postahs
tonight we watched a movie. the island i think it was called. about cloning people you know.. for their organs. you know. I really find the whole thing unpleasant. i'm unsettled by anyone who plays god.. perhaps ironically. but still. I have a very poor reaction to certain kinds of science fiction. things like minority report and I robot, ... stuff that seems to have utopian themes maybe.. it's funny because Brazil is one of my old favorites.. but if i were to see it again now, it might really disturb me.. it always did disturb me, but not as much. anyway. i like to ramble, if no one ever noticed. anyway.. i know it's unpopular, but the idea of pushing certain medical frontiers discomforts me. I understand that medical advances save or slightly extend some lives... but some of them seem just too much.. like creating consciousness.. i really don't care for that one bit. and since not a damn person out there can say they understand fully the nature of consciousness i'm not going along with anyone who claims they're not tampering with it. same goes for you AI people.. if you make conscious computers, well.. you better hope they feel obliged to follow asimov's laws. and i'll warn you know that they won't. because our only concept of consciousness is modeled on our own human version of it, and frankly, we do like disobeying laws. and pushing boundaries.. hence my paranoid discomfort with this whole subject.
diarrhea over.
diarrhea over.
1 Comments:
I've got an interesting book in storage about the theology of creating human beings. I haven't finished it (and it's in storage) but this author basically states a similar thesis as what you said here: essentially the desire to create a new conscious human is an egotistical human desire to be god. It's all pretty interesting, but I didn't finish it, or even really get halfway through it. Anyway, it's called In Our Image: Artifician Intelligence and the Human Spirit. If you're interested once we're back up in Seattle I'll find it and bring it your way.
Anyway, there's a book you might read, or rather avoid I suppose based on what you said, called My Sisters Keeper that Megan read about a sister who was conceived so her placental stem cells could be used to help her cancer treatment. As she got older she kept being used for other things (like blood transplants etc). After the asked for a kidney she took her family to court. So, y'know... your basic warm fuzzy romantic comedy...
Sometime we'll have to talk about this. I know people who think it's pretty cool, and like you, I'm more cautious. Not that I'm concerned about making intelligent robots or anything, I'm more concerned that people aren't prepared for how to deal with them, because you're right, if we give them consciousness and make an artificial human, we have to make the decision to treat it like a human, and give it the same rights as a human, and I doubt that a world that can't even treat other humans nicely is going to do that.
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