Late in November, English researcher and writer Harvey Aughton posted a very interesting article on science news site Medium in which explains the reasons why Artificial Intelligence (AI) will never become human, in spite of all the recent developments on this matter.

“Antonio Demasio claims the body gave humanity consciousness, gifting physical emotions to the brain that needed to be turned into feelings to act upon (through a process of biochemical homeostasis). By extension, AI consciousness will be utterly alien to our own, buried in a vastly contrasting bodily shell”, Mr Aughton said. “Humanity will be completely separate species, whether we are inferior or not”, he added.

In addition to the fact that AI could feel, think and act in a different way, Mr Aughton also mentions a key element that gives humans their uniqueness: a complex -though sometimes fallible memory.

“AI will probably be something far more dangerous and less flexible. A computer’s memory of what is in its hard drive is perfect or completely void of meaning. The computer does not ask you what iTunes is, only to remember later. The files and documents are either installed or they are not. The same will be true of information”, he asserted. “The way a machine will prune what is important will not be by feeling through memories consciously in retrospect. It will almost certain prune them using an algorithm designed to answer some kind of logical question that fits its programming”, he continued.

This means that feelings and emotions will mean nothing for AI. “When a robot needs to understand the emotion of an event, it will not be able to do it like a human, by giving in to the overarching narrative”, the British researcher explained. “A computer will have to go through each detailed moment, cross-reference it against the past and future, and form a conclusion”, he commented.

“We are storytellers, dramatists, teary-eyed memorialists, and excitable futurists. Our memory is built to trim the irrelevant edges, which means we miss some things that might be important, in favour of reaching the nugget of the moment which makes us feel something”, Mr Aughton mentioned. “AI can make an eventual profit from every detail, but by doing so, it loses any chance it had of becoming human”, he claimed.

For more information: https://becominghuman.ai/ai-will-not-become-human-ecaed598f3c5