For nearly a century, science fiction has been asking a question that suddenly doesn’t feel much like fiction: what happens when our machines begin to resemble us?
This morning at The Little Station on Commercial Street, we follow that question from Murray Leinster’s astonishingly prescient A Logic Named Joe and Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? to The Day the Earth Stood Still—and then straight into today’s debate over artificial intelligence, morality, conscience, and the soul.
Along the way, we revisit Chesterton Radio’s Magnificent Humanity and The Soul of the Machine. If a machine can answer our questions, imitate our language, recognize our emotions, and perhaps even learn our moral rules, what remains uniquely human?
Perhaps the most important question raised by artificial intelligence isn’t whether a machine can become human.
It is whether we still understand what it means to be human.
☕ Daybreak comes to you from The Little Station on Commercial Street—a good story, a wider view of the day, and a thought worth carrying into it.
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Magnificent Humanity
When the smoke first rose above the Vatican and the name “Leo” was spoken again after more than a century, many Catholics immediately thought of factories.
