I've been thinking this week about the difference between consciousness and intelligence. As we veer into our new world with computers that are getting smarter every day, it seems like a good idea to be solid on what this difference is. Consciousness is awareness, and a particular kind of awareness that is not available to the machines we will be building. Unless we can build a machine that is capable of truly caring about another being's pain, it's unlikely that we will ever build computers that can replace us.
They can replace and even exceed our intelligence if we define intelligence as speed of processing and acting on information. They may even be able to replace and exceed our ability to liberate others from suffering, in that machines can be programmed to look at the facts and not be prone to faulty beliefs or perceptions. It is indeed possible that self-driving cars will liberate us from accidents. But what machines cannot replace is our ability to care about or value life. All life, not just human.
The technology that machines cannot replace is compassion, which I define here as the desire to liberate others from sufferings. Computers and robots cannot want others to be free of pain, cannot want others to be happy.
There are certain kinds of value decisions that computers cannot make. A machine will never be able to make the decision to be grateful for what it has, to hold life precious, to take to time to be struck by beauty rather than roam the world feeding a craving for more possessions, more sensations, more permanence.
And if we are able to offload much of our intelligence to computers, will intelligence continue to be valuable? Perhaps a natural intelligence will become more valuable as the more machine-like processes of intelligence are replicated.
The future is going to be harder and harder to predict because humans are more predictable in many ways that machines. As machines are given more control of the world it may seem that chaos will reign forever from now on. But maybe not. At a certain point, we may reach the limits of what machines can really do and we can come to a consensus on what to do with our newfound power.
