In 2022, an event shook machine learning and artificial intelligence scholars: Blake Lemoine, a Google engineer, said he recognized personified traits of the chatbot LaMDA by Google. This raised a question: is it possible that an AI model could be considered a “person”?
It has been proven that in some fields AI is more intelligent than humans. But it’s a long way from here to considering her as a person. The concepts of personality e individuality are crucial in ethical and philosophical discussions, as it concerns the moral status of a being. The questions surrounding this topic are complex and involve rights, duties and dignity. In attempting to define them, many have focused on capacity for conscious experiencebut consciousness is a difficult concept to frame and measure.
Here the figure of emerges Ibn Theirsan Islamic philosopher who lived between 980 and 1037, also known as Avicenna in the West. Although his studies precede the emergence of artificial intelligence by centuries, his ideas can offer interesting insights. Ibn Sina explored the distinction between humans and animalsfocusing on the human ability to understand “the universal”, unlike animals who simply perceive “particulars”.
In his work “Al-Nafs”, Ibn Sina gives the example of a sheep seeing a wolf. While the sheep instinctively reacts to the threat, a human would reflect on the general concept of “wolf”, associating it with danger and deciding accordingly. This abstraction capacity it is what, according to Ibn Sina, distinguishes humans from other animals.
This distinction is also relevant in current AI research, which shows how artificial neural networks are limited in their ability to generalize. In other words, while a human can recognize variations of an object or concept based on general characteristics, an AI model requires very specific data to operate correctly. Furthermore, it must be trained adequately otherwise the results will be terrible.
Ibn Sina’s comparison of human and animal reasoning offers a unique perspective on the question of personality e individuality in AI. If we take into account his criterion, we will understand that AI still doesn’t pass this test. This suggests that, despite being advanced, artificial intelligence does not reach the complexity of human thought in terms of its ability to abstract and generalize.
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