I'm over forty years old and have watched the progress of computer technology since the Intel 16 bit chipset. I have yet to see technology that is beyond my comprehension. There are no truly intelligent bots. There are not any bots which can fake human enough to pass as intelligent in a forum such as this. Now...a poster who seems unintelligent, extremely eccentric or disfunctional perhaps. A bot could be fashioned to create posts and respond in a strange fashion, but you won't catch one pondering anything. They can't ponder. They can't consider ideas. They can imitate belief, imitate certainty and imitate knowledge; but that is the edge of their ability. IBM has its Watson, and it has access to much knowledge as well as grammatical rules. It can impress, but it doesn't ponder or weigh ideas like a human. Google has its champion bot as well, but its similarly limited.
The primary limitations of bots: They can't feel pain. They don't have bodies. Knowledge does not have any impact on their existence. They do not have integrated visualization of themselves in the world (no personality). They don't have competing desires (so no choices just reactions). They don't feel time (don't get bored). They don't care, and in order to care they'd have to have all of the above first. They've no fear of death, so they have little in common with us. They've no fear of anything.
The bots are pretty crummy and don't mimic people well, and that is probably a good thing for the time being. As long as they don't care, they can't be harmed or get bored. We can put them to work without ethical difficulty; and as long as they don't care and cannot be harmed we can always tell that they are bots.
The primary limitations of bots: They can't feel pain. They don't have bodies. Knowledge does not have any impact on their existence. They do not have integrated visualization of themselves in the world (no personality). They don't have competing desires (so no choices just reactions). They don't feel time (don't get bored). They don't care, and in order to care they'd have to have all of the above first. They've no fear of death, so they have little in common with us. They've no fear of anything.
The bots are pretty crummy and don't mimic people well, and that is probably a good thing for the time being. As long as they don't care, they can't be harmed or get bored. We can put them to work without ethical difficulty; and as long as they don't care and cannot be harmed we can always tell that they are bots.
