What Happens When Machines Become Conscious? :: The Age of Spiritual Machines Technology Essays

What Happens When Machines Become Conscious? Some leading techno-pundits like Ray Kurzweil believe that machines will become conscious within our lifetimes. In his book, The Age of Spiritual Machines, Kurzweil writes that computers will, â€Å"increasingly appear to have their own personalities, evidencing reactions that we can only label as emotions and articulating their own goals and purposes.† He goes even further to say that the computers will â€Å"appear to have their own free will†, and â€Å"have spiritual experiences† (Kurzweil 6). This is an astounding prediction, but one that is echoed by many of today’s artificial intelligence (AI) theorists. In this brief discussion, I will bring into focus some of the questions surrounding the topic of intelligent computers and consciousness. Whether or not computers will be conscious or spiritual in the future, the fact remains that they are increasingly able to accomplish tasks which were thought only achievable by humans, such as playing chess, or even reading printed text aloud to assist the blind. Stanford computer scientist John McCarthy believes that the only reason computers cannot do some tasks as well as humans is that we do not have an actual understanding of how we solve the problems ourselves. He writes that, â€Å"whenever people do better than computers on some task or computers use a lot of computation to do as well as people, this demonstrates that the program designers lack understanding of the intellectual mechanisms required to do the task efficiently† (McCarthy 2004). This lack of understanding of underlying mechanisms is apparent in the situation when experts in a field cannot fully explain how they accomplish a complex task, such as playing the saxophone or swinging a golf club, which they ma y only fully understand on a subconscious level. As brain researcher Fred Genesee (2000) writes, even the human learning process can be seen as a kind of â€Å"programming†: We now think that the young brain is like a computer with incredibly sophisticated hardwiring, but no software. The software of the brain, like the software of desktop computers, harnesses the exceptional processing capacity of the brain in the service of specialized functions, like vision, smell, and language. All individuals have to acquire or develop their own software in order to harness the processing power of the brain with which they are born. Alas, if only we could find a better way to teach the computer how to solve problems, rather than the current programming methods! Kurzweil suggests that in the future we will be able to use detailed, non-invasive scanning of the human brain to replicate a brain’s structure inside a computer (53).