This book brings the reader up to date with developments in the thinking about consciousness in AI, and examines the implications this has for humans as a species.It concludes that we need to start cultivating our junk code, and that it may now be time to give our robots some soul.
Many people have a sense of unease about the direction in which AI is taking us. This is more than a worry about losing jobs or online content, although these are symptoms.? This is a sense that something more fundamental is wrongthat the way programmers and designers understand intelligence is itself awry.
With her extraordinary ability to bridge the arts and sciences, Eve Poole not only diagnoses what is wrong, but offers an entirely novel suggestion about how to put it right. Rather than throwing up her hands in horror, Poole offers a way out of the nightmare: stop stripping out all that makes us most humanlike emotions and mistakesand put our junk code into the programming. If it has been good enough for human survival, it is good enough for AI.
Robot Souls?is a brilliant book that wears its breadth of learning lightly and makes a complex subject seem simply. It is funny, readable, and important. It upends the fundamental presuppositions of AI and puts the enterprise on a new, more human, foundation.
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Linda Woodhead,?F.D.Maurice Professor Kings College London, UK
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In?Robot Souls, Eve Poole advances what is a provocativeeven hereticalidea: our AIs and robots not only can have souls; we need them to have souls. In developing this groundbreaking proposal, Poole not only provides a much-needed critical examination of human exceptionalism but uses this opportunity to develop an innovative conceptualization of soul as the messy but necessary junk code of consciousnel#Œ
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