How would you know if you were an android? I don't mean a
dopey "danger Wil Robinson!" clunky, clanky, arm waving robot. Not even like Commander Data but with a
better skin tone. Or Ripley's synthetic
'friend' Ash. I mean a super sophisticated bio-engineered flesh and blood
android. How would you know?
Would you occasionally struggle with your core
programming? Would your programming feel
inadequate to deal with some kinds of human behaviour?
What if you were a spy, left here by an alien
civilisation to observe, emulate, and presumably at some stage report back? A
sophisticated, interactive CCTV camera. Perhaps you're continuously reporting
and not even aware of it. Perhaps the best anthropology is done without violating
the prime directive (although as any Trekkie knows there's no such thing as an
episode or Star Trek that DOESN'T violate the prime directive). How would you know?
What would it feel like as you upgraded your human
emulation software? When my daughter was very small, we came home to find that
our house had been burgled. "Daddy", she asked, "are there bad
people living in our world?". Upgrade 1.1 there ARE bad people in our
world. Is grief the sensation of
downloading a patch, installing it, and rebooting in safe mode?
Would you laugh at times that seemed to be very different
to everyone else? Would things that worry other people simply not be
interesting to you? Would you know facts, figures and data and be able to
retrieve them much quicker than neurotypicals?
Or do you ever imagine that you were the only human, and
everyone else was a flesh and blood android? Like a sophisticated conservation
project: a zoo exhibit for human research.
Do you ever ask yourself, "what would a normal human
person do in this situation"?
No? Good. Shh! Neither do I. Forget I mentioned it.
