There exists a great number of intellectual men and women who occupy themselves with creating a non-human intelligence, usually with materials atypical of lifeforms. These intellectuals debate the merits of intelligence, without being able to provide a proper definition of it… offering qualifications such as: “we’ll know it when we see it”, or appealing to pragmatic considerations such as: “it doesn’t matter if what we make is actually intelligent, what matters is merely whether it appears intelligent to us”. Large and lofty debates take place, and when all the hot air rises we are left with more questions than answers… patiently awaiting the fantastical robotic futurisms of great poets, such as Ray Kurzweil, to (intentionally) walk on to the world-stage, and tell us how much they are like us, while being superior in every way.

Alan Turing

Alan Turing, an intellectual man, set humankind on the direction outlined above through his paper, “Computing Machinery, and Intelligence”. Turing, in a very dialectical way, asked himself the difficult question: “can machines think?”, and from there he developed a ‘thinking’ test inspired by the ‘imitation game’, a 1950’s British party favourite, second only to drunk men dressing up as women. The test, now known as ‘the Turing test’, is the ultimate form of pragmatic exercise– it allows us to overcome the difficulties of doing actual foundational work, and jumps right to the conclusion: assume non-human intelligence is a possibility… then add interrogation– an approach that has more in common with instant ramen than academic thought.

Examining the Turing test further, with perhaps an even more critical eye, it becomes obvious that all the presumptions that go in to his implied foundation are all totally anthropomorphic. We presume thinking, or intelligence, involves speech, words, language, perception, and memory– our whole pragmatic understanding of intelligence seems to be forged in our anthropomorphic biases against animals… we assume ourselves intelligent and assume animals are not, then we tally up the differences between animals and ourselves, and, while exclaiming ‘eureka’ at the top of our lungs, consider the problem of intelligence closed.

To bolster our anthropomorphic follies, we create other spectral considerations that are even more dubious than our foundation itself: concepts such as ‘sentience’, ‘consciousness’, ‘intentionality’, etc. We proclaim human beings have these ‘qualities’ by virtue of their intelligence… and that other intelligent beings will have them too, because these ‘qualities’ must be intrinsic to intelligent beings; the loop is now closed in the most circular of ways… and when one of these intrinsic ‘qualities’ is dispelled, we can create new and more complicated versions of said ‘qualities’, eluding all refutation in the most maniacal of ways. For all we know, consciousness is akin to a video recorder hooked up to a speak-and-spell… add a couple of external sensors and you have sentience; as for intentionality, if it actually mattered, half (if not much more) of the human race would never have been born.

Termite Mound

If any of these most excellent, intellectual thinkers are to ever create or discover a non-human intelligence, they will need to subdue their child-like exuberance and accept the possibility that humans aren’t actually intelligent at all– perhaps we have a few tricks unique to our species, but there is nothing to say they are all that much better than a termite’s ability to build a mound, or a bird’s ability to sing its call. Another possibility worth considering is we have already created a non-human intelligence when we created the first computer, and, as a species, we are incapable of recognizing this non-human intelligence even while it sits in front of our faces; this ability to recognize other intelligences is a skill we did not require for survival, and therefore it never evolved in us… except for perhaps in a handful of Disney characters, such as Cinderella, who is able to both understand, and speak to birds, mice, and others with ease.

If we can cure our anthropomorphic maladies, reject the fantasies of maligned futurists, and do the hard foundational work required of us, we may begin to gleam the knowledge of what it is to be human, and from there we might begin to understand other forms of life.