pgd wrote:
Is it possible to create a robot which becomes a human being using Artificial Intelligence?
My preliminary view is no.
.
I also don't think so. Biology drives brains, including human brains, in ways that can't be replicated by machines. I think eventually a machine could be programmed to give a simulation of human intelligence good enough to pass the Turing Test. But it wouldn't actually be thinking like a human brain. Brains are driven by the needs of being alive. For humans, this drives the big philosophical questions and fuels art. Humans wonder "what happens after I die?", "what is my place in the world?" and other Big Questions which come from being alive. Art also addresses these and other being-alive-related issues. Since computers aren't alive, they will never approach thought in a way that human brains- or any brains- do. They simply don't have the biological imperatives that drive living brains.
One of the things that humans and all animals do which is biologically based thought is to prioritize. Prioritization comes from emotion. We (all animals) use emotions as the hook to hang thoughts on. We prioritize based on emotion. Was an experience scary, painful or otherwise emotionally important? The data picked up from that experience gets prioritized and we use it to make later decisions. Computers prioritize based only on sets of rules given by humans. Computers run according to whatever priorities their programmers give them. But they have no way of generating their own priorities. Priorities come from biological imperatives such as staying alive. Science fiction deals with this thought firewall by giving fictional computers a fear of death (being disconnected from power source) which allows the computers to prioritize and therefore think like living (and dying) beings. An example is HAL in
2001: A Space Odyssey. That works in fiction and gives HAL an authentic human-ish intelligence. But I don't think that could happen in reality.
Without the ability to prioritize, you get computation, not actual thought.