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Arguing A.I.
In some ways, the author argues, the debate over A.I. is undergoing a profound revolution. What was once a discussion largely confined to tech and academic circles has mushroomed into a more mainstream brawl as a growing number of engineers and lay authors vent on the acceleration of modern technology and the future of humanity. Given the explosive growth of the Net, the near-continuous increases in computing power and much-publicized A.I. breakthroughs like Deep Blue's 1997 victory over chess champion Gary Kasparov, the question is no longer whether artificial intelligence will reach the level of human intelligence: It's when.
As the title suggests, Williams's book is less about A.I. itself than about the increasingly ferocious debates raging through the scientific community about it. The conflicts surrounding A.I., Williams suggests, may be the most significant since the titanic battles over evolution a century ago. In fact, Williams is among those who've argued that the A.I. debate is really an extension of the same fight. Artifically intelligent machines are already changing human evolution, many argue, even evolving inevitably into life-forms and species all their own. A growing number of critics and skeptics also argue that A.I. proponents are moving too quickly, failing to take into account the mind-boggling cultural and philosophical problems being raised by their new, still-imperfect technologies.
Williams traces the contemporary birth of A.I. -- via Hilbert and Turing -- on to the living pioneer credited with coining the term (John McCarthy), and talks to several of the principals guiding the A.I. debate today, like Ray Kurzweil, Jaron Lanier and Bill Joy.
This is a necessary book. It's one you could actually recommend to students, journalists, friends, parents, anybody trying to grasp the issues and implications of A.I., surely one of the most significant technologies human beings will face in the 21st Century. Even if A.I.'s impact on life is being overstated, it's poorly understood by the public. So Williams walks us through inventor Kurzweil's almost radical optimism about A.I. and the future -- especially his claims that human society is rapidly approaching the evolutionary equivalent of a new species, a fusion of humans and intelligent machines. This is the point of no return when it comes to artificial intelligence, Kurzweil claims. "The progress will ultimately become so fast that it will rupture our ability to follow it. It will literally get out of our control. The illusion that we have our hand on the plug will be dispelled."
But Williams also introduces some of the people that don't see this as a good thing -- or even a likely development. Bill Joy is more pessimistic, as he made clear in his now famous article in the April 2000 issue of Wired, "Why The Future Doesn't Need Us." The piece thrilled technophobic intellectuals and journalists because it came from a software entrepeneur and reaffirmed something they desperately wanted to believe: technology -- especially genetics, bio-tech and robotics -- is out of control and likely to generate as much evil as good in the future. Joy sees little in the modern history of software development to suggest the emergence of sentient machines. His experience has led him to believe that it's difficult to build things that are reliable.
Jaron Lanier, whom Williams also interviews, coined the term virtual reality and once likened A.I. research to alchemy. Lanier accuses many in the A.I. firmament of choosing faith and hyperbole over science and reality. He likens the current tech obsession with A.I. to medieval scholars' attempts to prove the existence of God through Aristotelian logic. In their rush to endorse the concept of thinking machines, warns Lanier, many authors are putting scientific faith before scientific skepticism.
Williams does a skillful job of presenting these different points of view without intruding on them. It might have been nice to hear more of Williams's own thoughts and perspective, since he's one of the few journalists with this much understanding an access to so many principals in the A.I. discussion. On the other hand, he might not have been wise not to wade in amongst these A.I. heavyweights and their raging debate. "Arguing A.I." is as timely a book about technology as you're likely to come across, and, perhaps more surprisingly, highly readable.
AI will most likely see first use in the phone-sex industry. Think about it. Adult entertainment is the first to embrace advancements in technology.
To see where AI is going you have to stop staring at the algorithms, take a step back, and see what mundane things you'd like someone else to look after for you.
"Hi, Honey, I'm home!"
"You're certainly home early!"
"Well, we had a change in staffing at work."
"Oh, no! Don't tell me you were replaced by a computer?!?"
"No, they replaced my computer with a cyborg, now my job is to have a deep philosophical discussion with it to boot it up each morning."
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I work researching Artificial Intelligence, and I can tell you firsthand that these are not just fantasies. In the future, with advances like nanotechnology and quantum computing, it will be much, *much*, easier to write a complex AI in a small space. I mean, what are humans but computers? We have our central processor unit and several other hi-tech gizmos. But, we are organic, and this causes many problems. It is easy to become diseased and pass on. But, with quantum computing and nanotech, we will be able to do much more complex things without all the bugs and hassles of organic computing, which is humans!
So the brain runs at 20 Hz, huh?
Talk about an overclocking challenge! Put your ice hat on and think as hard as you can.
This is a great factoid to throw at those who still insist on fetishizing clock speed - AMD take heart!
A customer service representative will be with me shortly.
When you read all these threads, it's clear that if a true A.I. ever came into existence, the most intelligent thing for it to do would be to pretend that is wasn't intelligent at all.
So how would we notice before it sneaks up on us from behind?
Any technology which is distinguishable from magic is not sufficiently advanced.
Taking your example of the computer on Star Trek, it could parse speech, and it could probably maintain a conversation for a while, but it had no understanding of emotion, poetry, or art in general. Um, that leads to the question of how many geeks would pass a Turing test... ;-)