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AI researchers are now trying to make AI more human. “Intelligence is the ability to interpret the world and act on it” says Yann Lecun of NYU, “[so] learning is probably the most essential characteristic of intelligence” (“The Rise of Artificial Intelligence”). AI used to be solely concerned about a machine’s ability to mathematically reason and problem-solve, but more recently, more attention and energy is channeled towards what Robin Hanson from Oxford describes as “brain emulation” (“The Rise”). In brain emulation, people are attempting to recreate human consciousness and emotions by first examining exactly how a human brain operates, and then reverse engineering a “robot” with such capacities. Very recently, according to a Boston Globe article, the National Science Foundation gave a group of researchers from Harvard, MIT, and other robotics and software organizations a 25 million dollar grant to help study the brain and reproduce the human brain and early cognitive development and learning with AI (“Making Artificial Intelligence More Human”).
We had previously thought that AI mainly encompassed computerized intelligence, that it was only concerned with what it previously focused on, mathematical reasoning and problem solving. However, with AI becoming more human, it seems as if there will be an increasing amount of ethical issues. We think that humanizing robots and giving them the capacity to of consciousness, learning, and emotions is a potentially dangerous path. Where does a researcher draw the boundary between designing robotics and tampering with humanity? How do they know how far they can go?
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