Arguing A.I.

Are intelligent machines transforming life as we know it? Or is A.I. yet another overhyped, self-serving fantasy by deluded scientists and technocrats talking mostly to one another, foisting their ill-conceived, poorly-engineered creations on an unsuspecting public? The discussion has rarely been better framed than in software-culture writer Sam Williams's short, readable and smartly-organized new paperback book Arguing A.I.: The Battle for Twenty-first Century Science," published by atRandom.com, the e-book division of Random House. Arguing A.I. author Sam Williams pages 94 publisher Random House rating 8 reviewer Jon Katz ISBN 0-8129-9180-X (pbk) summary perspectives on the A.I. debate

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.

Comments

wrong topic

[gTsiros]

This isn't about technology. This is about philosophy. The question that arises is:
is a machine that to a human appears to be human, human?

I'm doubtful

[TrollMan 5000]

Or is A.I. yet another overhyped, self-serving fantasy by deluded scientists and technocrats talking mostly to one another, foisting their ill-conceived, poorly-engineered creations on an unsuspecting public?

I tend to agree. I'd like to see something using AI play in a poker game. Can AI ever simulate bluffing? Or analyze the expressions on the other player's faces to determine if perhaps that they are bluffing, and call the bluff? Human intelligence can do thiss, but I'm not sure if something this complex exists now, or ever will.

Chess is one thing. It follows a certain set of rules. Even conversation does, but it also invloves human expression like the bluffing example. But to to play out a scenario given a unique situation, machines are not up to the task yet.

We (probably) won't ever actually ACHIEVE AI

[SirWhoopass]

The problem with AI is that it always seems unsuccsessful. Any time an AI technology matures and becomes useful it is no longer considered "AI". Computer vision (face recognition), expert systems, even many modern strategy games would be considered amazing AI advances a few decades ago. They all arose because of AI research. Once they matured, however, they were no longer considered AI.

AI won't be considered successful until we build HAL or Data, but the journey so far has been very useful.

Re:We (probably) won't ever actually ACHIEVE AI

[Logic Bomb]

Regarding the subject of your comment: if you call humans "intelligent", and you do not subscribe to the argument that there is some "soul" or non-physical essence that gives us consciousness, how can one believe that we won't ever achieve AI? It seems illogical to assume that humans will never be capable of duplicating something already in existence. The real question, if you ask me, is if we will find a way to do so that wholly differs from the organic model that has evolved on Earth, or whether we will just end up creating imitations (through emulation on an electronic platform or actual biological construction) of ourselves.

Re:We (probably) won't ever actually ACHIEVE AI

[mesterha]

The problem with AI is that it always seems unsuccsessful. Any time an AI technology matures and becomes useful it is no longer considered "AI". Computer vision (face recognition), expert systems, even many modern strategy games would be considered amazing AI advances a few decades ago. They all arose because of AI research. Once they matured, however, they were no longer considered AI.

The reason it is unsuccessful is the confusion caused by the different meanings of the phrase AI.

Often AI just means research on a specific problem that humans are currently much better at solving than machines. Of course once the research is complete and the machine is better, it is no longer AI under this definition.

Now if the solution is largely motivated by what we know about how humans work then perhaps there is still a glimmer of AI in the research. However, this is a hard argument to make since we don't know how the brain works. In fact, often there are many reasons to think the solution isn't similar to the brain. There are many ways to skin a cat. For example, I doubt human chess masters search a game tree with alpha-beta pruning, however, this is a way for computers to solve the problem that, with todays hardware, gives them superior performance.

AI won't be considered successful until we build HAL or Data, but the journey so far has been very useful.

This is a different notion of AI. It fits more into the natural definition of AI, where AI is the creation of human intelligence. In this case, you need the whole enchilada (or at least a interesting percentage) to get intelligence. You can't just pick and choose certain problems. This definition is more in line with the Turing Test. Unfortunately this is a very hard problem for obvious reasons. At one time more people worked on this problem, but when nobody got good results, the funding started to dry up. That's why people switched to the previous definition.

Some people still work on the grand AI problem, but as another poster pointed out, it is generally on a small piece with a story about how it can be connected to other pieces to create a real AI. Generally they pick a piece that might be commercially useful in its own right such as vision or linguistics. Again this helps with funding. Unfortunately, I don't think anyone works on tying these systems together. (Probably because there would be a whole mess of problems if they tried.)

Chinese Rooms and Software Guys

[Aldern]

It's always seemed funny to me how the technologists take this field, which is tied irrevocably to philosophy, and ignore everything the philosophers say about it. For example, has there ever been a good refutation of Searle's Chinese Room argument?

Another of Searle's arguments is pretty damning as well; those that pursue strong AI are, in fact, favoring a form of dualism. For them the mind is completely separate from the brain, an idea that has been pretty much discarded by the thinking public. Why is it, when computers are concerned, that the mind is no longer a product of a brain?

Creative adaptation

[DaoudaW]

To truly demonstrate artifcial intelligence, a machine must be general purpose. A key feature of human intelligence is creatively adapting to context. For example, I'd like to see a machine do what 4-year old Jose Capablanca did in 1892. Though he'd not yet been taught to play chess, while watching his uncle and father play he warned his Dad that the move he was about to make was a mistake. Both adults scoffed that he even knew how to play, so 4-year old Jose challenged his father and beat him. The rest, of course, is history. Show me a machine with no specific chess programming do that, and I'll accept that it is intelligent.

Re:complexity of supercomputers approaching brain

[kin_korn_karn]

the brain runs at 20 Hz, but it's massively parallel. No, I couldn't begin to guess how many 20 Hz processors the brain contains the equivalent of.

Are they?

[Syberghost]

Are intelligent machines transforming life as we know it?

Wouldn't we need to have some, first, before we could say they "are" doing anything?

Re:The hardware is the software

[gwernol]

One thing that's always bothered me about the AI debate is that the thinking for a long time has centered around how to model intelligence on silicon.

Actually this is not true, for example an early AI system was constructed to play tic-tac-toe on a computer using matchboxes and marbles. No silicon at all.

One of the fundmental results of computing (discovered by Alan Turing, the first researcher in the field of AI) is that there is a basic set of computable functions. It doesn't matter what hardware you use, the set of things you can compute is ultimately the same. An interesting question is whether human-like intelligence is a combination of functions from the computable set or not. People like Roger Penrose argue that there is something more than computable functions going on in the human brain (he calls it the "divine spark"). In my opinion that's nonsense.

If an AI system can be built using computable functions it doesn't matter what hardware you execute it on (apart from perfromance issues). The results will be the same.

To me the true marvel of the mind is the holographic quality of intelligence and the way in which the physical form of the brain influences, and is shaped by, the quality and nature of one's thoughts.

You should look into neural net research. This uses massively parallel networks of artificial neurons to simulate the real structure of the brain. Its an important branch of AI research. Of course neural networks can be completely simulated on traditional computer hardware. Again, the hardware is not the key, its totally down to the software you run.

By the way, what do you mean "holographic" nature of intelligence. I don't understand what you are trying to imply with this term.

It will be exciting to see what part the new polymers can play in this research.

In my opinion, none, except perhaps to give us faster computers. They can do nothing to change the fundamental computations that are taking place.

Emergent emotions?

[NanoGator]

I had a thought a while back that the more complex my computer got, the moodier it got. It seemed that some computers I had were very enthusiastic, and some just hated their jobs and performed sluggishly.

Some could attribute this to hardware configuration problems, and that would likely be true. But it was interesting to me that Windows itself changes as it grows. Every change in my computer makes it a little different, and I'm starting to notice. I can even tell the difference between two installs of Windows on the same machine, even though they look virtually the same.

What I think is happening is that each component changes the complexity of the overall system. If that component has an issue (i.e. bad driver or maybe misconfigured), then it adds a little spark of personality to the computer. When enough of these little quirks add up, my computer feels different than other people's computers.

This yields an interesting question. If computers get more complex, will a rudementary set of 'emotions' evolve? They may not be emotions in the sense that they cry if you switch to a Mac, but maybe emotions in the sense that the computers have moods? What if your computer's performance was tied to bandwidth on the internet, and a congested network bogs the computer? What if you're running a laptop off a battery, and the computer gets 'tired' as it wears down? What if you're running a screensaver that makes it 'daydream.'?

Again, these aren't the same type of emotions or moods that people feel, but it is interesting that the more complex a computer gets, the more we can personify it.

Definition of intelligence - it's most basic form.

[Catbeller]

Let's define intelligence.

Ability to perceive oneself as part of the universe? Animals have it.

Self-awareness? Dogs seem to have it. Chimpanzees, elephants, cetaceans certainly seem to know that they are individuals. Dolphins even recognize their own reflections in mirrors.

Tool use? Chimps use sticks to dig with. They can stack boxes to reach high places, which is borderline engineering for most humans.

Language? Chimps have one. So do gorillas. Dolphins and other cetaceans have great capacity for communication underwater.

Now, machine intelligence. Turing test? Simple programs passed limited tests years ago. The more complex ones to come will be far more capable of fooling people into believing they are speaking to a human.

Play chess? Limited, but the best can beat our best.

In the future, the AI's will be able to speak, emote, manipulate items and use tools, even be able to design their own descendents. Give tools, the AI's could even build their successors.

But, will they ever be regarded as intelligent by humans?

Nope.

Most europeans and americans for centuries considered blacks and American Indians as sort of half-people, using great logic and rigor that was totally idiotic looking back from our time.

Many tests for animal intelligence and self-awareness has shown that the subjects can indeed show the traits necessary to be considered sapient. But, after each hurdle, the bar gets raised another notch philosophically.

If I were a suspicious type, and I am, I would say that humans simply don't want to recognize intelligence in other species, much less animals, because it threatens us enormously. Our pride in ourselves, our domination of the planet, and our cruelty towards other species are all shaken if the animal looking back at us in the treetops is actually a thinking being, tho a bit furry.

Religion has more than a little to do with it as well.

Down to my definition of intelligent life:

If it fights back, and wins, it is intelligent. All other players are dead meat.