Some people believe that you should die, and some people think dying is a nuisance. I'm one of the latter. So I think we should get rid of death.
I suspect that pleasure is mainly used to turn off parts of the brain so you can keep fresh the memories of things you're trying to learn. It protects the short-term memory buffers. That's one theory of pleasure.
We humans are not the end of evolution, so if we can make a machine that's as smart as a person, we can probably also make one that's much smarter. There's no point in making just another person. You want to make one that can do things we can't.
We wanted to solve robot problems and needed some vision, action, reasoning, planning, and so forth. We even used some structural learning, such as was being explored by Patrick Winston.
Once when I was standing at the base, they started rotating the set and a big, heavy wrench fell down from the 12 o'clock position of the set, and got buried in the ground a few feet from me. I could have been killed!
No computer has ever been designed that is ever aware of what it's doing; but most of the time, we aren't either.
I believe that everyone has to construct a mental model of what they are and where they came from and why they are as they are, and the word soul in each person is the name for that particular mish-mash of those fully formed ideas of one's nature.
There was a failure to recognize the deep problems in AI; for instance, those captured in Blocks World. The people building physical robots learned nothing.
When David Marr at MIT moved into computer vision, he generated a lot of excitement, but he hit up against the problem of knowledge representation; he had no good representations for knowledge in his vision systems.
By the way, it was his simulations that helped out in Jurassic Park - without them, there would have been only a few dinosaurs. Based on his techniques, Industrial Light and Magic could make whole herds of dinosaurs race across the screen.
I think every person either inherits or eventually makes up their own idea of what they are and who they are and what caused the world to be, and it seems to me that these stories of creation myth, adopted by different cultures - most of them are less insightful than the stories made up by individual poets and writers.
If you just have a single problem to solve, then fine, go ahead and use a neural network. But if you want to do science and understand how to choose architectures, or how to go to a new problem, you have to understand what different architectures can and cannot do.
When David Marr at MIT moved into computer vision, he generated a lot of excitement, but he hit up against the problem of knowledge representation; he had no good representations for knowledge in his vision systems.
Societies need rules that make no sense for individuals. For example, it makes no difference whether a single car drives on the left or on the right. But it makes all the difference when there are many cars!