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Saturday, March 31, 2018

Drawing A Line Between Humans And Automatons


In the episode " Be Right back " of the popular T.V show ,Black Mirror, it shows a highly intelligent,learning, android helping a young woman cope with the recent loss of her husband while going through a pregnancy. It starts simple enough from a chat bot that acts as a text chat between the woman and her husband , to keep her company but soon that isn't enough. Next she upgrades to a automated voice of her husband that uses his digital identity to mimic things he would say and his personality. Ultimately that wasn't enough though because she ordered the final upgrade in this project which was basically an android mimic of her husband. unknowingly modern technology though has become very close to this, we have sophisticated chat bots that can fool almost an unsuspecting person. We also have bots that can mimic voices and scam insurance companies even as I type life-like androids are under development to become more human. So the big question is where would the line be drawn between humans and their self governing,learning, and indistinguishable android counterparts?  My guess would be that first hopefully these androids themselves would not acknowledge themselves fully as 'human beings' and recognize they were manufactured and not born. Secondly we ourselves as humans are discovering what makes up us being conscious and thinking beings. For example, one thing that would set us apart from androids is our ability to have 'feelings' a concept really that no one can define yet. in the instance though that androids are able to experience feeling and emotion one day we must ask ourselves are we simply their human overlords or would they be free to govern themselves. At the end of the episode Martha couldn't simply let the android destroy itself because she commented Ash would've begged for his life and it bothered her so much that she stored him in the attic of her home. We see here that she constantly became more and more  emotional attached and dependent on a machine that only mimicked the real husband but could not connect to her emotionally. So here we must question was this inability to truly feel emotion and the only thing that made this android inhuman? He had the capabilities to learn and function on its own and he looked exactly human, and you could possibly argue he was conscious of his own existence. So looking as close as possible the only limitation between A human and an Android was the ability to feel and if this barrier is broken what  would truly separates us?

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Ash 2 was aware he was alive. I believe that if he had more time to "learn" everything ash 1 knew there would be zero differences in their behavior. The only thing that separates humans from androids like Ash 2 are our primitive needs.