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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.
The general public is not now, nor has it EVER been, part of the dialogue of Science. Here I mean science as an instution, like banking and marriage is an instition.
The dialogue in science is people publishing papers. These papers are peer-reviewed by other people who also publish and have 'scientific credibility'. Scientific credibility is gained by publishing good papers and having academic credentials. There's a book by Bradley Latour that describes a 'scientific economy' based on credibility.
As such, the general public may be a spectator to the dialogue of science but does not participate, as the 'general public' isn't publishing and therefore isn't part of the economy.
The public gets disappointed when science doesn't live up to claims that they read into the dialogue which is, frankly, not taking place in the Real World anyway, and it's a mistake to expect that it should produce anything the Real World can use.
It's the public that PULLS things from the realm of science, develops expectations, and tries to change the Real World with it. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn't work. You can't blame science for those failures.
Now, science isn't perfect. The landscape of debate is subject to bloody revolutions in paradigm, like the changes from Ptolemy to Galileo to Newton to Einsten and beyond. Scientists play politics, too, and sometimes lose their objectivity when reviewing papers for publication. It doesn't change the Real World. Over the last 30 years, there have been a dozen opinions and 'proofs' on whether the Universe will expand forever, collapse in a 'big crunch', or eventually stop and stabilize. So what? Life goes on here on Earth. Nobody's jumping off of buildings because astronomers tell us one day the Sun will swallow the earth (oops... they changed their mind on that one, too! Did anyone notice?)
The usefulness of this review or the book it talks about is diminshed and tarnished for me by such a sensationalistic lead-in. Many, many Slashdot readers are familiar with the division between the general public as users of computer systems, and their own roles as the makers and maintainers of those systems. We never stop bitching about clueless users, 'we' always know better what to expect out of our machines than 'they' do, etc, etc. Ha ha. Very funny.
Stop and think for a minute why that happens. When your users expect things you didn't promise, is it because they read things into your claims you didn't intend? Is that your fault or theirs? Who do they blame for it? Who do YOU blame for it?
It cuts both ways, people. If you don't want science to disappoint you, don't expect it to do things it isn't meant to do. You may play chess better than your cat, but you'd look pretty stupid if your cat asked you to catch a mouse.
I wonder if he talks about Professor Rodney A. Brooks at MIT and his ideas about artificial intelligence, situatedness, and embodiment.
For Rod Brooks, "intelligence" cannot really be programmed into a system; it is rather an emergent property of systems as they interact with their environment. In The Matrix Morpheus says that the body cannot exist without the mind, but Brooks would rather say that the mind cannot exist without the body, because the body is the only way that the mind can have any experience of its environment. It's a radical idea. It answers the problems behind knowledge representation that have been argued by Hubert Dreyfus in 1965, where he stated that any representation of knowledge is incomplete without its connection to all other pieces of knowledge. The paradigm Brooks is presenting in his ideas about embodied intelligence is that explicit representation of knowledge is superfluous: let the world itself be its own best model, and let the artificially intelligent being formulate its own judgments about what the world is and what it means from its own experience of that world. Intelligence emerges from its interaction and experience of the world. If Brooks is correct, then true AI is absolutely inseperable from robotics.
The seminal paper where Brooks discusses this philosophy is "Intelligence Without Reason" and is available at his website which is linked above.
Any book on AI that does not discuss this other branch of AI philosophy is in my view hopelessly incomplete.
Qu'on me donne six lignes écrites de la main du plus honnête homme, j'y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre.
The most obvious problem with the Chinese Room metaphor is that it confuses the properties of a system with the properties of an element of the system. Asserting that the guy in the room does not know Chinese is about as interesting as asserting that a single neuron in your brain does not know English. Since we've known not to make that mistake for at least 3000 years, there really isn't much excuse.
Perhaps people are fooled because there's a guy in there, and despite all evidence to the contrary, people expect guys to know what they're doing. Or, perhaps people don't know how to think. In any event, "refuting" an argument requires that it be an argument, and that is not the case here. It also requires that the person recieving the refutation have a certain grasp, and I find it difficult to believe anyone with such a grasp could fail to see it as bogus during the first read-through. It is hard to refute "deedle deedle queep."
But, anyway, my favorite discussion of this is "Backtracking: the Chinese food problem," Lou Hoebel, Chris Welty, intelligence March 1999, 10:1.
There is also a decent discussion in The Universal Computer: The Road from Leibniz to Turing, Martin Davis. This is an excellent book all around.
I agree with "receding horizon" comment of S.W. that onece you've built it, it doesn't seem that intelligent anymore. However, I suggest the essential aspect of humans are that we are language animals (to paraphrase Steven Pinker). Therefore, where a computer exhibits useful & creative conversation, I will consider that to be A.I. This doesn't mean the 'parrot programs' like the Eliza psychologist that just reflect stock phrase back at you based on keywords in your input. I mean some true understanding, perhaps a dash of emotional insight, and saying something new and interesting (the creative part). A few expert systems can discuss narrow topics fairly well, but not much else, and are boring. Natural language understanding and creation has been an important objective of A.I. and C.S. for a half century, with very limited and disappointing results.
Not exactly.
The specific point Searle is making is based on a presumption that abstract symbol manipulation (the kind that computers perform) is "neither constituitive of nor sufficient for semantics." This is where most of the attacks have gone after, but to my knowledge unsuccesfully.
You are correct in saying the man is not required to know Chinese any more than the processor knows LISP. But do you say the system - the processor and software code - "understands" LISP? Of course not - it can process it, yes (manipulate the symbols). Does it "understand" in our traditional use of that word? No. Then comes the analogy to the sytem of the man in the room and the rules themselves. Somehow this "system" understands Chinese? Not in the least - it is merely able to manipulate symbols in a manner that satisfies an external observer.
To say that consciousness can be created simply by instantiating a program is (according to Searle) a flawed proposition. He never said that machine consciousness is impossible as a whole, and he never said that human meat-machines are the only possible consciousness; he merely said that a program cannot be.
BTW, the quote is from "Is the Brain's Mind a Computer Program?" by Searle, in Scientific American, January 1990. It went a long with a attempted refutation by the Churchlands, and it's a more clear illustration of the principal than Searle's original paper.
"Let's build quiet armies friends, let's march on their glass towers... let's build fallen cathedrals & make imprac
At least in the hacker culture, the canonical book on AI is Douglas Hofstadter's "Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid". A good starting and end point for any philosophical discussion on AI.
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http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/jargon/html/Bibliogr
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http://www.faqs.org/faqs/books/hofstadter-GEB-F
There's a good book called Blondie24, which tells the story of 2 guys who developed a program to play checkers without telling it the rules. They used the idea of Natural Selection applied to neural nets, keeping the best nets for the next generation. Eventually this process created a neural network which could beat most everyone at checkers without even knowing the rules.
"the brain is not digital, it's analog"
IANAE (i am not an expert) but I do not think it is entirely proper to say the brain is analog. Not all things in nature are analog or random at all (DNA for example). The network of synapses behave in a digital matter. The signals that travel on it, and the particular path they take could be considered analog. So it's a fuzzy middle ground that no one can really explain yet.
Is it really something called "intelligence" that can read a face? Nobody every wrote an academic tome called "Advanced Face Reading" that details an intellectual process to go thru to read an opponent that might be turned into some algorithm.
Actually, this exact style of intelligence has been the subject of many papers. See MIT's Sociable Machines site for more information. This kind of thing is a very hot topic in AI, not ot mention psychology or even some areas of linguistics.