Board Thread:Speculation House/@comment-10380701-20140808014446/@comment-24891101-20140816000632

How does it cheapen human life? Surely, it does the opposite: glorifying human accomplishment: we, in the several millenia of our civilization, managed to create what took nature millions of years to differentiate from apes. We did this from first principles, creating life extirely distinct in form from anything we know to exist: sharing nothing in the way of machinery. And our lives are insignificant.

Surely tampering with the soul is better than dying?

And there's no reason at all to think we can't make an AI: we, ourselves, are of course nothing more than an advanced neural net, nodes of which communicate via sequences of electric pulses. It happened once, it can happen again. Worst case, we ape all of our structures, but we can almost surely do the same with our current direction. One's a sufficiently advanced neural net composed of silicon and plastic, the other's a sufficiently advanced neural net composed of proteins and phospholipids. What's the difference?

And the problem with the Chinese room is that as one perfects simulation it asymptotically approaches understanding, such that there's really no difference between the two, and so the distinction is meaningless.

And I have no particular reason to think Penny was created to replace a dead daughter. She's clearly the result of a decades-long, multi-billion lien military research program. She may have come to be treated like a dead daughter, but she wsa never intended to be such: she's proof of concept for the first true synthetic intelligences to take the battlefield, replacing humans.