Writer's Block: Humans and Cylons
I saw this quote today and it really got me thinking. I know that in our current stage of technological development, we don't have to worry about it just yet, but having seen movies like AI and I, Robot which specifically attempt to blur the lines between human and machine, you've got to wonder if it's only a matter of time.
What makes us human, exactly? If you try to find a definition, you'll most likely only come across something as vague as 'a member of a species of bipedal primates in the family Hominidae.' Scientifically speaking, yes, this is true. But the issue here, I think, is what defines humanity in your eyes, and in mine. Warm-blooded. Capable of sentient thought. Alive. However in using this logic, does that not also count most fictional humanoid androids (the Cylons of Battlestar Galactica, for example) into the definition?
Growing up, I was always one of those kids who thought that humans shouldn't be allowed to lord over the world, to dominate other species. We might be of a higher order of intelligence than most other animals, and our bodies are better equipped thanks to evolution, but what makes us so different from a monkey, or a cat or a cow? We're all creatures of flesh and blood with identical needs - food, warmth, company. Our primary goal is the same - survival. Now, having matured a little bit and seen more of the world, I realise that this was a mostly naive view. It's just a fact of life that one species is going to reign supreme over the others. In the same way that humans keep livestock for the purpose of using them for food, if you look out to the world's abundance of oceans you'll see certain species - sharks, for example - gaining dominance over others. It might not seem fair, but at the end of the day it's just the way things panned out. We, as humans, learned to dominate other animals in order to improve our quality of life. The fact that we are capable of doing it, in itself, should be enough to justify it. I'm not saying that I like it. I just understand it.
Anyway, I digress.
Similarly, as humans can be classed as animals, can we not also be classed as machines? We are, first and foremost, a combination of systems, mechanisms and electrical impulses. You might say that we have a 'soul', but the existence of such a thing has never been proven. That thing which makes us alive, vital, real, is our brain - which itself is just another machine.
This brings me, finally, back to the question at hand. If humans are just machines (of flesh and blood, yes, but machines nonetheless) with free will, what happens when we create a machine of solder and wires which is capable of thinking for itself? Perhaps its cognitive ability might not be as advanced as ours, but with all the artificial intelligence technology available these days it will surely come to think for itself after a while - or at least to mimic that process. If we program it to think that it feels pain when it has been struck, then by rights we could say that it feels pain - at which point, would you be able to bring yourself to raise a fist against it in anger? If we program it to think that it fears death, then by rights we could say that it fears death - at which point, would you be able to bring yourself to flip that handy little 'off' switch built into the back of its neck?