Do you think robots will ever be just as human as actual humans?

I want to get people's opinions on this. Do you think there is something intrinsically special about humans that our level of consciousness will never be achieved in a robot, even if robots become more intelligent than us? If so, do you hold that belief because of spirituality reasons like the belief in a soul? I'd like to hear your thoughts.

Yes 11
Yes it's possible, but that kind of robotics is so advanced that we'll never create it 2
No, it's not possible (religious reasons) 5
No, it's not possible (other reasons) 13
Other 2
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Comments ( 35 )
  • XYXY

    We can’t predict the future but nothing is impossible. Even if it is not achievable in the lifetime of anyone alive today doesn’t mean it will never happened. Go back to when the very first telephone was invented and try to convince people it would one day be possible to have a mobile that is not just a phone but also can be used to access something called internet where you can find out just about any piece of information about anything. Add to that all the other features such as camera, text messaging and all the hundreds of apps you can download. You would have been considered a freak.

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  • Boojum

    Some deep philosophical questions flow from such an idea, especially the murky waters of what it means to be human.

    I was born around a decade after the invention of the transistor, and digital computing has developed at an exponential rate during my lifetime. There weren't many people who looked at the primitive kludge that was the first transistor in Bell Laboratories 1947 and understood even a tiny fraction of how that invention would transform the world. In fact, I recall an electronics professor telling me that he'd been a young man when the first commercially produced transistors came on the market, and there were loads of highly regarded experts who predicted they'd never be used in anything other than special equipment that needed to function in environments that vacuum tubes couldn't cope with.

    My point is that the current pace of technological development means there's no way anyone can reliably predict where we're going to be in a decade, never mind fifty or a hundred years. For all we know, some graduate student in an obscure university somewhere is right now working on a project that will eventually lead to a synthetic brain that functions just as our neural synapses do, and most people here will live to see machines that can learn and develop just as humans do - although probably at a vastly faster rate.

    I'm highly sceptical that humans will always be able to claim that emotions are our sole preserve and what distinguishes us from machines. If a person says they're sad, weeps and acts in other ways that we link with sorrow, we generally assume that they're feeling that emotion, even though it's impossible for us to look inside their brain and search for a correlation between the activity there and some benchmark standard of normal sadness. We also don't say that psychopaths aren't human because they're apparently devoid of what most of us would consider normal emotions. So if a machine should ever display all the signs of sorrow without having been programmed to do so in response to a specific set of criteria, then who are we to say that the machine is not feeling some sort of sadness?

    There's nothing mystical about humans and our brains. We're highly successful as a species (at least by some measures), but we're only the product of a vast line of ancestors, each of whom was selected by evolutionary pressures. There's a strong argument for intelligence being an emergent property wherever in the universe life might evolve, since the finite resources necessary for biological life will always ultimately be a population-limiting factor, and more intelligent species will always be better at maximising the utilisation of those resources.

    Our brains are incredibly complex machines, but just as technology can already mimic another highly complex evolved organ - the eye - and replicate the functions of many of the body's other organs - even if in not quite such an efficient way in terms of size and energy input - so I'm sure that someday there will be machines that are equal to and then exceed the capacity of human brains in every possible way.

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  • my_life_my_way

    Most people don’t really feel half of what they claim they do. A robot can imitate emotions just as well as a human can.

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  • bigbudchonga

    No. There's 0 evidence of sentience from robots, or that they could be alive. You might be able to program a robot to convincingly say it loves you, or react to stimuli in a fashion shadowing humans, but at the end of the day, it'd be a facade. It's just coding.

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  • donteatstuffoffthesidewalk

    they cant even make a fuckin toaster that works for more than 6 months these days

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    • litelander8

      😂😂

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  • --

    Never going to happen

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  • Tommythecaty

    Well they may outdo the Aspergers peeps at some point 🤣

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    • Bazinga

      Good point Dr. Tommy. Inside the cathedral of mathematical zealotry, Asperger's geeks are already endowing microchips with neural net software to exceed all collective human abilities to understand quantum physics and make stock market millions. This is a geek's only shot at symbolic immortality.

      Getting laid is a different story. You can't program "sexy". I've tried it. It didn't work.

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      • Tommythecaty

        I thought it was all cool to be a nerd now lol

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  • greatman051

    The Uncanny Valley would need to be breached in order for robots to ever appear human like.

    At best, we would need to make robots look obviously like robots in order to prevent robots from looking like horrific zombies from hell.

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  • Nikclaire

    No, this will never happen for the same reason you cannot travel at the speed of light. Despite boojums usual verbosity on the subject he really doesn't know anything.

    Synapse in the brain move at the speed of light, much like fibre optics but the speed limit for computing and the human brain and universe is just that. The speed of light. So no, AI will never outsmart humans, not because we are particularly bright, it's just physics.

    The singularity will never occur.

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    • JellyBeanBandit

      Are you sure about that? I've read that nerve impulses in the human brain travel at only around 320-420 km/hr, where as computers are close to the speed of light. And that once we transfer our minds into digital computers that can move near the speed of light, then we'll be able to think and communicate much more rapidly. So that it'll be painfully slow then to speak to someone with a sluggish biological brain.

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      • Nikclaire

        Yeah I'm pretty sure. Humans can process much more information and with greater efficiency than an exaflop of data per ms. NSA computers are approaching this speed but we have yet to even measure the computing power of the human brain.

        I'm not suggesting that we aren't capable of creating an AI that could destroy us, out of our sheer stupidity, but there will always be a human smart enough to turn it off since ultimately it's a human creation.

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        • JellyBeanBandit

          Yeah I know that for the moment human brains can process more information than computers. But from what I've heard anyway, that's just because there are billions of neurons in the human brain, with thousands of connections between them, and so they make up for their slow speed with that. But eventually computer processors will become more powerful, with more cores, and so will match the human brain in terms of processing power. And then because they can also send information around more quickly, they'll then overtake the brain. (Plus then quantum computing will eventually take supercomputers to a whole new level). I'm no computer architecture expert though, I'm just quoting what I've heard, so if you can correct me on this then fair enough.

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  • ellnell

    No and I hate robots

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  • PonyProblem

    I'm working to become a robotics engineer to help hopefully make a robot that can feel. I believe it can be done but it will take a lot of time.

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    • Nikclaire

      First you will have to define what feeling is, then port that to code. Since no human can define what a feeling ultimately is, I doubt you'll be successful.

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  • Unknown_player

    Robots are greater than us in a bunch of ways, but what use is it all if they only go by what they are programmed to do and even if they were AI, they mightn't ever be able to experience complex human emotion and therefore they might not see the bigger picture to each outcome, they might not be considerate to us

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  • Unknown_player

    I don't think this because of religion I just think that of all the stuff we can achieve, then why haven't we made the emotions we as humans feel be put in some kind of computerized format already? There would be benefits of doing that like ressurecting a loved one but we haven't because in all this time we have dealt with computers and worked on technology this is next to impossible to achieve

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  • Unknown_player

    Not unless if a robot has been programmed to feel emotion: empathy, remorse, regret, enjoyment. I don't think it will decide what's best for the human race because logically there's already too many of us and that much is obvious and our emotions and ability to adapt and change are very complex. I don't think that is something that can be put in the form of a hardrive or to be computerized in general.

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  • olderdude-xx

    Robots (and computers) will never develop the abilities to so incorrectly assign wrong meanings to things like humans do; which usually negatively influences our abilities to do things.

    They will never enjoy the joy of a peak performance and achievement.

    They won't make all the mistakes we make, nor the successes either.

    The very real part of what makes us human is our ability to have emotions, make mistakes, correct those, and achieve things through grit and determination.

    Then there is the soul... (if you believe in that)...

    You don't have to believe in gravity either. Your lack of belief in gravity will not prevent it from killing you if you fall or walk off a building, cliff, bridge, etc. (Beliefs rarely = reality).

    The Judo/Christian/Islam writings say that the soul enters the body with the first breath a baby takes, and leaves with the last one.

    Robots will not have even the chance of having a soul.

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  • FromTheSouthWeirdMan

    Yes I do believe thats possible. Humans are similar in ways.

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  • controversy

    No.

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  • TerriAngel

    It can go either way.
    It's no big deal to have more of a dictionary or computing abilities then any person known.
    Computers can be loaded with every language known. ( current, ancient, or made up ( borg, etc )
    Mathematical figures, computations.
    That said, being loaded with options VS creating something new.
    There's one challenge.
    Understanding or appreciating art/music/nature.
    Does that make you care more or less about humans?
    In some aspects, robots could be better.
    In dark aspects, worse.
    Because we are very irrational.
    I would like to think that in time a robot could be just as good, or better.
    Then many people I have known.
    That said, this has nothing to do with spirtituality for me.
    I've seen a praying mantis show more, faith then some impeached leaders.

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    • bigbudchonga

      Not the borg! They'll kill us all! Well... Assimilate us.

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      • TerriAngel

        Lighten up, I just mean they can learn any language.
        C3PO style.
        Doesn't mean they understand the culture, or could appreciate the foods, etc.

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        • Nikclaire

          Incorrect. You have obviously never written code. Computers cannot learn languages or anything for that matter. There is no code that will ever be able to learn. I say that as someone who writes the stuff. Code is fundamentally stupid by design.

          Do you know a self learning code?? I don't.

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  • KholatKhult

    Nah.
    But that won’t stop me from saying ‘Please’ and ‘Thank You’ to the Alexa

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  • Tommythecaty

    oh they’re there.

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  • McSorley

    When a robot cries real tears when it's kicked right in its little metal nads then maybe, just maybeeeee...

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  • LloydAsher

    Computers will always think differently than how an organic will because of the structure of storing information. Brains are VERY efficient machines with magnitudes of power above today's supercomputers that need a house hold amount of energy while a brain takes less than a lightbulb to function.

    Now machines could get to the point of sentience and be able to view the world and make their own judgments just like a animal. How future machines will function without a human fabricated purpose is up for debate. Machine intelligence's like Mass Effect Geth would be a realistic way how an artifical intelligence would gain the computing power to figure out what predicament it is in and want to create an alternative.

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    • Nikclaire

      Spoken like someone who has never programmed a thing. Computers undeniably think like us because we created them. Computers have all our faults, biases and limitations. There is zero possibility for a computer to become smarter than their creator without divine intervention. That is just common sense.

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      • JellyBeanBandit

        But we evolved from less intelligent creatures which would also seem to break common sense, so it is possible. I don't think it goes against common sense any more than saying that it's impossible for someone to build something bigger than he is. Besides it's not just one person who'll eventually create a smarter AI, it'll be the combined brainpower of the entire AI research field.

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        • Nikclaire

          Currently the NSA is trying to do what you are saying but it's not going well. They have collected more information than anything ever approached on a scale unheard of in human history. They can't even begin to parse the information they have. They have likened it to the perfunctory needle in a haystack, except they said it's not just a needle in a haystack, it's a needle in every haystack every created.

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