Quacking ducks and poetry reciting robot women!
What is it to be human? Surely one of the many and highly complex capacities which converge to form the human animal is our ability to create and appreciate art whether in the form of painting or literature. My dog has many admirable qualities but I’ve never seen him take down a book from my shelves and lose himself in it. No the ability to derive pleasure from literature and other high art is confined to we humans, or is it? Some proponents of artificial intelligence (the theory that we can create machines which equal or perhaps surpass us in intellectual capacities) contend that robots and computers will, one day possess the capability to understand and create high culture. Indeed the inventor and technological guru, Ray Kurzweil argues that machines will be able to create and comprehend art in precisely the same manner as we humans do. In the same way in which we can be moved to tears by a profound poem or other expression of artistic prowess so, in years to come will our artificial creations be moved to tears by the self-same cultural expressions.
In “Hemlock”, the final story in my collection of short stories, “The First Time” we are introduced to Becky, a robot who recites Keat’s Ode to a Nightingale with passion. She truly feels the beauty and sadness of Keat’s magnificent poem or does she? Perhaps Becky’s apparently genuine responses to Ode to a Nightingale are mere tricks stemming from clever computer programming. Becky is according to this perspective a mere shell with no thoughts and emotions of her own, she is in the true sense of the word a robot. However others would contend that we are all products of our genetic programming. Becky’s responses are therefore no more or less genuine than those of any other “programmed” creation whether of the biological or the non-biological variety. “If it quacks like a duck and walks like a duck then it is a duck”, or is it? I will leave you, my readers to decide.
(For “Hemlock” and the other stories in “The First Time” by Kevin Morris please visit http://www.amazon.com/The-First-Time-ebook/dp/B00AIK0DD6/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1357854695&sr=8-1&keywords=the+first+time+kevin+morris. For John Keat’s Ode to a Nightingale please visit http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/173744
