If we are machines, then in principle at least, we should be able to build machines out of other stuff, which are just as alive as we are.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
These machines are going to reflect our species and our evolutionary process. Everything we are will end up in these artificially intelligent machines no matter what we do.
I have been motivated by this idea since I was a kid that if we invented machines that were created in the way that people are - were aware, have free will, inventive machines, machines that would be geniuses - potentially, they could reinvent themselves. They're not just applying it to other things - they could actually redesign themselves.
Our technology, our machines, is part of our humanity. We created them to extend ourselves, and that is what is unique about human beings.
Machines built by human beings they will function correctly if we provide them with a very specific environment. But if that environment is changed, they won't function at all.
Anything that's living is a machine. I'm a machine; my children are machines. I can step back and see them as being a bag of skin full of biomolecules that are interacting according to some laws.
We can make life in the computer. Granted, it's limited, but we have learned what it takes in order to actually construct it.
If we're going to achieve compassion in the machines and also feel safe with the machines, to raise machines with human-like values, we need to make them human-like by simulating, or perhaps eventually imitating, human beings in high accuracy from top to bottom.
For the moment, machines able to 'think' in anything approaching a human sense remain science-fiction. How we should prepare for their potential emergence, however, is a deeply unsettling question - not least because intelligent machines seem considerably more achievable than any consensus around their programming or consequences.
I'm afraid for all those who'll have the bread snatched from their mouths by these machines. What business has science and capitalism got, bringing all these new inventions into the works, before society has produced a generation educated up to using them!
A human being is not a machine. Especially when it comes to creating.