In response to a request by the President of the United States’ Commission on BioEthics (PCBE), two authors at Georgetown published a paper here and this is the summation of their view of what makes people “human” – as distinct from animals – and worthy of special protection: “We will argue that what distinguishes human beings from other animals, what makes human beings persons rather than things, is their rational nature. Human beings are rational creatures by virtue of possessing natural capacities for conceptual thought, deliberation, and free choice, that is, the natural capacity to shape their own lives.” There follows a lengthy moral justification, and distinction, between human beings and animals, mentally handicapped humans (for example) as opposed to very “smart” horses or pigs, and on and on. It’s worth the read if one cares to explore the topic fully.
Aristotle said almost the same thing several thousand years ago. He looked at what it is to be human – and to be “good” – and pondered how to distinguish us from animals. “Life seems to be common even to plants, but we are seeking what is peculiar to man. Let us exclude, therefore, the life of nutrition and growth. Next there would be a life of perception, but it also seems to be common even to the horse, the ox, and every animal.” Nicomachean Ethics, Book I, 7. His conclusion is that Man, as distinct from all other life, has a capacity for reason: “the function of man is an activity of soul which follows or implies a rational principle…” Id. Thereafter follows an explanation of how to carry out that function well – by living a life of “virtue.”
But if the essence of Man – of being Human – consists of intelligence and “rational choice”, don’t computers fit the bill? Deep Blue made only “rational choices” in its specialty when playing Kasparov. It clearly is “intelligent” – if by that we mean extremely knowledgeable about something. While its intelligence can’t venture outside of chess, we could quickly hook it up with Watson and its 15 terabytes of information storage and “learning” of language. And yes, Watson can learn. As Jennings noted, over time it learns to distinguish the context necessary to determine if “Blondie” in a clue refers to the cookie, the comic strip character who is the wife of Dagwood, or Deborah Harry’s pop alter-ego of the late 70’s and early 80’s.
But I happen to think that the author Vladimir Nabokov (of Lolita, among other novels) got it right when asked in a 1969 interview, ‘what distinguishes us from animals?’ His answer is compelling:
“Being aware of being aware of being. In other words, if I not only know that I am, but also know that I know it, then I belong to the human species. All the rest follows—the glory of thought, poetry, a vision of the universe. In that respect, the gap between ape and man is immeasurably greater than the one between amoeba and ape. The difference between an ape’s memory and a human memory is the difference between an ampersand and the British Museum Library.” Montreux, 1969.
Many modern psychologists articulate this essence of being a part of “humanity” as “empathy” – driven by our ability to use our imagination, in my opinion. That is, the ability to step outside of ourselves and imagine the world from someone else’s point of view – the ability to empathize. Thus, the essence of being human is not just the ability to reason, coldly and dispassionately, but the ability to choose, after stepping outside of our own narrow interests and considering the full impact our actions might have on another person – physically, emotionally, in toto. We do it so often in our daily lives it is almost an unconscious process. We watch and try to read the other person’s emotions from the instant they ask “do these pants make my ass look fat?” And we start calculating – at who knows how many MIPS of processing speed – before we blurt out the answer. If it’s our significant other, we’re calculating honesty versus emotional harm versus future benefit versus humor versus strength of the relationship and on and on… and if it’s a friend, that calculation changes just slightly enough to make the answer different. And it happens fast.
In the original Terminator movie, Kyle Reese warns Linda Hamilton/Sarah Connor about the T-800: “It can’t be bargained with. It can’t be reasoned with. It doesn’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop! Ever! Until you are dead!”
Ken Jennings noted that part of what made playing Watson so difficult was that it never gets demoralized. It doesn’t care about being far behind or ahead. It can’t be psyched out, talked smacked to, or goaded into a too quick buzzer. It won’t ever ring in accidentally or slowly. It just executes its programming – over, and over, and over, and over…. It is what makes computers so amazing – the ability to crunch numbers and execute tirelessly; imagine if you had to coax your computer into turning on some morning because it was tired and a little cranky because of a long night at the craps tables.
If Raymond Kurzweil is right that it is simply a matter of time, given the exponential increase in computing power, before Cyberdyne Systems or some other government contractor creates Skynet’s real equivalent (BTW, Great Britain’s network of satellites for controlling their drones, RPVs, and robots in the GWOT is called Skynet
What makes us noble at our greatest moments is our choices against our own self-interest, right now. Or our decisions to protect helpless critters. Is it any surprise that one of the most common defining characteristics of serial killers (later in life) is that they tortured animals as children? Is it any surprise that what defines sociopaths (or used to define before the DSM V fucked it up) is an inability to empathize? We give our highest medal to men (or women) who dive on hand-grenades because it represents the ultimate act of selflessness, trading one’s life for someone else’s, without regard to moral worth or calculations about who should or shouldn’t get to live.
Without empathy, the potential coming Singularity may produce a new “being”(?) or entity, for whom such questions will merely be electrons scanned into a databank, without any emotional context to give these kinds of questions meaning. That is a scarier future than even Arnold with some high-powered rifles bearing down on Linda Hamilton.