PART vii
"Our
Concept of Ourselves"
"We know what we are, but know not what we may be." -
William Shakespeare
"What will happen when all these artificially intelligent computers
and robots leave us with nothing to do? What will be the point of living? Granted that
human obsolescence is hardly an urgent problem. It will be a long, long time before
computers can master politics, poetry, or any of the other things we really care about.
But a "long time" is not forever; what happens when the computers have
mastered politics and poetry? One can easily envision a future when the world is run
quietly and efficiently by a set of exceedingly expert systems, in which machines produce
goods, services, and wealth in abundance, and where everyone lives a life of luxury. It
sounds idyllic - and utterly pointless.
But personally, I have to side with the optimists - for two reasons. The
first stems from the simple observation that technology is made by people. Despite the
strong impression that we are helpless in the face of, say, the spread of automobiles or
the more mindless clerical applications of computers, the fact is that technology does not
develop according to an immutable genetic code. It embodies human values and human
choices... My second reason for being optimistic stems from a simple question: What
does it mean to be "obsolete"?"
M. Mitchell Waldrop
As I discussed earlier, I believe that a computer will be able to defeat
all human players at the game of chess within the next one or two decades. When this
happens, I noted, we shall either think more of computers, less of ourselves, or less of
chess. If history is a guide, we will probably think less of chess. Yet, as I hope this
book has made clear, the world chess championships is but one of many accomplishments that
will be attained by future machine intelligence. If our approach to coping with each
achievement of machine intelligence is to downgrade the intellectual value of the
accomplishment, we may have a lot of revision to do over the next half century.
Let us review some of the intellectual domains that machines are likely
to master in the near future. A few examples of tasks that computers are now beginning
to accomplish include the following: accompanying musical performances, teaching us skills
and areas of knowledge, diagnosing and recommending remedial treatment for classes of
diseases, designing new bioengineered drugs, performing delicate medical operations,
locating underground resources, and flying planes.
A more difficult task for a computer, one that we shall probably see
during the first half of the next century, is reading a book, magazine, or newspaper and
understanding its contents. This would require the computer to update its own knowledge
bases to reflect the information it read. Such a system would be able to write a synopsis
or a critique of its reading. Of comparable difficulty to this task is passing the Turing
test, which requires a mastery of written language as well as extensive world knowledge.
Of at least comparable difficulty would be to watch a moving scene and
understand what is going on. This task requires human-level vision and the ability to
abstract knowledge from moving images. Add the ability for a robot to imitate humans with
sufficient subtlety, and computers will be able to pass a more difficult form of the
Turing test in which communication is not through the written word transmitted by terminal
but rather by live face-to-face communication. For this achievement we have to go at least
to late in the next century.
It is clear that the strengths and weaknesses of machine intelligence
today are quite different from those of human intelligence. The very first computers had
prodigious and virtually unerring memories. In comparison, our memories are quite limited
and of dubious reliability. Yet the early computers' ability to organize knowledge,
recognize patterns, and render expert
Computer intelligence is not standing still. Radical new massively
parallel computer architectures, together with emerging insights into the algorithms of
vision, hearing, and physical skill acquisition, are propelling computers closer to human
capabilities and also continuing to enhance their historical areas of superiority. While
machine intelligence continues to evolve and move in our direction, human intelligence is
moving very slowly, if at all. But since we have computers to serve us, human intelligence
may not need to change.
Thousands of years ago, when the religious and philosophical traditions
that still guide Western civilization were being formed, a human being was regarded as
special. We were different from animals and certainly from material things. The ultimate
intelligence in the universe, God, knew about us, and cared about us. Later on as we
learned that the earth on which we stood was not the only celestial body in the world, we
imagined that all the other entities in the sky revolved around us. In this world view we
were special because of our central location. The sun, the moon, the stars, the comets,
and other celestial objects all paid homage to us. Still later when we realized that the
earth was just the third planet orbiting an unremarkable star located on the arm of an
unremarkable galaxy, our view changed again. Then we were special because of our unique
intelligence: we could derive knowledge from information. We could create patterns with
aesthetic qualities. We could appreciate those qualities. True, animals shared in this
intelligence, but to a much lesser degree, which only reinforced the uniqueness of the
level of intelligence we possessed.
Now we are entering an era in which this latest concept of our
uniqueness will be challenged once again. To be sure, this challenge will not arrive on a
single day. By the time one can seriously argue that computers possess intellectual
capabilities comparable to the human species, it will have been at least a century from
the invention of the electronic computer in the late 1940s. We should have time to adjust.
Perhaps we shall return whence we started, with an appreciation of the inherent value of
being human.
The Age of Spiritual Machines