Mistaking minds and machines: How speech affects dehumanization and anthropomorphism.

Mistaking minds and machines: How speech affects dehumanization and anthropomorphism.

Treating a human mind like a machine is an essential component of dehumanization, whereas attributing a humanlike mind to a machine is an essential component of anthropomorphism. Here we tested how a cue closely connected to a person's actual mental experience-a humanlike voice-affects the likelihood of mistaking a person for a machine, or a machine for a person. We predicted that paralinguisti...

Journal of Experimental Psychology: General Mistaking Minds and Machines: How Speech Affects Dehumanization and Anthropomorphism

Social Cognition Unbound: Insights Into Anthropomorphism and Dehumanization.

People conceive of wrathful gods, fickle computers, and selfish genes, attributing human characteristics to a variety of supernatural, technological, and biological agents. This tendency to anthropomorphize nonhuman agents figures prominently in domains ranging from religion to marketing to computer science. Perceiving an agent to be humanlike has important implications for whether the agent is...

Minds, machines and Searle

Searle's celebrated Chinese Room Argument has shaken the foundations of Artificial Intelligence. Many refutations have been attempted, but none seem convincing. This paper is an attempt to sort out explicitly the assumptions and the logical, methodological and empirical points of disagreement. Searle is shown to have underestimated some features of computer modeling, but the heart of the issue ...

Gödel, Nagel, Minds and Machines

Just fifty years ago, Ernest Nagel and Kurt Gödel became involved in a serious imbroglio about the possible inclusion of Gödel's original work on incompleteness in the book, Gödel's Proof, then being written by Nagel with James R. Newman. What led to the conflict were some unprecedented demands that Gödel made over the use of his material and his involvement in the contents of the bookdemands ...