Merry Christmas to the UAP thread! We're traveling today and I can't help scanning the skies for silver orbs. *wink*
Actually, I do have a book recommendation. I like sci-fi, so I picked up a copy of
The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler for our trip. I'm about 10 chapters in and it's great. Of particular interest for this thread, the story explores consciousness and intelligence in NHI, both biological and artificial. Here's a brief quote that really struck me as a common theme of this thread:
Quote:
This was why the world would never build another humanoid AI. The smile was perfect. Sincere, unaffected. Fully human.
And because of that, the smile was like the shadow of your own death. Evrim's existence implicated yours. It implied you, too, were nothing more than a machine, a swarm of pre-programmed impulses, iterating endlessly. If Evrim was a conscious thing, and made, then maybe you were made as well. A construct made of different materials. A skeleton walking around, sheathed in meat, fooled into thinking it has free will. A thing that had occurred by accident. Or a thing made on a whim, to see if it could be done.
"What exactly is the point," a stream interviewer once asked Minervudottir-Chan "of an android? Why go to such trouble to make them so human, when making humans is almost free?"
Minervudottir-Chan had answered, "the great and terrible thing about humankind is simply this: we will always do what we are capable of."