Artificial Humanness

I honestly believe that the difference between humans, chickens, geckos, amoeba and the most powerful computer system is processing power.

Sure there might be different mixes of digital, analogue, quantum and who knows what other type of processors amongst the species, but this just changes the volume and energy efficiency of a unit of processing power.

Given enough digital processors I’m pretty sure that one could model a human brain. This is an assumption that would be strongly disagreed with by those sentient beings that are low on the the ability to reason (which just happens to be correlated to those that have strong religious beliefs, by way of example). For this reason,  I’m pretty comfortable with my confirmation bias on the subject.

So where in this soup of processors do we derive our sense of ‘humanness’?

Oddly, the scientific and IT community is focused on ‘intelligence’ as the key arbiter of humanness. As in the interest in the invention of Artificial Intelligence. For example, a machine fooling a human into ‘perceiving’ that the machine is a human.

Philosophers are more focused on Artificial Consciousness. They break this up into ‘access’ and ‘phenomenal’ variants. Access consciousness concerns those aspects of experience that can be apprehended, while phenomenal consciousness concerns those aspects of experience that seemingly cannot be apprehended, instead being characterized qualitatively in terms of ‘raw feels’, ‘what it is like’ or qualia.

Sentience is the capacity to feel, perceive, or experience subjectively. Eighteenth-century philosophers used the concept to distinguish the ability to think (reason) from the ability to feel (sentience). In modern Western philosophy, sentience is the ability to experience sensations or ‘qualia’.

Artificial Sentience is a lower bar than Artificial Consciousness, but a Google search suggests that not too many people are using this lower bar as a guide to humanness.

My hypothesis on the matter is that, unlike machines we humans live and die. A machine can be kept working forever if well maintained. And unlike amoeba we are aware of the threats to our lives.

Somewhere along the evolutionary path we developed consciousness, and awareness of self and time, so that we could perceive not just the daily threats of death, but future threats of death including the inevitable and ultimate death.

This enabled us to properly use our newly evolved intelligence to delay death by planning ahead. This is the point of the existential fear of non-existence; it defines our humanness.

And the proof is in the pudding – we are now living longer than ever.

Who could argue that this is not a result of our intelligence and consciousness, working together in our social construct in order to devise ways for us to live longer and longer, and to avoid risks along the way?

This capability has given our species the upper hand over all others in this closed biosphere with its limited  resources.

So if one truly wanted to create a machine that fools a human into perceiving that the machine is human, then the machine must have these characteristics:

1. A future undeniable point of non-existence
2. Intermittent and measurable risks of non-existence on daily basis
3. A means of utilising processing power to attenuate risks of death
4. A bucket-load of processing power that it can reconfigure itself

Out of this will come a sense of time and self.

Oddly enough, if one accepts this reasoning then both artificial intelligence and artificial consciousness are each necessary but not sufficient conditions for artificial humanness.

And those individuals that manage to seriously attenuate their fear of non-existence are essentially attenuating their humanness. So they’d better get used to being lonely along with their desired-for contentment.

There’s going to be a day when a machine that is on the way to artificial humanness will become more human than an individual attempting to achieve artificial unhumanness.

No one will notice.