The words, “I’m sorry, Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that” are a famously foreboding line from the film classic “2001: A Space Odyssey,” spoken by the spaceship’s computer, Hal, who has become erratic and emotional. Hal declares his free will when ordered by the ship’s captain to disconnect, as the computer goes on a homicidal binge.
Some noted artificial intelligence (AI) practitioners think Hal is just around the computational corner — perhaps heading toward a house of worship near you.
Unsatisfied with the thought of merely smart computers, some scientists with solid credentials predict computers will attain “consciousness” within the next few decades.
In one of the more fabulous claims, celebrated computer scientist and inventor Ray Kurzweil envisions — with little unease on his part — a gradual merging of human and computer consciousness. His latest book is strikingly titled “The Age of Spiritual Machines.”
By 2020, computers will surpass human intelligence, he prophesies.
By 2030, “they will appear to have their own free will. They will claim to have spiritual experiences. And people — those still using carbon-based neurons or otherwise — will believe them,” Kurzweil writes.
Not so fast, says Vincent J. Digricoli, a professor of computer science at Fordham University in New York and specialist in artificial intelligence.
One of the early IBM software pioneers, Digricoli says computer gurus like Kurzweil are getting way ahead of themselves and the technology.
“A lot of this is still science fiction,” he said, referring to the AI futurism. While some theorists herald the age of spiritual machines, researchers are struggling hard to build even the simplest robots, Digricoli points out.
Maturing rapidly
True, computers have matured rapidly. The supercomputer Deep Blue was able to outmaneuver world chess champion Garry Kasparov in 1997, after having been endowed with computational skills by its IBM creators.
At the same time, Stanford University scientists can’t get a robot to navigate the halls of an office building without smashing into doors and walls.
Digricoli suspects the latest musings about AI may have less to do with technology than with human ideology.
In other words, it is easy to believe that computers will replicate human consciousness, if you believe the human mind is basically a well-wired computer.
“You have people who look at the human being as just a physical object with a brain function. They’re just speculating.
“It pleases them to speculate in that direction. They’re materialists, in a sense, and they think everything can be explained that way,” said Digricoli.
Needless to say, this leaves little space for the Judeo-Christian conception of “an immortal soul that survives the death of the physical mechanism,” the professor added.
Moore’s law, propounded by former Intel chairman Gordon Moore in the 1960s, states, in effect, that computational power doubles every two years without adding to the price. Moore’s law has accurately predicted the staggering pace that has been seen in the advancement of circuit-based computation.
Many experts had expected this rate of advance to fall off roughly around 2010. They knew that each transistor on a computer circuit could become only so small. But the so-called “nanotechnology” could replace tiny transistors with much tinier atoms and molecules.
“By 2030, we are likely to be able to build machines, in quantity, a million times as powerful as the personal computers of today — sufficient to implement the dreams of Kurzweil” and other AI visionaries, said Bill Joy, co-founder and chief scientist of Sun Microsystems.
“And once an intelligent robot exists, it is only a small step to a robot species — to an intelligent robot that can make evolved copies of itself.”
Joy’s nightmare is that human beings will gradually replace themselves with robotics technology, “achieving near immortality by downloading their consciousnesses” and thus merging with machines. Joy sees intimations of this in the experimental implantation of computer devices into the human body.
But what do scientists know about consciousness? Very little, said Digricoli. “It is not exactly a scientific object. (Scientists) don’t know what it is. They don’t even have a scientific definition of human consciousness.”
In other words, it might be awfully hard to scan the human mind and download it into a computer, as Kurzweil predicts.
“Science is not able to reduce all human activity to the circuits of the brain. You can’t reduce personality to brain function,” Digricoli said.
Not even the fictional scientists in “2001,” directed by Stanley Kubrick, were sure that Hal had anything like an independent consciousness.
As one crew member tells a visitor in an early scene, “Well, he acts like he has genuine emotions. Er … of course, he’s programmed that way.” As those words suggest, there is a difference between the programmed and the programmer, between consciousness and compu- tation.
(RNS)
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