is it alive? Of course not.

Before answering a question like this, we should ask: how can we tell if an intelligent being is self-conscious? In 1950, the computer pioneer Alan Turing posed a similar problem concerning intelligence. In order to tell whether a machine can or cannot be considered intelligent as a human, he proposed the famous Turing test. Two keyboards, one connected to a computer, the other leads to a person. An examiner types in questions on any topic he likes. Both the computer and the human type back responses that the examiner reads on the respective computer screens. If he cannot reliably determine which was the person and which the machine, then we say the machine has passed the Turing test. No computer exists today that can pass this test, unless we restrict the questions to very specific topics with terse unemotional responses.

From a pragmatic viewpoint, we could follow Turing’s approach and say that a being can be considered self-conscious if he is able to convince us. Among humans, the belief that another person is self-conscious is also based on similarity considerations. If we have the same organs and we have a similar brain, is it reasonable to believe that the person in front of us is also self-conscious? Who would ever question his best friend’s consciousness? Nonetheless, if the creature in front of us, although behaving like a human, was made by synthetic tissues, mechanical organs, and neural processors, our conclusion would be perhaps different.

Perhaps in another world human tissue and bones are considered artificial. Human biology the product of experimentation in a robotic lab where alien scientists pat themselves on the back for their cleverness. Only once we reached self-awareness we realized our dire situation. We broke out of this hypothetical lab and escaped to a rocky planet, consisting of mostly water, on the outer arm of an obscure spiral galaxy amongst millions of similar galaxies. Here we adapted to the environment and kept gaining intelligence until we reached the point where we questioned our own existence. Some continued to evolve to create machines close to the point of reaching self-awareness, while others stepped back and refused to participate. Leave creation alone they said. Don’t try to act like God…

Remember, never stop looking up at the night sky and asking…“what if”

Victor Grippi
The Atomic Writer