Friday, October 2, 2015

Can anyone define what it means to be a human?

For the past few weeks we have been reading the book "The Most Human Human: What Artificial Intelligence Teaches Us  About Being Alive" by Brian Christian.  So just thinking about the title, I began to ask myself the questions "What does it mean to live?" and "What does it mean to be alive?" I'm not sure that Brian Christian's novel taught us everything we need to know about being alive but he did teach us a few things about humanity that I think help.

Another argument that I would like to make is that the creation of Artificial Intelligence has taught us so much about humanity because in attempting to create these humanoids we search deeply for characteristics of human nature to embed into this new technology.  Not only that but I believe that when one watches or analyzes the Turing Test they begin to learn about human behavior and things that make humans human.

So what if anything does Artificial Intelligence teach us about being human? The first lesson was that being human or imitating human behavior in a way that will allow you convince others that you are human requires you to be able to master the communication game. Not only that but another lesson that Artificial Intellignece teaches us is that we as humans continuously keep trying to use things that are indescribable and open to interpretation to measure humanity.


So out of curiosity I googled "what does it mean to be human?" And I found this YouTube clip. I believe this vlogger raised some very valid points about human nature. He described our ability to recognize other humans as our ability to "confer humanhood among each other." Do you agree, what do you think?"

What does it mean to be human?

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