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comment by rezzeJ
rezzeJ  ·  3305 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Just who will be we, in 2493?

I read an intriguing article earlier that might provide somewhat of a counter to this piece. Not so much in regards to what we will come to include in 'we', but to the viewing of artificial intelligence as having to be intrinsically anthropomorphic. The author views this tendency as problematic and limiting of how we think about A.I.

    The real philosophical lessons of A.I. will have less to do with humans teaching machines how to think than with machines teaching humans a fuller and truer range of what thinking can be (and for that matter, what being human can be).

Now that I re-read that line in the context of this discussion, perhaps it's more relevant than I first thought.

If such a hypothetical form of A.I. came to exist as presented in Hofstadter's paper, I could see myself including them in use of 'we'. If it had a similar form of intelligence, could empathise, form a comparable relationship to a human , etc then I think it would only seem natural to do so. A potential analogy might be if you could upload a human brain/mind/personality to a similar system, which could then live on. I don't think there would be much issue in including that in a use of 'we'. So stretching that to a purely artificial intelligence doesn't seem out of the question.

I'm again reminded of Marshall McLuhan quote that I mentioned on a previous thread here:

    ...All media, from the phonetic alphabet to the computer, are extensions of man that cause deep and lasting changes in him and transform his environment. Such an extension is an intensification, an amplification of an organ, sense or function, and whenever it takes place, the central nervous system appears to institute a self-protective numbing of the affected area, insulating and anesthetizing it from conscious awareness of what’s happening to it. It’s a process rather like that which occurs to the body under shock or stress conditions, or to the mind in line with the Freudian concept of repression. I call this peculiar form of self-hypnosis Narcissus narcosis, a syndrome whereby man remains as unaware of the psychic and social effects of his new technology as a fish of the water it swims in. As a result, precisely at the point where a new media-induced environment becomes all pervasive and transmogrifies our sensory balance, it also becomes invisible.

In this case the A.I. beings could be seen as an extension of human experience as a whole. If these beings were as capable as imagined by Hofstadter, then I think they too could become 'invisible' in a sense. Invisible to us as a form of technology separate to humans. The would become part of us as a collective species.