Gigaom AI Minute – October 8

Transcript

In 1991, anthropologist Donald Brown published a book called "Human Universals." Human universals, he said, "comprise those features of culture, society, language, behavior, and psyche for which there are no known exception." In other words, wherever you find humans, you will find all of these behaviors. He identified sixty-seven of them, including gift-giving, joking, religious ritual, soul concepts, faith healing, eschatology (beliefs about how the world will end), hair styles, athletics, sports, and body adornment.

These sixty-seven universals, plus undoubtedly more, make up the common threads of humanity that connect us all to one another. Everywhere on the planet, there is marriage, for instance, in some form or another. What is different, of course, is all the dressing--how marriages happen, what people wear, how the ceremony is performed, and so forth. It is all the differences surrounding those universals that make different cultures genuinely unique.

What would it mean if an artificial intelligence began exhibiting these sixty-seven universals? What is the artificial intelligence started giving gifts and telling jokes and wondering what was going to happen at the end of the world? What would we then say that it is? Has it become, as it were, human, or is humanity something that a machine can never aspire to?