Arun-Kumar Tripathi (tripathi@amadeus.statistik.uni-dortmund.de)
Tue, 16 Mar 1999 00:47:16 +0100 (MET)
Date: Tue, 16 Mar 1999 00:47:16 +0100 (MET) From: Arun-Kumar Tripathi <tripathi@amadeus.statistik.uni-dortmund.de> Subject: Are Computers on a Pathway to Replace the Human Species? (fwd)
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Greetings IFETS Forum,
An excellent coverage RE..... Are Computers on a Pathway to Replace the
Human Species? I think, Dr. Chapman has tried his very best to give all
the answers regarding Are Intelligent Machines will be bringing the end to
the Humanity?
Monday, March 15, 1999
DIGITAL NATION
Are Computers on a Pathway to Replace the Human Species?
By Gary Chapman
Copyright 1999, The Los Angeles Times. All Rights Reserved
Thirty-one years after Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke gave us
the indelible image of HAL, the archetype of the "thinking computer"
in the film of Clarke's "2001: A Space Odyssey," there's been a
resurgence of the idea of a machine with intelligence superior to
that of human beings.
This idea is represented in three new books, all released within the
last few months: "The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers
Exceed Human Intelligence," by Ray Kurzweil; "When Things Start to
Think," by Neil A. Gershenfeld, director of MIT's Media Lab; and
"Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind," by Hans P. Moravec, a
professor of robotics at Carnegie Mellon.
The simultaneous appearance of three books with the same theme
prompted a conference on the concept of machines surpassing human
intelligence at Indiana University on March 6, the "Symposium on
Intelligent Machines: The End of Humanity?" The event was organized
by Rob Kling, a former UC Irvine professor.
The question posed by this conference title may seem prejudicial, but
it was reasonable given the arguments of at least two of the authors,
Kurzweil and Moravec. They contend in their books that computer
processing power is advancing so dramatically that sometime in the
next century, machines will become vastly more intelligent than human
beings. Because of this, they say, we will confront the problem of
being superseded as a species. Computers of the future may begin to
regard human beings as little more than an evolutionary dead end, a
kind of pet to be kept around only for amusement or by virtue of the
machines' benevolence.
This thesis was strong enough to pack an Indiana University
auditorium with more than 300 spectators, who listened to panels of
experts assess these ideas.
The concept of artificial intelligence, or AI, is controversial to
say the least. Some regard the phrase as an oxymoron, whereas others
view it as the holy grail of computer science.
AI has gone through an interesting metamorphosis in the last 20
years. In the 1980s, it was a hot field, funded lavishly by the
Department of Defense, which was keen on "smart" weapons and "battle
management systems." This research spun off an industry that
attracted a lot of venture capital and public investment, spawning
Silicon Valley firms such as Tecknowledge and Intellicorp. Nearly all
these companies are dead and gone, as the promises of AI failed to
materialize or the research was absorbed by other, more conventional
approaches to programming.
In the 1980s there was a joke circulating about the field: "If it
works, it's not AI."
To critics, this meant that the field's hype was so outlandish that
its claims could never be realized. To supporters, the joke meant
that AI was constantly on the cutting edge, exploring new domains of
knowledge, with its practical applications quickly ceded to other
fields, like database programming or pattern-matching algorithms.
But there has always been a cadre of so-called strong-AI proponents,
people who believe that the brain and computers are theoretically
equivalent kinds of information-processing devices and that it's only
a matter of time before computers not only catch up to brains but
surpass them. This position was summed up by MIT professor Marvin
Minsky, who once called the human brain a "meat machine."
The three authors mentioned above take this position for granted.
They see a near-total congruity between the way computers work and
the way the brain works, so that eventually we'll be able to not only
reproduce human cognition in machines, but also to "download" our
thoughts and memories into computers, giving us a far more resilient
vessel for consciousness than the fragile and short-lived human body.
Moravec calls such future machines our "mind children," going so far
as to suggest that the entire purpose of human beings is to serve as
an interim stage of evolution, a "carbon-based" life form whose main
task is to build its successor species, a silicon-based life form.
Kurzweil seconds this, saying in his book that mortality will be a
thing of the past by the middle of the next century as we migrate to
machine consciousness.
Many people have an almost instinctive revulsion when confronted with
such claims. The strong-AI advocates understand this but dismiss it
as "species chauvinism."
They point out that for the human race to fulfill its destiny, which
they commonly see as exploring the universe, we'll need a corporeal
form with a far greater life span than that of the human body. And
they typically say that computer power is growing so fast that
there's no way we can prevent the emergence of super-intelligent
machines even if we wanted to.
There are several critiques of these views, such as the devastating
counter-argument of philosopher John Searle of UC Berkeley, who
asserts that although brains and computers might both be symbolic
processors, brains are semantic processors while computers are
syntactic processors. In other words, in brains meaning is
all-important, and in computers instructions and their sequence are
all that matter. None of the recent books grapple with this critique,
possibly because it is so difficult to refute.
But the authors also fail to see that the computer industry is headed
in a different direction too. Kling said the authors are "extremely
good at circumventing the industrial and economic ramifications of
their predictions."
"Where do super-intelligent machines come from?" asks Kling. "Do they
grow, do they spring up or are they built by companies?"
He means that both robots and artificial intelligence programs are
today shaped by economic requirements, and the demands of industry
are for machines and programs that do very specific and limited kinds
of tasks. That is, there's very little demand for general-purpose
super-intelligence in machines. Manufacturers want robotic arms and
hands, not HAL or something like C3-PO in "Star Wars." Expert systems
are useful, but usually only in limited applications, such as medical
information or the maintenance of complex machinery.
Kling also noted, "These books skip a lot of the issues surrounding
our dependence on 'dumb' systems, for which the year 2000 problem is
the poster child." Most people have problems not with machines that
are too intelligent, but with computers that don't seem intelligent
enough. No one has figured out, for example, how to make computers
simply easier to use or how to make large, complex programs bug-free.
AI has made a lot of progress in the last 10 years, said Benjamin
Kuipers, chairman of the computer science department at the
University of Texas at Austin and a leader in the field. "But most of
it is obscure to the public, because this progress has been absorbed
into other fields of programming.
"I personally think that AI is one of the greatest half-dozen
scientific challenges we have today," added Kuipers. "It's important
for us to investigate the fundamental problem of what the mind is. We
have an imperative to investigate this subject, as human beings."
But Kuipers noted that just because we know how to split atoms
doesn't mean we should build a global nuclear arsenal that could
destroy life.
"Perhaps we should know about [the issues these authors address] in
the same way we should know not to touch a hot stove," he said.
Gary Chapman is director of the 21st Century Project at the
University of Texas at Austin. His e-mail address is
gary.chapman@mail.utexas.edu.
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Best Regards
Arun
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