Chapter 7



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A related issue is whether or not a re-created mind -- or any intelligent machine for that matter -- is conscious. This question too goes beyond the scope of the chapter, but I will venture a brief comment. There is, in fact, no objective test of another entity's subjective experience; it can argue convincingly that it feels joy and pain (perhaps it even "feels your pain"), but that is not proof of its subjective experience. HAL himself makes such a claim when he responds to the BBC interviewer's question.

HAL: I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.

Of course, HAL's telling us he's conscious, doesn't settle the issue, as Dan Dennett's engaging discussion of these issues demonstrates (see chapter 16).

Then there's the ethical issue. Will it be immoral, or even illegal, to cause pain and suffering to your computer program? Again, I refer the reader to Dennett's chapter. Few of us worry much about these issues now for our most advanced programs today are comparable to the minds of insects. However, when they attain the complexity and subtlety of the human mind -- as they will in a few decades -- and when they are in fact derived from human minds or portions of human minds, this will become a pressing issue.

Before Copernicus, our speciecentricity was embodied in the idea that the universe literally circled around us as a testament to our unique status. We no longer see our uniqueness as a matter of celestial relationships but of intelligence. Many people see evolution as a billion-year drama leading inexorably to its grandest creation: human intelligence. Like the Church fathers, we are threatened by the specter of machine intelligence that competes with its creator.

We cannot separate the full range of human knowledge and intelligence from the ability to understand human language, spoken or otherwise. Turing recognized this when, in his famous Turing test, he made communication through language the means of ascertaining whether a human-level intelligence is a machine or a person. HAL understands human spoken language about as well as a person; at least that's the impression we get from the movie. Achieving this level of machine proficiency is not the threshold we stand on today. Still, machines are quickly gaining the ability to understand what we say, as long as we stay within certain limited but useful domains. Until HAL comes along, we will be talking to our computers to dictate written documents, obtain information from data bases, command a diverse array of tasks, and interact with an environment that increasingly intertwines human and machine intelligence.