"The lights are on, but is anybody home?"

In this essay, with his main question being "Can Machines Think?", Wright discusses the progress machines have made in being 'more like us'. He states that the field is making computers more like us, not just their actions, but how the actions are carried out- more like us on the inside. Considering this fact that they are trying to make machines more like humans on the inside, he points out the following questions relating to consciousness or mind. Could Deep Blue ever feel deeply blue?; Does a face recognition program have the experience of recognizing a face? Can computers ever have subjective experience? ( Wright 142). Wright makes the point that for AI, the hardest thing for computers is the simple stuff. Things such as small talk, recognizing faces, cleaning, recognizing jokes, or even common sense.

If machines cannot carry out simple things like these, how can they relate to us on the inside? Why are humans feeling undermined by machines? Wright states that computers are bringing about an identity crisis in humans, and he feels that such a crisis possibly is in order. He says that the crisis isn't just that as these machines get more powerful they do more jobs once done only by people, but also that in the process, they seem to underscore the generally dispiriting impulse of scientific request for knowledge and information(Wright 140). One of Wrights main points, he states, is that as the information age advances and computers get brainier, philosophers are taking the existence of mind, of conscious, more seriously, not less (Wright 140).

Wright makes a point that conciousness- the existence of pleasure and pain, love and grief- is a fairly central source of life's meaning (Wright 144). Wright opposes Chalmers statement that consciousness is "extraness", and that there is no apparent role for subjective experience. Wright says that consciousness actually does something in the physical world, like influence behavior. The robot Cog, has the ability that upon touching an object, the "skin" will send a data packet to the "brain" and could have impulses to recoil from an object, an example a hot object, jsut as humans do. Cog, however, would not experience the pain felt by humans.This goes back to his main question...Can machines think? If he has no experience, then how is it even possible? The only reason the robot could even recoil away from the heat, is because of the "skin" that was applied to him. This whole idea that they could even get a robot to so call "feel" the heat, arises the thought that they are creating a new species of sentient life and it is being taken seriously by philosophers. However, there is on going debate on whether machines can think, and personally, I do not think that humans will ever be underminded by machines.