Can we hold our tools responible for our infamous actions?

How about the “artificial intelligence”?

 

Based on: Angela Renata Vasconcelos de Mendonça, Fortaleza, 2011

 

Can the ‘overwhelming’ technology with its racy progress of today bring us to the point that we are not any more responsible for our acts because we don’t need think any more?

Machines can be programmed for closely defined and highly specialized functions – for example to play chess. But they lack in something, the first thing in human intelligence: consciousness.

Someday it may be possible that computers drive cars reliably, but they will not “see” and hear” really.

They may keep a car on the right lane and react to obstacles, but will never recognize that something doesn’t fit together looking at a gas station with a giant banana.

Consciousness requires two things: a tremendous information density and its complex crosslinking integration.

Each scene enters as a unit in our consciousness; we cannot separate these perceptions in single observations independent from each other, only as a whole.

This widespread quality of human consciousness is based on a vast number of crosslinks in our brains. Our neurological development and a span of life full of experiences allow us to see immediately, if a picture is right or not.

Computers can take up much more single pieces of information than the human brain, but those pieces remain unlinked.

For a computer pictures are nothing more than a carpet of pixels with codified colors by numbers.

A human being sees a picture as a scene charged with experience, memory and cross references.

Only the human consciousness gives sense to the pictures.

 

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