What Is It Like to Be a Bot?

Our title is a take-off on Thomas Nagel\´s profound and famous piece, "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?," which first appeared in The Philosophical Review in 1974 and has been cited hundreds of times since. (Google finds 67,000 hits!) His point is that it\´s impossible to know what it\´s like to be a bat. Of course, we can imagine having leathery wings, navigating by sonar, eating bugs while flying, and hanging upside down to sleep, but that’s not the same as knowing what a bat experiences. In other words, we can\´t know what it\´s like for a bat to be a bat. Whether you agree with him or not, his view is even more relevant today than it was in 1974.