People vs. Machina sapiens. Trial Part 2: The case for the defense.

Dateline: June 29, 1997

LAST week we considered some of the objections to the possibility of an intelligent machine. We concluded that even the skeptics are beginning to admit of the possibility. This week, we consider very briefly the question when will it emerge? Next week, we will conclude this three-part series with a look at some of the ramifications of it emergence.

A safe answer to when is Marvin Minsky’s: Between four to four hundred years from now. But look back four hundred years, and what do you see? You see pretty much what your great-great-grandmother saw a mere 170 years ago. The classic study of middle America, conducted in the early part of this century by Robert and Helen Lynd and engagingly described in their classic work of sociology, Middletown, recalls that within the lifetime of a Muncie, Indiana (="Middletown") physician born in 1827, "local transportation … changed from virtually the ‘hoof and sail` methods in use in the time of Homer; grain . . . ceased to be cut in the state by thrusting the sickle into the ripened grain as in the days of Ruth and threshing done by trampling out by horses on the threshing-floor or by flail; getting a living and making a home . . . ceased to be conducted under one roof by the majority of the American people; education . . . ceased to be a luxury accessible only to the few; in his own field of medicine the X-ray, anaesthetics, asepsis, and other developments . . . tended to make the healing art a science; electricity, the telephone, telegraph and radio . . . appeared; and the theory of evolution [shook] the theological cosmogony that had reigned for centuries."

Middletown was published less than 70 years ago. Notice the absence of any mention of television, computers, nuclear power, genetic engineering, space travel, quantum mechanics, and computers, to name just a few of the technological marvels of the past few decades. To the Lynds, as to most other folks in the 1920s, the telephone and the automobile were marvelous enough.

The point is that the velocity of scientific and technological development is increasing exponentially. Ask the average scientist in the 1920s whether space travel would ever be possible, and you would probably have been told: "Sure—within the next four to four hundred years." It happened in less than fifty.

In 1971 Alvin Toffler's Future Shock gave the masses early warning of the increasing velocity of change. Almost 30 years later, events have proved him right, and the shock has to some extent worn off. We have grown so accustomed to rapid change that its absence would be shocking. Anyone who has bought at least two PCs expects to be buying a new one within at most three years. Any Web surfer expects to be upgrading their browser within six months. Banks expect to compete with software companies. Entertainment companies expect to be wooed by telephone companies. Business expects the unexpected.

Even government is emerging from bureaucratic torpor. The U.S. government seems at last to have recognized the futility of attempting to regulate the Internet, with the recent (June 1997) capitulation on the issue of the anti-pornography provisions of the Communications Decency Act, though it took a Supreme Court decision to make it do so. It took the government only ten years to accept what I and others were predicting on the late 1980s.

A graph (adapted from John Barrow's Theories of Everything) illustrates the exponential nature of the velocity of change, with respect to computing power. Anyone who doubts that global computational capacity twenty years hence will not be totally, utterly mind-blowing has his or her head stuck deep in the sand.

It seems to me that the state of artificial intelligence today is analagous to the state of rocket science in the 1920s; but the segment of the development curve is much steeper today than it was 70 years ago. I predict the arrival of Machina sapiens within the next twenty years. That means almost everyone under 50 years of age today is going to be around when Machina sapiens wakes up, and will be affected by it.

Until next week,

NEXT WEEK: So What? The jury (me :) ) deliberates on the ramifications of the emergence of Machina sapiens.

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