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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.