On Artificial Intelligence and Machine Men : Part Fourteen

[ellyssian]

On Artificial Intelligence and Machine Men
By Everett A Warren
March 14, 2004

Presented as part fourteen of sixteen

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Part One
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"In the seventeenth chapter of Saint Luke it is written "the kingdom of God is within man" – not one man, nor a group of men – but in all men – in you, the people."

"Man as God", indeed. The kingdom of God is within man, and still we manage to subdivide it, obfuscate it, lose it, and deny it. We draw lines on maps, we form "competitive alliances", we lose track of the humane and aim for the heroic.

As Charlie led me there, so shall I follow: throughout the New Testament there is a phrase, and a broader theme, repeated over and over in the words of Jesus: "I tell you the truth." One wonders why he must restate this over and over, until we look back on a speech written sixty-four years ago and realise how applicable it is – how little people actually comprehend and follow the advice contained therein.

Thus far, the Jewish barber has used one key point as his primary positive argument: love. A certain Jewish carpenter is quoted as saying, repeatedly, that one thing is most important: love.

Even as we acknowledge that, reinforced, perhaps, by John, Paul, George, and Ringo singing "All you need is love" – which comes to mind, in part, through questions such as "Will you still need me... when I'm 64?"¹⁴; which, in the case of this particular hexagenarian speech, the answer is clearly an empathetic "Yes!" – we still go through our forced modeling, our assumption that things must be simplified and pigeon-holed, that we love "Us" and it's acceptable to hate "Them."

That's not love, that's separation. It's an artificial construct, an approximation of a few aspects used to create a generalisation. A stereotype. It's not something natural, and it's not something particularly human – it's machine thinking. It's less than what we expect from an AI.

Asimov's Laws of Robotics are far more strict than what we're willing to accept for ourselves. They don't even mention the really difficult stuff like "love" and still we fall short of the mark. We're still stuck in the Prairie of Prax, face to face and motionless with each other, while even the most basic, unthinking, robotic construct has the ability to detect an obstacle and change course. From commercially available vacuum cleaners or lawn mowers or pool cleaners that zip around unattended within certain boundaries to robobiologist Mark W. Tilden's autonomous biomorphs¹⁵, what is possible today shows more freedom of movement – mentally, in regards to the physical environment, if not purely physically – than many of us seem to possess; and such creations are a far cry from the true AI.

The Turing Test, mentioned earlier, proves a machine capable of intelligence if it can imitate a human, which is allegedly a creature possessing intelligence. The way Alan Turing proposed carrying out the test is to have a human interrogator sitting at some form of Input/Output such as a computer. Another human and the machine to be tested are hidden from this interrogator, who questions both, and then determines which is human and which is machine. If the interrogator can not identify them correctly, the machine is intelligent.

Perhaps this works for a certain communication intelligence, but it relies on "tell" not "show" – whereas creatures such as the biomorphs show they have more common sense by not making a big deal out of what should be a simple decision. It's at this more simplistic, animal level of intelligence where we fail consistently – as they say, common sense is quite uncommon – and it's at this point where we will stand the greatest chance of forcing an AI to imitate our behaviour.

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Reference Links

14. The Beatles - "All you need is love" and "When I'm 64"

15. Mark W. Tilden
**** http://downloads.solarbotics.net/PDF/living_machines.pdf
**** http://www.nis.lanl.gov/projects/robot//

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~ Questions and discussion welcome! ~

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