Death by Artificial Intelligence: How Human Can It Get?

This is a response to a thoughtful article from Search Engine Watch, by Janet Bastiman entitled Can machines think?

It occurs to me that there is a great variety of capability that we classify as "human" including people with very low IQ (some have almost no intellectual capacity). Any type of test (e.g. Turing) to determine whether a machine possesses intelligence must draw a line somewhere, when in fact any drawn line may be arbitrary. Perhaps "intelligence" - cognitive and emotional abilities - are on a scale that starts with rocks, runs the gamut through amoebas, fish, cats, dolphins, humans, and God.
Eventually, machines will mimic a lot of human thinking. Will they ever have empathy, longing, happiness, and love? Is it better for machines to remain dispassionate? Are they more likely to kill us if they have self-directed behavior with no conscience (like a psychopath) or if they are capable of hate and anger?

Alan Turing - inventor of the Turing test to determine if a robot is really "intelligent".
 Photo courtesy Search Engine Watch.

There are some physicists (I'll try to find a link), who believe that merging AI with human intelligence may pave the way for us to manipulate or even create universes.  In other words, we effectively would become gods. From a mathematical point of view, given the age of the universe and the potential for other universes like it to exist, some feel that this  must have already happened somewhere, which has led to the speculation that we may be the result of someone playing around with physics at a high level.

Let there be light...