More thoughts are flowing on Human/Computer interactions as things like neural prosthesis and gizmos like IBM's Watson actually do seem to be truly intelligent to our species.
When do we get to the point that a Human asks himself when it is okay to hit the OFF button on a machine… and the machine tells that person that it would be wrong, that it is aware of what is about to happen to it? We haven't even gotten to that point, many of us, in our treatment of our own. We needn't look to history. We have see it on this morning's news.
IBM's Watson's answering questions placed in puns on a TV quiz show is pretty cool, but we are a long way from perfecting our own morality, let alone "programming" such rules into computers. Yet, we are not far away from creating devices that detect and respond to and mimic Human emotions. Watson is perhaps the great grandfather of such mechanical critters.
Things are going to get very weird, perhaps even wonderful, if we Humans clear a few hurdles that are not really technical.
S
