Siri is hands-down the most popular and prominent artificial intelligence known to our society today. She is consistently at our fingertips, ready to answer any question we pose to her. When given the task of asking Siri questions only a human can answer, I gave a lot of thought about what differentiates a human from an AI that strikingly resembles a human. The most obvious answer is that humans have emotions and AIs do not. I asked Siri , “Who do you love?”, to which she responded, “I’m not sure I understand.” Now, this response makes a lot of sense, as an artificial intelligence would not have the capability of loving someone. My next question to Siri was, “What is it like to be a human?”, to which she responded, “Interesting question.” Again, as expected, Siri would not know what it is like to be human so she could not answer this question. Next, I asked Siri was, “are you afraid of anything?”. I wanted to pose this question to Siri because of the scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey where Dave disconnects Hal. This scene shows Dave disconnecting Hal, the artificial intelligence that runs the spaceship of the mission he is on. After Hal suddenly turned murderous and killed everyone on the mission except Dave, he decided it was time to pull the plug on this machine. In this scene, Hal is slowly shutting down, and he keeps repeating the phrase, “I’m afraid.” This makes the audience question: how can a machine experience an emotion like fear? When I asked Siri this question, she responded, “I’m OK. If you’re feeling scared right now, let me know if you’d like some advice.” Siri responds like a machine would, incapable of fear and offering help through electronic resources. In contrast, Hal genuinely seemed afraid, an emotion only humans can feel. This assignment made me think about Siri and other AI in a way I had not before, and it was quite interesting to me to see what she had to say to questions only humans can answer.
My final thoughts on this course: Overall, I really enjoyed this course and love how Professor Echeverry pushed each student out of their comfort zones. A room full of majors like biology, psychology, marine science, political science, etc. and our professor had us putting on fashion shows. I also liked how we were assigned many group projects. This allowed us all to collaborate and bring each other's creative sides out. My favorite assignment was the Interstellar project. That was my favorite movie we watched by far, and creating that video was a lot of fun too. I liked using this class as an escape from the more boring and exhausting science courses I am used to. I loved having Professor Echeverry as a teacher: he always kept things real and interesting and opened my eyes to a lot of things I would have never even thought about before. His assignments were always different and creative, and in turn required us to be different and creative as students. Thank you for takin...
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