I love it when John Henry and Ellison get to talking about God. When John Henry said, "Am I one of God's children?" It's for sure Ellison is struggling with the answer to that one!
Having read the Bible quite extensively thanks to "Religious Instruction" in my youth I'm at a loss to see why Ellison was being "overly simplistic and silly." The Bible contains various revealed by God axiomatic truths, one of which is that humans are made in God's image. "Human life is sacred" is the assertion of an axiom. John Henry would be perfectly on board with the idea that any system of logic must have axiomatic truths that have to be assumed to be correct.
Maybe you'd rather have them arguing The Prisoner's Dilemma. I find it hard to imagine how that gets you to arrive at John Henry seeing human life as sacred.
Remember "Mr Ferguson is Ill Today," Sarah and Cromartie in the car: Sarah: "I'm not a murderer!" Cromartie: "Who is?" Cromartie is a Terminator. He terminates people. That's what he is.
I repeat, yet again, this whole area is a fantastically hard problem for the AI people trying to build a true machine intelligence, in no small part because we don't, in actual fact, understand how it goes down in humans. Ellison is exactly right in the conception of what he's attempting, I find it unsurprising his execution is unconvincing.
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ninetydegrees
no subject
on 2009-04-20 01:14 pm (UTC)Having read the Bible quite extensively thanks to "Religious Instruction" in my youth I'm at a loss to see why Ellison was being "overly simplistic and silly." The Bible contains various revealed by God axiomatic truths, one of which is that humans are made in God's image. "Human life is sacred" is the assertion of an axiom. John Henry would be perfectly on board with the idea that any system of logic must have axiomatic truths that have to be assumed to be correct.
Maybe you'd rather have them arguing The Prisoner's Dilemma. I find it hard to imagine how that gets you to arrive at John Henry seeing human life as sacred.
Remember "Mr Ferguson is Ill Today," Sarah and Cromartie in the car:
Sarah: "I'm not a murderer!"
Cromartie: "Who is?"
Cromartie is a Terminator. He terminates people. That's what he is.
I repeat, yet again, this whole area is a fantastically hard problem for the AI people trying to build a true machine intelligence, in no small part because we don't, in actual fact, understand how it goes down in humans. Ellison is exactly right in the conception of what he's attempting, I find it unsurprising his execution is unconvincing.