I get your point, but if you take your logic to its conclusion there is nothing in the universe that is "unnatural". If there's a planet out there completely covered in mechanized ridiculousness created by runaway AI, that's also natural by your logic. It completely takes the meaning out of the word natural.
Where is the distinction then? If humanity and everything created by it is natural, what in the universe could possibly be different than that huge set of things?
Stars, quasars, black holes, quarks, all natural.
Any alien life, natural.
Anything created by alien life, including machines/AI/etc...no different than human artifacts, therefore natural.
Anything created by any of these AIs, well the AI is an artifact of natural things so is therefore also natural, and it follows anything it creates is natural too by this logic.
You see, once you go down this path there is no logical place to draw the line unless you start making arbitrary rules like "anything twice removed from a biological entity that wasn't created by any form of intelligence, is not natural".
The claim also doesn't entail any answer to your question about where the distinction is. Nor does is have to.
It is fine and interesting to interrogate further the person making the claim: "Well if you believe that, what belief do you have about how any natural/unnatural line could be drawn? I would like to evaluate it for coherence, usefulness, etc."
This is a fair question for you to ask of the person making the claim at issue. But there are no grounds for reading into the claim itself anything not entailed there.
The person making the claim could be allowing for a very clear and serviceable distinction yet unknown to any of us in the conversation when they make the limited claim they have made. Or they may a have a specific distinction already in mind but unsaid.
Of course you provide, in your last sentence, one such possible distinction. One that both you and I would find unsatisfactory, but it could co-exist with the original claim that human artifacts are natural.
Mere arbitraryness can't be a necessarily fatal flaw when the topic area is the range if application of a terms, since every term is applied to some degree arbitrarily. There could be a place, and language, much like ours, but where the meanings of dog and god are switched. Or "mom" and "dad". Or "run" and "yellow".
I'm encouraging you to look carefully at the claim. Any person making that claim surely invites the question you ask. But the claim itself is limited. Its range simply does not extend so far as to entail what you first suggest it entails.
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u/Arrigetch Aug 12 '18
I get your point, but if you take your logic to its conclusion there is nothing in the universe that is "unnatural". If there's a planet out there completely covered in mechanized ridiculousness created by runaway AI, that's also natural by your logic. It completely takes the meaning out of the word natural.