Critical Thinking Blog Assignment #1

             The last couple of lectures from eng101, eng103, and lib110 courses, I've studied the new developments in artificial intelligence. As we've discussed newly developed mechanisms such as robotics. I've grown to be optimistic about this subject matter. Although I feel optimistic about artificial intelligence, I am not strongly positive about the advancements for the future like Kurzweil. Because I worry for the problematic issues such as limited job opportunities, too simliar of clones that may steal opportunities of actual humans, and the way people will reply on artificial intelligence to carry on some if not most of the duties we're meant to fulfill alone. In other words, I feel like artificial intelligence will limit people to reach their limit of effort because we will soon become dependent on mechanisms to carry on for us. So, my standpoint would be neutrality instead of agreeing one hundred percent to this approach.
             Even in my philosophy course we've discussed the views on functionalism. The theory that if mechanisms act like humans in every way possible and carry on the same internal beliefs as us, then why aren't they considered moral like us?  Putnam's theory on functionalism is that if two things that are entirely different from one another, robot vs human, has the same input, the same output, and the same internal states then we can believe that these two things are functionally identical. I'm making the connection between a philosophical view with the views of Ray Kurzweil to simply say that
although they both mean the same position, its awakens us to believe that our world would become a supernatural place.
            As I have furthered my knowledge on human consciousness, I’ve learned that to be humanistic partially means to have behavior that correlates with the internal states like having emotions, having experiences, stories to tell to be able to relate to others in a humane way. As a in class experiment, we’ve gotten hands on with the newly discovered chatterbot such as A.L.I.C.E. My class had performed a mini Turing test to determine what it meant to  have humanistic qualities. One of which we discovered was that A.L.I.C.E was not able to answer tell us a real song like a real person will be able to. When the question, “Do you know any songs” was asked she answered “Yes, just one”. Something a real person will not do, A.L.I.C.E did, which helped us to quickly assume that to have human consciousness is to have the qualities, and morals of humans and not automated responses.