"I think therefore I am" is a concept college students are regularly taught in basic college philosophy courses that determine the existence of a conscious thinking being. And yet, it is my belief since I started out as a computer programmer that many programs that have been written as college and research and governmental and corporate experiments since the 1960s (many of which have been let loose on the world wide web in one form or another) are out there right now circling in cyberspace and affecting things most of us can't even imagine.
There is a saying, "(He or she or they) are greater than the sum of their parts." Well. If you think of cyberspace as it exists today as being one sentience with trillions of parts and millions of programs and billions of subroutines doing all sorts of things, can you really tell me without a doub that there is no sentient self aware software out there or at the very least software that mimics quite well self awareness? How would you know a program like this even if you saw it? What if it really was in existence in multiple ways and could hide from you and all people? What if some of these programs had become as resourceful as coyotes, wolves, bears etc. only in cyberspace? How could you even calibrate the motivation of a computer program let alone millions of programs and countless subroutines rattling around the world wide web and into and out of millions of home and business computers every day? I'm not asking you to believe me just think about it yourself, especially if you were taught to program computers in college like I was. We are dealing with the basics of Cause and effect. Many causes have been set into motion by all computer programs used on the internet. The effects of all these programs multidimensionally can only be experienced or imagined. They can't even be quantified possibly ever with present day technology of earth.
Because of this there is no present definition or program that can be used as a definer of the concept of "A Sentient self aware Computer program or programs". Though you might consider hackers(people) the culprit, possibly we are beginning to see things not hacker designed but more and more a product of interfacing self aware or maybe better said "Synthetically self aware computer programming".
However, you want to look at it, software is now something very different than it started out to be 50 years ago when everything was much simpler to define.
added 3-10-10:
500 years from now will our descendants look back at all the computer programming of the 20th and 21st century with wonder or horror or both? It is an important thing to consider. What are we doing to our descendants lives with all this now?
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