...the idea of machinery with a conscious mental inner life frightens or enrages some people--an understandable visceral reaction, as the concept clashes with a deep primordial view of the nature of things. Similar vehemence greeted predictions of space travel early in the twentieth century. Space travel violated the self-evident dichotomy of the terrestrial and the celestial, a sacred distinction in most religions, whose abrogation, if possible at all, would surely upset the natural order, with horrible consequences. Thoughtful machinery violates the equally obvious and sacred dichotomy of the living and the dead, a difference embedded in our mentality. The skills for interacting with living things, with feelings, memories, and intentions, ar e utterly different from the techniques for shaping insensitive dead matter.
Although animate machines have existed for several centuries, they have acted more like inanimate things, with no awareness of past or future, responding to the skill but not the character of their handlers. But past machines were simpler than bacteria, and are as misleading a guide to future robot mentality as bacteria are to human psychology. Ancient thinkers theorized that the animating principle that separated the living from the dead was a special kind of substance, a spirit. In the last century biology, mathematics, and related sciences have gathered powerful evidence that the animating principle is not a substance, but a very particular, very complex organization. Such organization was once found only in biological matter, but is now slowly appearing in our most complex machines. In the old metaphor, we are in the process of inspiriting the dead matter around us. It will soon be our honor to welcome some of it to the land of the living, however upsetting that may be to our traditional categories.
Moravec, H. (1999). Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind. Oxford University Press.
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