Further Discussion on the Class Readings

In class we didn’t get to talk too much about the second article by Charles Platt, partly because we had so much to say on the first article, so I wanted to go back and revisit something I found to be interesting. The paradox occurs when Platt is being told the rules of the competition and learns of the rankings of most human human and least human human. After realizing that he does not want to be classified in the national press as the “least human human,” Platt resolves to seem 100 percent human. He then poses a couple of interesting questions: “I am human, so why should I need to fake it? Is it possible for me to seem more human than I really am?” It seems that as more technological developments are made regarding artificial intelligence, the more we as humans fear becoming inferior or submissive to the very things we have created. The questions I pose to you as you read this are these: what would it mean for society if artificial intelligence was developed until the point where a human user was indistinguishable from a computer program? What implications would this have or what would this say about the state of our society?