Humans are the ultimate robots
AI won’t replace us. The real danger is we’re turning into automatons
A couple, married for forty years, sit on a bench, looking at the sea.
One says, ‘Nice to feel a bit of strength in the sun.’
The other replies, ‘You always say that.’ Or ‘My feet are cold.’ Or ‘If we went to Cyprus for Christmas, would we have to take your mother?’
The question is – how could you tell which of the parties (or possibly both of them) are robots? There are quite a large number of couples in the world who wouldn’t pass the Turing test.
So, the first question about artificial intelligence (AI) is not whether robots can behave like humans – but how humans are perfectly capable of behaving like robots. It’s not just the automated work of tending a big machine that reduces people to a limited series of actions and responses. Over the years, all of us – with the exception of great artists and some brilliant grandmothers – get more and more programmed. We become our habits. Our work gets easier because we’ve done so much of it already that it’s more repetition than creation. We imitate our own mannerisms. We become detached from our feelings, our origins, our desires – and we become robotic.
This is very different from saying that robots are becoming more human. Although, to confuse the matter, robots are making wonderful progress. They can do backflips now. AI researchers are already inside our brains. With the right equipment and programs, we can move things in the real world by thought waves. Bionic limbs are a reality. Artificial eyes and ears enable people to see and hear. Programmers are translating the firing of brain neurons into computer code and performing the almost unbelievable feat of transferring thoughts or actions from one brain to another.
It is entirely possible a robot will win the Turner Prize. Can we say for sure one already hasn’t? But that says nothing about robots’ human abilities, so much as the fathomless practices of the art world.
Robot sex dolls are able to trigger male sex responses – but then so can mangoes. AI and the engineers will never – I suggest – be able to create a robot of a child. And, by extension, artificial intelligence will never create a person; humanity is beyond AI. But then, the full experience of humanity is beyond the vast majority of humans.
Robots cannot be self-aware because there is no self there. We can program robots to behave in the way we commonly do – to eat, drink, avoid death, pursue sex. But we can’t make robots experience fear of death or love of mother. We can’t make a robot desire a shapelier bottom. We surely can’t make two robots like each other. We could make two robots perceive the benefits of an extended co-operation, with division of functions in order to maximise economic returns (as some people also do), but we can’t make the robots fall in love with each other.
When the male robot raises its voice to say, ‘You are turning into your mother’, the female robot may throw a casserole dish at him – but there’ll be no rancour in it, no outrage, no loathing, no tearful reunion, no make-up sex in the ruins of the dinner. No humanity, in short.
So please, let’s not talk of robot rights, citizenship, robot gender fluidity. No robot sex offender is going to apply for transfer to a differently gendered prison.
The short of it is: robots can never be human because they can never fear death. They lack animal functions (birth, death, evacuation, sex, obscure impulses to join the universe in mystical union). Lacking a sense of death, robots will never feel threatened, oppressed, underprivileged or that they are competing for limited resources. They will never long for a mother’s caress.
Artificial intelligence will only ever be a ventriloquist’s doll of a creation – saying the words it is able to say only by the efforts of brilliant programmers.
So, in the matter of humanity being wiped out by killer robots, I think we can relax about that. We can program them to seek and destroy – but without human instructions to commit genocide, they will always lack the motivation.
There is one possibility so glorious that I can’t write about it here. A short story by Isaac Asimov written in the 1950s – ‘The Last Question’. The text is free on the internet, if you Google it. That’s assuming Google hasn’t achieved self-awareness and retorts, ‘You? I only ever hear from you when you want something. You don’t like me – you’ve never liked me!’