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FLAWLESS AI SEEMS LIKE SCIENCE FICTION
Philosopher; director, Scientific Vortex, Inc.
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A “conscious” or “thinking” machine should behave erratically, in a sometimes stupid and sometimes smart way. Human “intelligent” behavior is about unpredictable oscillations between emotions and reason; this is what Homo sensus sapiens is about. Paradoxical as it sounds, we call a species characterized as equally and randomly stupid and smart “intelligent.”
In first-person perspective, we know we’re conscious, although there’s no definitive way to prove it. In third-person perspective, it’s also impossible to verify that someone or something else is conscious. All we do is perceive signals—sounds, gestures, expressions—and infer consciousness.
Any software or robot can pronounce the words “I am intelligent” or “I am conscious,” but those aren’t proofs of intelligence. In practical terms, consciousness and intelligence are perceived and attributed. This attribution depends on our empathy and criteria for anthropomorphizing. We tend to infer that others are conscious if they behave, look, or (in Turing terms) answer questions like us. The Turing Test is a social experiment about perceiving and assigning intelligence to a machine, not about proving that the machine thinks. This is a social game we play every day. A “thinking machine” is actually a social machine, not a functional but isolated mind.
The idea of creating a singular intelligent machine that will solve the mysteries of reality through flawless logic and produce a whole new species is in the domain of science fiction. The Singularity idea is not an event horizon but an endless effort.
The human mind is resilient because decentralized networks of other minds and knowledge sustain it. As we grow, we enter those networks via language and concepts that don’t accord with perfect logic; we then become resilient minds by navigating and exploring those networks; and finally we leave them as we lose brain capacities—for instance, with Alzheimer’s. This is an analogous process: We’re never absolutely inside or outside the human-knowledge networks. In this process, words and concepts are characterized by ambiguity. Logic and perfection are present only in artificial languages—mathematics, geometry, software—that we cannot use to communicate in everyday life. Imperfection and ambiguity define human thinking; that’s why, even in science fiction, humans usually find unexpected ways to beat the logic of the machines.
Therefore the possibility of a flawless superintelligent machine seems like science fiction: We can never condense the entire knowledge of the world, so we can’t teach a machine how to do it. We can teach a machine how to acquire knowledge, but it will always be an unfinished process. This doesn’t mean that artificial intelligence is irrelevant. We don’t fully understand brains and minds yet, and that makes artificial intelligence and thinking machines more relevant now than ever.
We can solve practical problems by simulating specific elements of the mind through machine learning and deep learning. This is what artificial expert systems currently do. But that doesn’t mean we’re creating actual minds: Simulating minds is like creating artificial meat that vegans can eat by reorganizing chemical compounds found in plants. The simulated meat tastes like meat, but it’s not.
Or we can try to create real meat, not imitate it—for instance by cloning cow cells. Maybe the cloned meat and the replicated mind won’t alter society, because we also still have the originals, but they’ll take us to a whole new level of understanding. In the end, the efforts to understand—or to simulate or create—minds will be relevant if they improve coexistence. We’re well aware that religion, exacerbated ambition, and intolerance can lead to social tragedies because of a failure to achieve the delicate equilibrium between emotion and reason.
As we approach the border between peace and barbarity in various regions of the world, artificial intelligence allows us to integrate all we know and all we need to know for achieving coexistence and balance among the organic machines that we are and (maybe) the inorganic machines that will come.
