Experience

What better place to begin than birth?  Specifically, I want to start off by looking at the concept of neoteny.  Neoteny is an evolutionary concept “in which the characteristics of early development are drawn out and sustained into an individual organism’s chronological age” (Lanier 179).  In other words, the more neoteny a species has, the more development is needed to reach maturity.  A human baby is pretty useless for anything other than eating, crying, and crapping.  Yet that baby will soon begin to walk, then talk, then read, and on and on until you are left with a fully-functioning adult human capable of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of extremely complex tasks that no other animal is capable of.  I was hesitant to include “or machine” in that last sentence, as time will tell if there will be any areas of human life computers are unable to reproduce.  Lanier brings neoteny into the conversation about technology by showing how our neoteny is “expanding” on a cultural and technological level as our lifespan increases.  He also gives a prime example of the importance of neoteny in developing intelligence: the cephalopod

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            However, my interest in neoteny is focused on the emergence of artificial intelligence.  I began to wonder, can true human-levels of intelligence and emotion really be programmed?  As humans, we rely intensely on our upbringing to mold us from a tabula rasa into active, thinking members of society.  Is it not a leap to assume that AI machines, if and when they emerge, might require some form of “robotic childhood?”  When that first fully AI robot is switched on, how will it know who it is?  Is it programmed with false memories, or is it the ultimate tabula rasa?  Both prospects are equally disturbing to me, in that it seems you either end up with an AI who “thinks” itself to be something it is not or an AI who is totally susceptible to whoever or whatever “raises” it.  And if glossing over this issue by saying the creation of an AI “personality” is unnecessary, then that is not truly human-level intelligence.  Will robots need to grow up?