Can Machines Be Made Self-Aware? - ATLANTIS RISING THE RESEARCH REPORT (original) (raw)

According to Australian Ph.D. candidate Michael Timothy Bennett, in an online column for The Conversation (www.theconversation.com/us) “To build a machine, one must know what its parts are and how they fit together. To understand the machine, one needs to know what each part does and how it contributes to its function. In other words, one should be able to explain the “mechanics” of how it works. “Human-like intent,” believes Bennett, “would require human-like experiences and feelings, which is a difficult thing to engineer. Furthermore, we can’t easily test for the full richness of human consciousness. Consciousness is a broad and ambiguous concept that encompasses—but should be distinguished from—the more narrow claims.”

According to a philosophical approach called mechanism, humans are arguably a type of machine—and our ability to think, speak and understand the world is the result of a mechanical process we don’t understand.
“Bombs and phones, say other critics, may be getting smarter, but we are getting dumber,” wrote anthropologist Dr. Susan Martinez in A.R. #130, “attention span alarmingly shortened from the New York minute to the Cyber Second. Constant emailing and instant-messaging, says one group of London psychiatrists, “might do more damage to you brain than smoking pot.” Meanwhile, said Martinez, “one Canadian researcher has concluded that our obsessive use of information technology is dumbing us down and encouraging superficial and uncritical thinking … [as well as] leading to compulsive behavior”. Tech addicts are fessing up: Casey F., for one, says she had to ditch her smartphone altogether: “If I have one, I will check it obsessively”. Recovering addict, Blake S. talks about how he finally broke the spell of “days attached to a smart phone from wake until sleep.” The addiction has become so prevalent (many Americans spending one quarter of their time staring at their phones) that we now have books with titles like How to Break Up With Your Phone. College kids, taking out their earbuds long enough to discuss how technology dominates their lives, swarm across campus “like giant schools of cyborg jellyfish” (Gregoire).

You know the blowback is getting serious when major Apple investors call for a probe into iPhone addiction among young users. There is a sense that much of today’s tech is less about “facilitating” the way we live than about shaping and controlling it.

Over a half century ago in his best-seller Future Shock, Alvin Toffler gave a dim prognosis for “goals set without the participation of those affected.” Instability and upheaval, he predicted, will inevitably arise from “top-down technocracy.”

AR #99

The Future of Scientific Genius

by J. Douglas Kenyon, Publisher’s Letter