A.I. and the Future

Ted Kaczynski predicts that humanity will easily drift into a position of such dependence on intelligent machines that it will ultimately have little choice but to accept all the machines' decisions. Steven Spielberg's vision is that we will unthinkingly create machines to try to replicate, replace or tend to human needs and emotions. MIT's Ray Kurzweil projects artificially intelligent machines evolving so rapidly in the early part of this century that they will ultimately fuse with biological beings. Many novelists and filmmakers share these dark visions. They see smart machines as inevitably replicating, and surpassing human beings in longevity, endurance, intelligence and raw power. These machines will dominate us. Truth or more techno-hype?

The guesses about the future above are as good as yours or mine. But Spielberg's haunting and provocative movie A.I. has opened a window into human consciousness and the moral implications of artificial intelligence.

This window is unlikely to last very long. The next Monica Lewinsky scandal is always around the corner, ready to fuel the Big Media machine and distract the public. Given the short attention span of Americans in particular to scientific issues like this (genomics, copyright, intellectual property, fertility research, alleged global warming), it's worth beginning a discussion on A.I. Where is it going? Which vision of A.I. and the future do you think is closest to reality? Will machines make us uncreasingly dependent on them, as the Unabomber suggests? Will they take us over, as George Orwell believed?

Or, as M.I.T. computer scientist and artificial intelligence researcher Kurzweil suggests, will humans and machines -- especially miniaturized, increasingly powerful computing machines -- simply become an integral part of out bodies and lives? Kurzweil envisions the distinctions between these two "species" and entities (biological and digital) rapidly blurring.

It says a lot about our willingness to think seriously about technology that no national politician has ever addressed these issues in a meaningful way. But a murderous student of technology has:

Unabomber Kaczynski wrote in his infamous manifesto:

"As society and the problems that face it become more and more complex and machines become more and more intelligent, people will let machines make more of their decisions for them, simply because machine-made decisions will bring better results than man made ones. Eventually a stage may be reached at which the decisions necessary to keep the system running will be so complex that human beings will be incapable of making them intelligently. At that stage the machines will be in effective control. People won't be able to turn the machines off, because they will be so dependent on them that turning them off would amount to suicide."

Reading that excerpt, it occurred to me -- not for the first time -- "What a shame this demented creature chose to express himself through the maiming and murder of innocent people." Because he sure has a point.

Comments

OK, Jon, you *obviously* didn't read Kurzwiel

[11223]

Kurzwiel's Age of Spiritual Machines was not a dark vision, nor was it intended to be. It was intended to be an inspiring vision of what we can do with technology if we choose to do so. This alone damages your credibility when speaking on the topic.

May I suggest a few things? Read Kurzwiel. Read Hofstadter's Godel, Escher, Bach. Perhaps you'll come to understand the mindset of those who are developing this A.I. technology that every one else fears will run amok and distroy humanity. (I also thought I was supposed to be chained to a machine 24 hours a day working for the machines by now, too.)

I'm not worried.

[MWoody]

As long as the dominant operating system is a Microsoft product, I have no worries about "smart" machines.
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