Say hello to Osprey. She's bad news. If you had a hankering for a menacing supervillain who delivers long nerve-grinding monologues, you are in luck at long last. Said diabolical monologue is coming up on the next page, you lucky thing.
As mentioned before, the point of this whole chapter is to reintroduce characters who appeared in the first chapter and then were left by the wayside as the story went in a new direction. It's almost embarrassing looking back at the mooner baddies Nascha (the horned valkyrie above), Panzer, and Woody, and wondering what the hell was I thinking when I put them in this comic? Doing this chapter, I almost feel like a serious film director who's been put under contract to direct some movie based on a ridiculous cartoon series, and somehow I have to squeeze something worthwhile out of the source material. Well, at least it should be entertaining. Stuff gets blowed up good.
Is strong artificial intelligence a fallacy? Is a computer capable of conscious thought, the way a human is? Can an artificial intelligence actually understand what it's doing? Proponents of strong AI would argue that, if an artificial intelligence is capable of passing a Turing Test – that is, it's capable of responding and interacting in a manner indistinguishable from a human – then it is, for all intents and purposes, intelligent. If you saw the movie Ex Machina, then you know what I'm talking about! But is that really true?
Philosopher John Searle doesn't think so. And to prove his point, he famously proposed a thought experiment: The Chinese Room. Imagine that you're locked in a room, with no access to the outside world except for a tiny slot in a door. From time to time, someone slips you messages through the door that are written in Chinese. You don't speak Chinese, but you have a book of instructions which tell you which arrangement of Chinese characters to write down as a response. You write down your response and slip it back out the slot to the Chinese speaker on the other side. This goes on, back and forth, for a period of time, during which you're actually engaging in a conversation with the Chinese speaker outside who's slipping you messages. Your responses, in perfect Chinese, are indistinguishable from a normal human Chinese speaker's responses. They exhibit engagement and humor, and your responses even inquire about the message writer's family and career. But you don't speak a word of Chinese. You're just following instructions. So when you finally emerge from the room and meet this person you've been having a conversation with, you won't know anything about them. Because the whole time, all you were doing was mindlessly going through the motions.
By now, I'm sure you see where that was going. A computer, even a very “clever” one capable of passing a Turing Test, is ultimately just a lifeless chunk of electronic components, mindlessly interacting in accordance with physical laws. No matter how convincing an artificial intelligence may be, it can never be truly intelligent; it's just really good at fooling you. If rogue AI took over the world and all biological life were wiped out like cockroaches, would the robot overlords be alive, or would it just be a lifeless world full of dead machine components, mindlessly performing a perverse imitation of life?
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