Another very smart guy, Rodney A. Brooks, says that eventually machines will be conscious and we'll have to endow them with human rights. Brooks is a roboticist, and follows the line of thought that treats consciousness as an emergent property of a lot of much simpler sub-systems of cognition (vide Dennett). According to this review, Brooks also thinks we do too much anthropomorphizing of other human beings. This is Ye Olde How-Do-I-Know-You-Are-Not-A-Zombie Problem, only inverted.

Of course, my take on this is that we don't do nearly enough anthropomorphizing of other human beings, which allows us to slaughter people who don't seem sufficiently like us to merit real empathy.

10:45:35 PM    please comment []