There are enough occasions when I have referred in this column to issues that we have discussed, in very thorough debates, in the plenary of the Royal Academy of Moral and Political Sciences. Thus, this Tuesday, on February 25, Adela Cortina, one of the great specialists in ethical issues, made the masterful exhibition about whether the machines can become thinking. And register as people, and deal with all their rights and obligations; By having similar abilities to human beings, with full awareness. It is an issue that Alan Turing has already raised, and that resulted in the famous test of his name.
In an intervention that I did in the Royal Academy, I stated that a series of authors, including Isaac Asimov, in his novel “Considers with Rama”, assumes that possibility. He set up a whole planet in which machines live in society of themselves, created a long time ago by humans, which disappeared at a given time. And in a more initiatory way, Arthur Clark and Stanley Kubrick, in their film “2001, an odyssey of space”, they surely gave the robots can become beings that make decisions (HAL is their name, anticipation of IBM).
Extensively, the issue is related to the idea of life, a concept that as Carl Sagan stressed, in his work “Cosmos”, is more complicated than it seems. Because even a rock has in operation the sub -speakers that make up its atoms, with a frantic activity, which some consider as a way of existing. At the other extreme is the idea of Noah Hariri of the eventual “deification” of man, by creating alternative life to the result of the natural genesis and evolution of so many millions of years; in what would be a true process of deification of humans.
Will we continue?