What makes us human?
Having breakfast at 7 am. Working between 6 and 9 hours per day. Taking those lessons of Kung fu you paid last week to exercise to become fitter to be up to the dating game. Kissing your beloved one on the forehead; crying about the drama series you watched last weekend. Texting you are not going to that dinner because you don’t want to see someone.
Routines, making decisions, sharing emotions and experiences with the ones we care about, letting off pent-up stress and boredom, or sharing happiness; seem to characterize and, therefore, define human existence.
But we are not the only species using routines to make our life stable and avoid anxiety. Cats and most pets need them too. They expect to be fed, go to bed, or go to the toilet at specific times each day. Pets also need to introduce changes to their routines gradually to avoid fear or frustration.
Novelty in their life, just like ours, requires a one-thing-at-a-time approach to bypassing stress.
Likewise, emotions aren’t unique to human beings.
The teacher Carl Safine, who wrote the book Beyond words: How Animals think and feel, says animals have a vivid life experiences. Like us, they know who their friends are and who their rivals are; they play; they can feel fear and love and have particular reactions to each emotion.
According to this author, animals can feel empathy too. He shows this by telling about an extraordinary incident where humpback whales help seals being hunted by killer whales.
Some reserach have also shown plants have particular strcutures and dynamics to sense:
Research into their awareness has revealed the incredible ways plants sense their environment: from “hearing” their predators, “smelling” their neighbours1 and even “mimicking” the shapes of their plant hosts.
Nor are we the only species that can make decisions. Animals make them too.
A tiny fruit fly must decide where to fly when the temperature rises, and she has not found any food. So has to do a polar bear without food or a bird that must choose a reproductive partner; animals can remember specific events, use tools, and solve problems.
But yet, the rules that govern their actions and how they behave are still under study. Scientists use animals to fathom how nervous systems work, but there are several questions without an answer within this field. This information is of high value to address how decisions are made on more complex brains, like humans.
Our human brain makes around 35,000 decisions on an average day. Those decisions create actions that define our behaviors. Beyond our individuality actions, as a species, we have behavioral patterns… But there’s so much we still don’t know about them.
Nevertheless, a knowledge field is already building solutions and experimenting with existent models that explain human behavior, which is the technology field, especially Artificial Intelligence (AI).
Artificial intelligence is learning to emulate what we know so far about human intelligence; how we think, make choices, and feel. One of its goals is to be like us, so we can feel more comfortable interacting with them, while they are in charge of complex chores, for example.
There are many holes and voids in those research. So, I am curious about what concepts are used to teach a machine to behave like humans and interact with us.
And that “us” makes me wonder about their definition of our species and which learning pattern behaviors we are transferring to an artificial entity.
Do we want all those behaviors to be emulated now for an artificial “being”?
It would be valuable to learn from you what it means to be a human being, so all comments are welcome!
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Thank you for reading me! Greetings from the north side of South America!
