Did We Just Pass the Uncanny Valley?
A Google chatbot may be our first brush with computer-generated sentience. Then again, maybe not.
What is alive? What is a living thing?
Determining what can be said to be “alive”; what science considers a living thing, rather than something merely existing, isn’t as simple as it sounds.
Sure; a piece of sedimentary rock stands out among the barking, chattering, chirping, singing, sounding, vocalizing cacophony of our wondrous biosphere as something clearly not alive.
A rock isn’t alive because it doesn’t respirate, doesn’t reproduce, divide or replicate itself; it doesn’t eat or excrete. But then again, a fire can be said to do all those things and fire isn’t a living thing.
Why not?
There are an almost equally complex and confounding set of circumstances and conditions required to constitute highly intelligent life.
For instance, reading back through the tea leaves of early human evolution, anthropologists, archaeologists and evolutionary biologists are deeply concerned with the questions of when, how and why we human beings grew these fantastic and phantasmagorical brains of ours.
Our giant brains take a great deal of energy to run. They were an evolutionary gamble of cataclysmic proportions and…