Originally Posted by invader_tech
Robots can be as advanced as you want them to be, I doubt I can ever see them as 'alive'. Conscious? Yes. Alive? No.
Imagine you could raise yourself from the dead, as a undead creature, and you had all the same attributes you do now except for the fact that you lack a pulse and any kind of regenerating cells. Now compare yourself to an intelligent, unbreathing, creative machine. You're undead right? So you're not alive. Robots will never really be alive, although they may be able to genuinely act the same way we do, or beyond.
there is no such thing as the undead.
using fantasy as an argument that you can be conscious but not alive is just silly.
if you are conscious, you are alive. there is only the living and the dead, and nothing in between. (if a spirit is conscious, it is alive)
we can't however use the definition of a living thing to determine when a robot is alive, as our definitions wouldn't even work for life on other planets. we can only know a robot is alive when it shows some form of consciousness. a low level of self-awareness
just comparing plants to rocks is a good starting point of what early behaviors we can look for in robots. that is, if you are willing to look at a plant a little more un-biased, than they are just lifeless rocks that grow leaves.
- plants distinguish themselves from their environment (a low level of self awareness)
- plants then react to the environment based on what is good for their 'self'.
I mean a seed, a simple brainless seed, always grows when the time is right. the seed can 'measure' soil type, gravity, moisture, oxygen. plants interact with their environment. and their interaction is instinctual.
for a robot this low level of consciousness would be displayed if it can interact with its environment in such a way, that it shows it distinguishes itself from its environment, and can make decisions based on itself and the environment. for example - a robot that works on wheels is not going to wheel off a cliff.
a robot with no consciousness - is going to wheel off the cliff. thus showing it has no concept of self-versus-environment.
this is where a lot of AI research has become stagnant though. visual stimuli is not easy to program, and a lot of AI that I know about, use visual stimuli. many years ago they tested a robot in a parking lot. its job was simple. to find the cube in the parking lot.
in the parking lot were many objects. cubes, pyramids, spheres, and so on. it took, like..THREE DAYS of this robot just sitting there and looking, to decide what on earth is the cube. they did not think it would take this long for the robot to find the cube. as humans, and as mammals we take for granted all the things we can do. though AI, we actually begin to realize how complicated we are as organisms. reacting to the kind of visual stimuli that we have, requires a brain more capable than any computer today.
anyways, distinguishing the self from environment, and then interacting with that environment is very - instinctual or rather programmed behavior.
though it is important behavior for any living thing.
the next type of important behavior is learned behavior - that is the ability to learn from experience. this is normally what we are interested in when talking about AI. but its very difficult to define what is learned behavior, even in animal behavior we argue whether something is instinctual or not. so its going to be very difficult to pinpoint learned behavior in robots from instinct.
for example, if the learned behavior was because of a program "A" to learn "A" after stimulus "A", then is it still learned behavior? otherwise every dog would know how to 'sit', but obviously they don't. there is more going on to learned behavior then just a 'new' reaction to a stimulus.
ps, I don't think reproduction has anything to do with the answer. reproduction is important to life in general, but not a single living thing has to actually reproduce itself to prove that it is alive. otherwise, all of us here who have never had children would be considered not-alive.
I do not need to got pregnant to be alive. so neither does anything else in existence need to reproduce to be alive.
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