Philosophical rant
Is it morally justifiable to sacrifice one person to save the lives of many?
I think it depends largely on the context of the situation and reasons for which sacrifice of one could be morally justified. But there’s a vast difference between intentionally harming another person vs volunteering oneself for the betterment of society. If a deadly disease breaks out and doctors need to run human trials but nobody is willing to, should the government force its citizens to participate?
Countries that mandates its citizens for compulsory military service in order to protect its borders should they stop these practices?
If a highly powerful criminal murders in broad daylight with many eye witnesses but no one dares to testify against him in court as they are afraid of the consequences, would you choose to take a stand knowing well that although your life’s at risk but it would save many others if he is put behind bars.
Journalists, whistleblowers, judges, soldiers, vaccine testers, there are many such examples of people who willfully sacrifice their lives thinking of the greater good.
Can machines think, or is consciousness unique to biological organisms?
What is consciousness? It means everything you can experience. Whether it is the cold, the toothache, the shining lights, any sensory feelings and all the emotions that get created with it. Consciousness comes with thinking. Whether it’s intentional or just a stream of thoughts running in your mind while doing laundry or any mundane task, if one’s thinking one is conscious. We often take pride or a sense of arrogance that machines no matter how advanced they become, they can never think like a human. They can never process emotions, experience love, loss, joy, sadness. It is true till now. Machines can’t feel or sense or experience anything like us. But I don’t think that day is very far. Machines have come a long way from being a giant piece occupying an entire room used to process simple arithmetic operations to now doing complex calculations at the tip of your finger with the size of a wrist watch.
People often make predictions as to what the future of machines will be. Would they start thinking, processing emotions, compete with humans, wage a war against them? Movies and Books like to scare us into believing a similar fate. I believe the next advent of tech would be sentient machines. If machines can be taught to interpret language, understand the context of conversations, they can surely learn to feel and produce emotions over time. After all emotions are nothing but electric signals transmitted by neurons based on stimuli followed by changes in sensory behaviour. Ex. rapid increase of heart rate, hyperventilation when fear is experienced.
Of Course teaching a machine to emulate this behaviour will require significant efforts. And they can detect emotions even now using facial recognition and in voice, text communication using NLP. But to produce them autonomously and to experience them like humans do will require a deeper understanding of human brain.
