Meh, I think that human intelligence is vastly overrated. We've been moving the goalposts for centuries to safeguard our place not only at the top of the intellectual food chain, but also to maintain the idea that we are on an altogether different chain.

We've been doing this with regard to various animals since forever. Every time a chimp learns sign language, an elephant cares about its mother, or a dolphin has sex for fun, everyone loses their minds falling all over themselves to "prove" that we are qualitatively different. That there's something else going on with us that is special.

I'm not passing judgment here. I do it too. It's extremely convenient for me to do so. If you start thinking of intelligence as a spectrum with some species closer to one end of it than others, it gets a lot harder to justify most of what we do to animals. And there's a dark place I don't want to go that suggests that some people are far enough down the spectrum that maybe you could justify doing bad things to them.

It get really messy and ugly in both directions when you think about intelligence as a spectrum. At what point should an animal be considered smart enough to merit "human" rights? At what point should a human be considered so dumb that it doesn't?

We, as a society, are not ready to have that conversation. We lack the moral fortitude to do so, which is why I happily participate in this artificial segregation.

But we are going to be forced into dealing with it much sooner than we are ready to. I fully expect that within my lifetime, there will be Bladerunner scenarios with lifelike robots who are practically indistinguishable from actual people.

We live in a bubble here, where all the women are beautiful, all the men are above average, and all the children are FBI agents.

Human memory is far more corrupt and fallacious than we want to think it is. Weird social interactions with slightly (or very) dysfunctional people are far more common than we tend to think they are. Spend a day on the subway in NYC. Spend a day in my hometown in Texas (population: 498).

Many of these people could easily be simulated with a high degree of believability. The real hypocrisy here is that no one wants to believe that you, as an individual, could be simulated with believability. I'll go on the record and say that it would be trivial to simulate me. I'm not that special.

The problem we have with AI tests is that we are testing against the ability for an AI to be anyone. We're checking to see if an AI could be as good at impersonating absolutely anyone as one of the top .00001% of human character actors.

We aren't checking the lower bounds. Because that's extremely uncomfortable for us. We're maintaining goals and standards that are designed to make the tests fail.

Again, we are doing it for good reasons. We haven't yet solved the problem of how to treat each other when we know that we're only dealing with humans. We aren't ready to talk about bringing other entities into our world yet.

Bladerunner was prescient; Westworld is near future. We need to get our shit together because these issues are going to come up far sooner than we expect. And when we're talking about an entity that speaks to us in our own language, with our own idioms, with our own concepts of feelings and emotions--it's going to be a lot harder to maintain the pretense that we are somehow qualitatively different.

On the other hand, this could be really convenient for us. A moment of solidarity, if you will. We could create believable robot characters that we unite against and focus all our hate, violence, racism, and abuse towards. Maybe we all get along better after that.

But what does that say about us? And have we really solved our problems? I think that's the question Westworld is asking, similarly to the question some open world games ask, like EvE Online: in a universe where everything is permissible, who are you?