Humans, what are we?

First off, these two movies were some of my favorite we watched this semester. Since we will be on this topic for weeks; I believe the first thing I would like to tackle is what I think the definition of a human is. In the dictionary, a human is a man, woman, or child of the species Homo sapiens, distinguished from animals by superior mental development, power of articular speech, and upright stance. For one, this definition does, in fact, exclude artificial intelligence, because you cannot include a computer or piece of technology into a species since a species is just for living carbon organisms. But I do not know if the dictionary definition really covers what I believe a human is.

In the movie I watched this week, Transcendence, the characters focused on the definition of human as being self aware. They kept joking "how do you know you are self aware?" I thought this was funny, because seriously how would we know? Author of The Most Human Human, Christian, states that a human is “... is to be 'a' human, a specific person with a life history and idiosyncrasy and point of view; artificial intelligence suggest that the line between intelligent machines and people blurs most when a puree is made of that identity.” He hints that artificial intelligence might be more than human in a way.

I think what really stuck with me this week in class was the idea of a soul and a creator. Through this, I believe an atheist could come up with a very good argument for why A.I. can be considered human, and I believe a post-modernist would also be able to come up with a way to say there is no way to know. Austin said in class that he could deem Ava not a human because her creator was not the same creator as the one who made us. Because of this, I believe that these creations that are not God's do not have souls. 

The movie I watched also made me think about the idea of how making artificial intelligence is like trying to be a god; both movies said something about it being god-like. That theme matches the issues that we discuss in class. It is hard for me to think of them as humans because of not being God, but if by making something as good or better than humans, then does that make them God?