Machines & Humans

Countless theories encompassing the origins of man and machine, what they are, how they co exist or potentially co existed in the past, and how they exist and integrate into societies around our planet today. My questions lay not with the deeper theory for now, but with the similarities and lessons we can learn as people by observing machines and how they process information.

I tend to look at life as somewhat of an absorption process. We take in data from external factors and parties, process it in some manner and essentially extract what we (hopefully) believe to be the most useful information to make a decision with a positive impact for the foreseeable future concerning the scenario. This concept is similar to that of a machine, with the exception being that a machine's output would in most cases differ greatly from a human's. The reason being is the fact that machines operate in a linear fashion and us humans simply don't, regardless of how strict one is when balancing or countering factors such as emotions or somewhat irrelevant influences in the process of making a decision.

In the past, machines would have often been observed as having a discrete state. This means that their state would be either one state or another, with absolute certainty of the active state. The human brain evidently operates in a non-discrete manner in terms of state per scenario. For example, a human brain can comprehend that meat is either raw, half cooked, fully cooked or some intermediate state. Conversely, a machine would naturally opt to define in the binary fashion of either raw or cooked. This decision tree has obviously expanded as machines can cater to many different factors now in a given scenario, providing a response to information that can be put to greater use than the 'yes or no' outputs from the early days of computing. This evolution of machines gained through exploring deep learning, neural networks and artificial intelligence can bring about the philosophical question of how different are we really from machines?

If we were to explore this thought path, extrapolating the results of successful and exponentially growing machine learning results, how can we not arrive at the mock up of conscious human-like outputs? Considering the development and creation of such outputs, it is reasonable to assume a complex back-end is integrated and will debug nearly any task (trivial question, decision making or mathematical problem) and compile a response which would pass the Alan Turing test (read about the Turing test here) with flying colours. Given this back end, the front end would essentially be a projection of what the brain of a computer sees fit to represent the typical appearance of a functioning decision making machine. How long would it take for the humans of today to design an aesthetically recognisable body for an AI? It's already been achieved many times and is exponentially increasing in quality. Now, I'm not saying we are all secretly machines and that our consciousness is potentially an enormous library of AI, but how far from the truth, in the concept of nature, could that really be?

The human take on data extraction in any simulation would be to recognise and identify factors or features of a scenario, be it visual, audible or sensory, that one is familiar with or is equipped to tactically engage with in some manner. This is where the process of evaluation has many sub-processes. Let's take an abstract example to see how this theory can apply to any scenario:

Imagine you have been walking around a shopping centre and at random bump into an old associate of yours. Not immediately obvious to you, they attended the same school as yourself but were in the year group one senior to yours, however, you share 2 mutual friends. You have encountered this individual twice before in a partially personal capacity previously (at a friends party, for arguments sake). You are initially confused as you are unsure of who they are, or how you recognise them (or if you even recognise them at all). What would your absorption process be? How long would it last? The same for processing and extraction? Finally, a decision on how to react/respond?

Although one may believe that this process does not happen, as there are so many perceived stages, our minds have trained with data we have absorbed from our environments visually, audibly or even emotionally. Just as a data model could be developed and trained to become better at predicting results or improving the automation speed of a given task, our minds as humans have learned through trial and error since we were children exploring an entirely new environment. The tasks that were once complex for humans as babies, such as picking up a piece of food and biting it, have become effortless over time.

This computation occurs without us realising, at every instance of our daily interactions with the nodes in our environment, which in this case can be theoretically seen as the points of interaction that take the forms of people or other stimulating matter. This process has been fine tuned over a short period of time to the point where the small computations seem so automatic to us today, where many generations ago humans would have been deeper absorbed in the interaction processes that were formed with their environments and other beings.

The new age of technology has shown that as a species we are fast approaching the stage of developing technology that can imitate what we know as human logic and even show signs of the potential to become sentient. Still we wander where the soul fits into this whole process. I hope that by reading this article, you, the reader, would find that surprisingly the word soul fits quite comfortably amongst sentences crammed with human and machine comparisons. When we are unsure of whether man is controlling machine or machine is calling man back to a sort of circular orientated dictation of an instance of time where humans struck a functionally utopian relationship with them, all we can do, logically, is find out what makes the relationship between these two entities.