Question: Could AI ever be considered human?

Dave Underhill answered on 13 Jun 2019:

interesting question. Unfortunately, it won’t be a straightforward answer. It really depends on how you define human. Biologically AI could never be human, we could make a robot that looks human but it would never be biologically human. AI is already used all over the world for all sorts of things, mainly menial tasks that are repetitive or involve large amounts of data, but I think what your question means is could AI ever become sentient – could it think for its self to the degree that it could be considered an independent life form. Now Artificial Intelligence isn’t my field but philosophically speaking it would need to become self-aware, it would need to recognise what it was and understand its place in the world. We do have learning AI which has been taught to play the japanese game go, but these arent really sentient. Now, if an AI became fully self-aware it would almost certainly not want to be considered human, it would be a different life form. The question is would we accept it as such? I do think that AI could, and probably will become sentient, in fact, with the advent of quantum computing (the first one was switched on in January this year) we are a step closer to being able to develop this sort of AI. I am not sure that AI would ever be considered human however, but that doesn’t mean it can’t become a self-aware sentient being capable of all of the cognition that humans are capable of.