A.I.

What's this, what's this?
Artificial Intelligence (or more commonly, A.I.) is the term for intelligence exhibited by machines or robots. It is also a field of study as to whether we can synthetically create consciousness in an artificial mind, as well as being one of the most covered topics in science-fiction.

So why is this article on a philosophy wiki?
Well, pushy reader, first of all, if you'd waited, I would have explained, but anyway, the idea of a machine that can think raises all sorts of questions both ethically and in terms of understanding our own minds.

Ethically, there are those who argue that humans trying to create thinking beings is basically just us playing god, but also, there's the whole Skynet question of if we made it, would it actually like us? Everything we've ever encountered with any form of a mind has been biological, with instincts that can date back through millennia of evolution, but a sythetic mind would be fresh, how much stuff goes on in our minds that we simply aren't aware of? So as to why that might be dangerous, a mind unshackled from biological needs like eating, sleeping and, ya know, might just take a logical stare at mankind and go nope ain't havin' none of that and try to go all machine apocolypse on our arses.

You still haven't answered that question...
FINE. I was just enjoying a bit of classic sci-fi scare-mongering, but hey, maybe we'd enjoy having robot overlords, if they don't just wipe us out instead. Onto the aspect relating to Philosophy of Mind, the idea of machines having minds is kinda challenging for some theories of mind, which, rather chauvinistically believe that the only thing that can think would be a human mind, and that a robot could only be simulating thinking, rather than having thoughts of its own. Turing felt that a way of testing whether a robot could actually be classed as intelligent is if it was capable of fooling a human into believing that it wasn't a robot while they were talking.

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