Introduction

What makes us human? Why do we think halloween when we see october 31st? Why don't cats and dogs create their own society? Why do people have such differing views? And what will come of us playing god with robots? These any many more questions have been asked for a very long time throughout history. From Plato to Pavlove humans have had tried to understand what makes us unique. Which begs the question what makes us human. It has been established in the physiology community since the works of Pavlov with his dogs that animals use associative memory (Suzuki, W. A. (2005, February 7) . Pavlov ran an experiment that proved that animals (and humans) both use associative memory. The leading theory up to then was that only humans could learn from past events making us capable of learning witch in this day and age just isn’t true.  Addontialy we as a human society are making robots/programs that are able to learn change itself based upon its experience which begs the question What makes humans human? Throughout this research paper I have researched many different resources and started to build the puzzle that is us.

Literature Review

What Makes Humans Human and not animals or Artificial intelligence?

What is Human

Humans are very interesting creatures, when you look at all of  hunman experincings from the beginning of recorded time to present day you see a very large range of Ideas, experiences, laws, and Ideals. One of the defining features of humanity is our ability to learn and apply knowledge through experiences. This phenomenon is called Assistive memory (Suzuki, W. A. (2005, February 7). According to current phycologists, individual humans experience things wildly different from each other. Within this you can tie each individual human memory or ideal to a specific event. Additionally psychologists suggest that humans don’t have control over this. We take in everything around us, from the color of the sky to the speech you hear, form the color of the school bus to the countless barrages of ads interrupting our daily dose of youtube episodes, humans learn it all. Although humans take in all this knowledge if humans tried to store it all in a spot accessible 24/7 by the conis mind the brain would turn into a babbling mess by age 6. The human mind instead stores most of memories in this place not accessible by the conscious mind. This is called the Unconscious mind. This is the part of the mind that  dictates actions like breathing, balance, reflexes and reactions. It is believed that the early years of life develop the unconscious and the years after that are devoted solely to the conscious mind.

Additionally Popular sciences states that memory is dictated by neroins. Neurons are specific mussels that populate the brain. Upon dissections we can prove that average humans can have over 100 billion neurons (100,000,000) each of these neurons are connected to at least 1,000 other neurons. It is believed that each of these connections are responsible for each of the individual memories in the body. Although it’s hard to calculate how much memory each neuron can hold.  If each of these held only one memory it reach a total of at least 100 trillion memories (100,000,000,000).

To conclude, Humans have a lot of weird differences that set us apart from other spices. These come from not only how learn but how we apply learning in new ways to make us “Human”.

Is there Humanity in Different Animals

Now why do we have this intelligence whereas other animals don't? Is it our language memory or just ability to build complex ideas? During the 1890s, Russian physiologist, Ivan Pavlov was researching salivation in dogs in response to being fed. During these experiments Pavlov found something interesting. During his experiments Pavlov would ring a bell right before feeding the dogs in his experiment. After doing this he discovered that dogs would salivate (get saliva in the mouth to prepare to chew food) everytime the bell rang. Pavlov concluded that you can get a dog to associate to different objects and act upon that association. This paved the way to many many more experiments that range from the same experiment with cats to whether or not dolphins can create their own society. These proves that not only humans but dogs and other animals can use assistive memory.  

Is it our Language? In 2016 an interesting study came to be. The study was on  Why do Cats Meow . “Since cats were domesticated 10,000 years ago, they have learned to communicate with humans using visual and vocal signals.  However, a lot of the cats’ vocal communications are not well understood. For example, cats vary the melody of their sounds often — possibly using patterns similar to those in human speech — but we currently do not know how to interpret these variations. One of the goals of the project is to learn more about these variations and study whether cats react differently to various aspects of human speech, such as different voices, speaking styles and intonation patterns. Although domestic cats’ body types don’t vary all that much, their meows can range from meek to intense.” (The Science explorer, 2016) From this study the researchers concluded that meowing was actually a form of communication between cats in humans. They also discovered that after enough time they could interpret exactly what the cats was trying to communicate. Therefore it isn’t our language.

Is it our complexities of human? In 2019 the  Institute for Marine Mammal Studies Made a shocking discovery. Kelli ( a dolphin at the Institute for Marine Mammal Studies) has opened a wealth of knowledge about dolphins. “As a result of training, when the dolphins discover paper or trash in the water, they smartly know to bring it to a trainer to receive a fish reward. Kelly, however, has gone one step further. Kelly figured out that she received the same fish regardless of the size of the piece of trash she was delivering to her trainer. So she began hiding big pieces of trash under a rock. Kelly would then rip off small pieces from the trash and deliver them one at a time so that she could receive more fish. This is surprising for many reasons. While of course dolphins are well known for being intelligent, this smart move by Kelly means that she has a sense of delayed gratification. She doesn't feel the need to rush to get a fish right away. She smartly knows that the future holds the possibility of a much greater amount of fish. Amazingly, Kelly hasn't stopped there with her brilliance. When a bird landed in the pool, Kelly snatched it and delivered it to her trainers. She received a large amount of fish in return. Knowing this, she decided to start hiding fish each time she was fed. She would then use the fish to lure birds when none of her trainers were around. Kelly knew that by saving one or two fish now, she could get many more fish later by turning in a bird.” (Phil Mutz, 2019).  So we can determine that it isn’t or society. What makes us human is the ability to write our findings down and spread that information. We don’t see cats writing their own bible. This is what separates us from the animal kingdom.

AI Place in the world

Now in science fiction we always see artificial intelligences that seem almost human. From Jarvis or vision in marvel To R2D2 and c3po in star wars, To the terminators and the the robots in I,robot. At what point will these become a reality, and what does this mean for the world?

Artificial intelligence is a very complex and vague subject. If you look at it as its raw definition its defined as “the theory and development of computer systems able to perform tasks that normally require human intelligence, such as visual perception, speech recognition, decision-making, and translation between languages.” (Dictionary, 2019) under this definition almost all technology you interact with daily is an artificial intelligence. From your google search to your Amazon echo to the bot that pulls up your suggested video on youtube. However there seems to be a hierarchy to this “artificial intelligence”. For example IBM’s Watson is the most advanced machine mankind has created has beaten two of jeopardy greatest champions where as amazon's AI has created thousands of sales. Comparatively Watson is like a god compared with your smartphone.

So what does this mean for our Future. The advanced machines(ie. Self driving cars, ad bots and watson) learn by a topic called machine learning. machine learning is the process of someone teaching a machine  how to think and process the world around them. Machine learning is modeled with what is called a neural network. A neural network is almost impossible to understand much like the human brain. The main reason between a neural network and tradition coding the machine teaches themselves. For example apple's SIRI is hand coded you have an action and you get a response, where's youtube ad bots are created by trial by fire sorta. For this you start with an adaptive programing through generations. Think of it as there are generations of machines. Although the first one doesn't really work well but the best of them gotr to generation two. Generation two then randomly changes many different  parts of this. The best of witch goes onto generation three. You then repeat this process as many times as it takes tell you have the AI you interact with daily.

What does this mean in the future? Now looking deeper into the tech world there are some pretty scary stuff going on. In 2016 two of  Facebook's AI for trying to understand and respond to human inputs. During their operational period of the two AI’s they had created their own language to communicate with each other.  Humans tried and failed to understand this language. After discovering this Facebook rather quickly pulled the plug on both of the AI. Under earlier definition of Artificial intelligence these AI have crossed the threshold to true intelligence. Begging the question where will this lead us. Under machine learning AI basically teaches themselves to do certain tasks, Meaning that the AI can develop infinite personalities and have an infinite amount of relations with humanity. As current AI’s go they have three basic laws “Isaac Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.” (Auburn, 2001). Now with true AI they would also have a version of free will meaning that the laws of robotics would be like federal tax law for humans. The AI would have the choice to break these laws much like a human can commit tax fraud. With the way AI is developing it is destined to become part of our everyday life more and more.

Conclusion

Humans are very interesting and complex creatures. Much too complicated to build broad statements that sum up the whole of the population. Although there are traits that we share as population. For example, humans are resursele, thrifty, have a written language and have a close knit society that builds and thrives off of each other. This is why humans are so unique and advanced. Additionally this is why we associate things and knowledge has to be experienced for ourselves. Although artificial intelligence and the animal kingdom may eventually catch up we should do just fine.