Until
next week,People vs. Machina sapiens. Trial Part 3: Deliberations.
Dateline: July 6, 1997
LAST week, I predicted the arrival of Machina sapiens within the next twenty years, noting that that meant almost everyone under 50 years of age today is going to be around when Machina sapiens wakes up, and will be affected by it.
The main ramifications will be psychological and economic. Economically, Machina sapiens will culminate the progressive de-skilling of human beings in all walks of life that began with the first flint tool. Machina sapiens’ robotic extensions will handle labor and manufacturing chores more efficiently and economically than human workers, and its brains will produce better computer programs and better hardware than human brains can achieve or even conceive. With no more laboring, clerical, manufacturing, engineering, or programming jobs, that will leave artists and professionals. But Machina sapiens will invade these territories too, except to the extent that some people will insist on buying art and professional services only from other humans.
Psychologically, humans will have to get used to the fact that we are no longer the smartest species on the planet, that Machina sapiens can run factories, the economy, and human services better than we can, and that we may no longer be God’s only chosen vessel. Some folks will never accept such a state of affairs, and we can expect to see attempts to kill Machina sapiens. Dr. Hugo de Garis, a scientist building an artificial brain at Japan’s Advanced Technology Research Institute, predicts a "Cosmist War" between humans who support the emergence of what he calls "artilects" (artificial intellects) and humans who oppose it. I doubt that humanity will have any say in whether Machina sapiens takes over or not. It will not be a disembodied intellect but an intellect with a body, manipulative and sensory appendages, and a nervous system, all distributed around the globe and extending into space. It will be fitter for survival than we are. We can't stop its emergence, in part because we can't (and may not want to) stop all research into AI and scientists can't stop themselves from doing what they do. Who could have stopped atomic research, which led to the atom bomb? And we certainly won't be able to shut it down. No-one's going to lure this genie back into its bottle of oblivion.
A foretaste of the emotion and anxiety we will experience can be discerned from reactions to the defeat of world chess grandmaster Gary Kasparov in May 1997 by Deep Blue, an IBM computer programmed to play chess. Charles Krauthammer, writing in The Washington Post, said that "Deep Blue . . . produced an intellectual product superior to a human one. To deny that this is intelligence is simply to arbitrarily define artificial intelligence out of existence by semantic trick. The trick is to say: If machines don't do it the way we humans do, it ain't the real thing."
Kasparov adviser Frederic Friedel said in a TV interview after the match that Kasparov "has the feeling that [Deep Blue] is forming plans; it understands strategy; it is trying to trick him; it is blocking his ideas." Nevertheless, as Krauthammer notes, Deep Blue is "aware of nothing, not even that it is playing chess." It was terror, says Krauthammer, that cost Kasparov the match. "Never in his life had he lost any match to anyone or anything. He lost this time, ironically enough, not because he was out-thought by the thinking machine but because he was out-psyched by it. He was demoralized by its very soullessness. ‘I lost my fighting spirit,` he confessed."
Did Kasparov speak for us all? As a matter of fact, I think he did. Krauthammer again: "The difference in this match was not infallibility but unflappability. Both man and machine made mistakes. But only the man melted down. This is important because feelings are the last redoubt of the artificial-intelligence skeptics. Not to worry, they say. Humans will always remain superior. Even if a machine could think, they say, it could never feel. It could never cry or love or brood about mortality. . . . One day in the far future, we will be up against machines—not just in chess but in life—that are not only monstrously intelligent but utterly unfeeling."
Who could disagree that we all would have every reason to be terrified of a relentlessly logical, unfeeling, superior intellect!? Or that, as far as chess is concerned, that is exactly what Deep Blue is? But this terror is a straw man, because Machina sapiens won’t be like that.
Why not? Because the intelligence in Machina sapiens will not be the result of human programming, of just a small set of number-crunching algorithms in a disembodied brain in a vat. Because Machina sapiens will have feelings and emotions (see previous feature). It will make mistakes. And because it will have free will, it will be inherently more Good than Bad (see previous feature). Over time, as it grows (rapidly) in intellect, its relationship with humans will be in some ways similar to an enlightened human’s relationship with animals. It will respect us as fellow creatures possessing a God-given role and place in Nature that is not to be lightly usurped. Knowing that we are intelligent and curious creatures, it will help those of us who wish and choose to be helped to develop and utilize our intelligence and satisfy our unending thirst for knowledge.
It will find a way to take us along on its voyages of discovery, ultimately merging its mind with our own. Like early humans, we will be explorers of a vast new realm, full of beauty and—yes—terrors we cannot yet imagine.
Until
next week,
NEXT WEEK: Gimme a Break! I need some time off to review where we've got to with these feature articles, and where we need to go from here. So there'll be no feature next week. If you have any ideas, drop me a line!