Will Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
More than a decade ago, 21•C Magazine invited the world’s top physicists, neuroscientists, psychologists, artificial intelligence experts and philosophers to express their opinion on whether androids will dream. And if so, of what. The answers were interesting and bear revisiting.
Androids will not dream of electric sheep – because there will not be any androids. The human being is such an ungainly heap of design flaws that no one will waste the time and money needed to make an artificial one. We will, however, fashion devices bright enough to merit the description intelligent. Such devices will have desires (why else would they do anything) and will need to be able to entertain possible ways of satisfying those desires (or else they wouldn’t be very intelligent, would they?) – and isn’t this precisely the stuff that dreams are made of? What, then, will these utterly inhuman intelligences dream of? Let us hope it is something as mundane as electric sheep, for they might instead dream of ways to rid themselves of the pesky heaps of design flaws that were their designers. Intelligence thrives on wildness: It does not take well to enslavement.
- – Pete Mandik, Philosophy-Neuroscience-Psychology at Washington U
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