Mechanizing Minds and Humanizing Machines

If researchers in the fields of Artificial Intelligence, Artificial Life, and Robotics have their way, the day is coming when androids will walk among us. They will be our doppelgangers-indistinguishable from humans. And the more scientists learn about getting machines to emulate human intelligence, the more we will learn about how we humans think, feel, and behave. Progress in Cognitive Science, has begun to stimulate moral and ethical concerns about how we will treat our machines when they eventually become humanoid.

We must ask at what point such androids will cross the threshold to personhood. Will they then remain our property, or must they own themselves? Will they be conscious? Will it be moral-or murder-to turn them off? Will they have an experience of themselves and of their android condition? Will an android someday say, "I think, therefore I am" and mean it? These, and other questions have brought formerly ignored areas of Philosophy and Psychology back into the realm of science. Epistemology, ethics, the problem of other minds, and the mind-body problem, all formerly considered to be beyond the purview of Psychology, are now becoming central to the study of Cognitive Science.