Why We Fear Diverse Intelligence Like AI

Michael Levin at Noema:

We, as humans, seem driven by the desire to create a sharp line between us — or at best, living things — and “mere machines.” In a bygone era, it was easy to draw that line around the idea that human beings might have an immaterial essence that makes up our souls and that it defied the laws of physics; machines did not.

Modern science has changed that. We and our synthetic brethren are all equally subject to the laws of physics, and maintaining a sharp distinction, in the face of progress in cybernetics, bioengineering, and computational cognitive science, is much more difficult.

But what drives this desire for such distinctions? Many humans have a visceral, energetic resistance to frameworks that emphasize a continuity of degrees of cognition across highly diverse embodiments even if developmental biology and evolution show that we were all single cells once — little blobs of chemistry and physics. Many yearn for a clean, categorical separation between “real beings” and artifacts, or “as-if” minds that are convincing, yet still fake, simulations.

more here.

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