Confirmation Example

Instructions:
1. Answer the following questions.
2. Write your confirmation.
3. Start linking to your sources. 

1. What is my thesis?
Although computers are constantly evolving, they will never be as powerful as the human brain.

2. What types of source am I using to defend my thesis? 
I am using expert opinions, a famous and relevant philosophical example and a fun article.

3. Are my arguments mostly based on evidence, logic or emotion?
My arguments have no hard evidence. In fact, I think that is one of the biggest problems with my confirmation. I have good quotes from famous people, and a good example with the Chinese Room, but no statistics or studies to support my thesis. There are no emotional appeals either, but I don't think those would be useful.

My Confirmation

Perhaps one of the challenges to adequately discussing this topic is the difficulty of defining the human brain in a way that can be compared to a computer so as to compare the power of the two. Let's first look at the human brain through a terrible lens, and one that sci fi concepts seem to constantly attribute to computers: the power to destroy. Perhaps the unique human ability to war and fight at a level unique to our species (Dolphins, as predatory and scary as they may be, will never launch a mortar barrage against an enemy pod or engage in genocide.) so will robots ever reach this uniquely human metric? Computer science professor at the University of Sheffield, England Noel Sharkey says no. "They are just computer systems... the only way they can become dangerous is when used in military applications." To Sharkey, robots and artificial intelligence have the greatest growth potential in toy markets, a strong indication of the potential for nefariousness he sees in future computing technology. He goes on to point out that the largest developments in robotics come not from software, but from their hardware. Robots that can walk or navigate difficult terrain seem to be the new trend for robots mimicking human behavior.

An article from Vox.com makes an interesting case about why computers will never be able to match human intelligence:

A computer program has never grown up in a human family, fallen in love, been cold, hungry or tired, and so forth. In short, they lack a huge amount of the context that allows human beings to relate naturally to one another.

Basically, the argument is that even if a computer can match our brain's computational power (A very far off and unlikely possibility), it will never be able to pass as a human because it lacks the experiences that really create our humanity. Or, in other words, humans are so much more than our brain power - we are the products of our upbringings. Our tenacity, will, passions and dreams all come from the sum of our experiences, not how fast we think. Because of that, computers will not be able to function at a human level of creativity or character.

Actually, this supposition stems from a famous scenario from philosopher John Searle in the 1980s. He proposed that an Englishman with no knowledge of Chinese, if locked in a room with an instruction manual for reading and writing Chinese characters, could successfully interpret and respond to messages passed under the door to him from a native Chinese speaker on the outside of the room. Theoretically, given enough time, the Englishman could respond so accurately that the native Chinese speaker would be sure that she was in fact corresponding with another native Chinese speaker.  Essentially, the Englishman would have passed himself off as a Chinese person with no contextual understanding of what it means to be Chinese. The extension of the argument into artificial intelligence is that even if we create a computer that can mimic and interact with humans so convincingly that we believe we are conversing with a real human, that machine will not be human because it lacks the contextual understandings of humanity.

Whether we define the brain by what it produces (In this paper I discussed the example of war, but many other examples would suffice, art or romance, for example), or in terms of raw computational power or how the experiences that mold each molecularly similar brain into such unique masterpieces the conclusion remains the same: Any computer, no matter how powerful or well conceived, can approach a human level of thought or existence.