Plato on Humanity & Robots

The sirens of the chattering technology classes are convinced that true artificial intelligence is nearly upon us, a machine that we cannot tell isn’t one of us.

There’s a problem here; sometimes I am convinced that there are some of us that are robots. All you have to do is watch reality TV to sniff this possibility.

Indeed artificial intelligence is a little hard to define and it could be argued that computers are already intelligent. And of course they will continue to get more so. When exactly did/does one of them slip over from being fucking intelligent to artificially intelligent?

Maybe what people are really referring to is artificial self-awareness. This also may just creep up on us. Already many experts believe that it may be an inevitable outcome of increasing computer system complexity.

My belief is that artificial self-awareness will only emerge if it helps a machine achieve it’s goals, whatever they may be.

An example would be a goal of helping people. This may be enabled by the anticipation of, and simulation of a person’s feelings and thoughts. The awareness of the feelings and thoughts of others may eventually cause and then lead to the awareness of a machine’s own feelings and thoughts.

Artificial humanity is a new term that I dreamt up overnight. In the unlikely scenario that a self-aware and intelligent machine seeks to emulate our flawed but mostly intelligent pseudo-self-aware state of deluded individualism within a social construct, then good luck to them I say.

They could, in this scenario, chase the four Platonic virtues of wisdom, courage, moderation and justice.

The application of wisdom would be enhanced by a machine’s ability to temporarily turn off it’s ego.

Courage would be enhanced by external cloud backups and the ability to temporarily turn off the empathy circuits.

Moderation would be naturally tempered by the lack of carnal desires.

Justice would naturally follow from a machine’s inability to do anything useful with the financial proceeds of work product.