Comic #5136: intelligence-2

Description

Here’s a detailed transcription of the comic:

Panel 1: Character 1: Do you think artificial intelligence can "really" think?
Character 2: Yes, obviously.

Panel 2: Character 1: Thinking is just processing information. The whole issue of machine thought is a sideshow from much more interesting questions!

Panel 3: Character 1: Look, we can now make a single machine that could drive a car in traffic, invent novel board game strategies, tell you what your favorite food is, and so on, but we don't care if it "dies."

Panel 4: Character 2: That’s weird, isn’t it? The closer AI might get to being able to do human tasks, the more it will seem to deserve moral standing.

Panel 5: Character 1: Your uncle who loves chess and knows all about flowers? Whatever makes him human is a bundle of things, even though he built his life around them.

Panel 6: Character 2: Nor is his good memory, his ability to paint, to build things to tell you about the stars… All of these things can be imparted to a machine without anyone caring whether you switch off the machine at all.

Panel 7: Character 1: Maybe humanness is there in individual things that make a human, but the totality…

Panel 8: Character 1: So if your uncle gets amnesia, is it okay to kill him?
Character 2: I don’t think so!

Panel 9: Character 1: So, maybe what's happened is our desire not to think of ourselves as machines. We've slowly made the idea of humanness more abstract.

Panel 10: Character 2: Every time a new machine can do a thing, we unbundle it from what it means to be human. But, what if we keep taking things off the bundle until we discover there's nothing left?

Panel 11: Character 1: Either there really is something special and ineffable about humans, or in the near future, we will constantly be creating beings worthy of thin air, making them do our bidding, then throwing them in the garbage for being obsolete!

Panel 12: Character 2: Do you think robots will engineer better humans to replace us?
Character 1: I mean, there hasn't been a new model for 200,000 years. We're overdue.

This transcription captures the dialogue from the comic accurately.