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Comment by MollyR | Hacker News Reader

This reminds of a scene from I, Robot.

Detective Del Spooner: Human beings have dreams. Even dogs have dreams, but not you, you are just a machine. An imitation of life. Can a robot write a symphony? Can a robot turn a... canvas into a beautiful masterpiece?

Sonny: Can you?

Detective Del Spooner: (Doesn't respond,looks irritated)

EDIT : this a scene from the will smith movie

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Which is the annoyingly weak answer. Rather say:

Spooner: No. But some humans can. Can any robot?

And see how it plays out from there.

I don't see how the fact that some human can do it can be used to justify the properties of another human. Are you rich because Bill Gates is rich?

It doesn't matter if all robot can't or that some human can, because we are judging an individual. So if Spooner can't do it, yet he still thinks he has some value than the robot, then clearly it's not ability to compose symphony that matters.

The creative faculty is much more than just composing symphonies though, the simple act of speaking, is a creative process. Every time you speak your utterances can be arbitrarily long, and unique - have probably never been expressed, in that particular order. So that's something all humans can do.

And something AI does too

https://www.engadget.com/2016/09/10/google-deepmind-ai-waven...

It can mimic a human voice but not synthesise novel sentences of arbitrary length - which are actually meaningful - the creative process of speech.

Check Noam Chomsky on AI and the singularity, interesting viewpoints. This video is good. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kICLG4Zg8s

Well the answer was probably appropriate for the movie.

At the moment computers can produce art and music but not as good as humans can. By 2035 when the film is set who knows?

I mean, of course it works for the movie, which I assume is why it's in there. But that's a movie. I don't understand why people cite it as though it has some dispositive power outside that context.

It might make sense to clarify that you are referencing the (late and unrelated) hollywood film vs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I,_Robot.

How about a simpler task: a cup of tea. Let human in any apartment kitchen and they will make you a cup of tea. Robot? Certainly not in 2016.

http://teabot.com/

If the "you" refers to humans in general. We are good.

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