I’m happy to see that more publishers won’t accept works created by AI. For the life of me, I can’t understand why someone would stick their name in the byline of something created by a computer program, but after all, plagiarism is nothing new. If people will take credit for something somebody else wrote, why not claim an AI product?

This issue isn’t going away. In Ray Kurzweil’s latest book, The Singularity is Nearer: When We Merge with AI, he claims AI will match and even surpass the writing of the best authors. These programs, he argues, will be “familiar with virtually every kind of human writing. Users could prompt it to answer questions about any given subject in a huge variety of styles — from scientific writing to children’s books, poetry, or sitcom scripts. It could even imitate specific writers, living or dead.”

Can it? I don’t think so. Ray Kurzweil is a transhumanist who advocates merging humans with AI as well as enhancing human ability with genetic engineering. Kurzweil believes we can upload our minds to a computer and live forever. Transhumanism despises the body, traditional culture, and humanity in general. Worse, it doesn’t understand any of the things it wants to replace.

First of all, human beings are not ghosts in a machine. The notion that our minds ride around in a meat robot that can be ditched without changing who we are is hopelessly simplistic. What we call the mind is the sum of the functions of the brain, which is a physical organ. And the brain interacts with the rest of the body. In fact, the field of Embodied Cognition tells us the body is central to our thought processes.

There’s solid research to back this view. Mirror neurons fire when we perform an action or when we observe someone else performing that action. Embodied Cognition also tells us that language is metaphor, and the building blocks of metaphor are physical sensations. Magnetic resonance imaging scanners reveal that when we read about a physical action, we activate the same areas of our brains as when we actually perform those actions. That’s the mirror neurons at work.

The bottom line is that disembodied machines cannot think, feel, or write the way humans do.  And never will.