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“As we go forward to create a different kind of intelligent being, the goal of AI is to create an ‘other’ in our own image,” said Herzfeld. “That image will necessarily be partial. Our machines will not be 100 percent like us. We must determine just what it is, in ourselves, that computers must possess to be considered our ‘mind children.’”

Herzfeld explained that how individuals imagine God, the imago Dei, is central to the image they attempt to imprint upon the autonomous machines they create, the imago hominis.

“The core of our nature is what we believe we share with God and what we want to share with our computers,” she said. ...

“Intelligence is not an individual thing; it’s acquired, held and demonstrated communally,” said Herzfeld. “Just as theology has moved toward relationship as the best way we [imagine] God, AI has moved toward relationship as the best way to understand AI.”

Many questions remain as humans consider what it means to create computers in their own image, said Herzfeld. Researchers in the area of AI generally view the soul as “arising from cognitive processes, an emergent property,” rather than as something built into every human, she explained. “But if the soul is a precondition, could God give a computer a soul?” she asked.
http://www.stnews.org/News-240.htm

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"To me, the thing that art does for life is to clean it, to strip it to form."
~Robert Frost

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There are times when our impulses and personal anxieties are at odds with our objective reasoning, and I have trouble thinking the same could ever be true for a computer.  Computer intelligence is derivative from human intelligence, so it couldn't really demonstrate much independence from its intended design.

On the other hand, maybe I should read more science fiction.

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Sociologists have a concept called socialization, which means the internalization of norms, which is completely opposite from every other behavior. There’s no such thing in biology or economics or political science or anthropology.

It seems to me that the principle of socialization was one of the established behavioral universal principles in academic sociology. What we propose is that human beings have this capacity to be programmed. Humans are the only ones where humans can want things just because they were socialized to want them — want to be fair, want to share, want to help your group, want to be patriotic, want to be honest, want to be trustworthy, want to be cheerful — when they are costly to our selves. If you’re honest as a principle, that’s good for everybody else and it costs you. So being honest is part of strong reciprocity.

Where does this come from?

Within a complex society, the general approach to this is gene-culture co-evolution. In biology, you get genetic information. In sociology or anthropology, you get cultural information. But really, in human society, they go together. Genetic evolution leads to culture. In that culture, given strong reciprocity, you can be rewarded for being nice or for cooperating. So cultural evolution can lead to genetic evolution. Human beings become nicer and more reciprocal and more honest. So, you get this whole dialectic back-and-forth between cultural evolution and genetic evolution and the product is human beings.

As a result, you get this very complex society, where if individuals don’t learn to share or learn to be honest, the system punishes them. People who are programmable, then, are more fit than people who are not programmable.
http://www.stnews.org/altruism-2569.htm

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[This message has been edited by Local Rebel (09-11-2006 05:34 PM).]