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From: cam@edai.ed.ac.uk (Chris Malcolm    cam@uk.ac.ed.edai   031 667 1011 x2550)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: Indictment
Message-ID: <441@edai.ed.ac.uk>
Date: 23 Jun 89 19:25:22 GMT
References: <299@ucl-cs.UUCP> <1421@lzfme.att.com>
Reply-To: cam@edai (Chris Malcolm)
Organization: University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh
Lines: 57

In article <1421@lzfme.att.com> jwi@lzfme.att.com (Jim Winer @ AT&T, Middletown, NJ) writes:

>My point is that human beings, as a group, are not intelligent.
>There does not seem to be any clear correlation between their
>behavior and the presumed objective of happiness.

I can think of many possible explanations of the observed lack of
correlation: the objective is not happiness; the objective is happiness
but it's usually so hard to find that most people, although highly
intelligent, make mistakes; there is a correlation, but the correlation
is hard to see. All of these seem to me to be much more plausible than
the presumption that most people are not intelligent.

>Based on *my* life, and the life of everyone I have
>ever met, ... there are some rare
>moments of rationality.

In general you cannot judge whether or not behaviour is rational without
knowing the goals. The annals of psychotherapy are full of anecdotes
about apprarently irrational behaviour proving to be rational once the
hidden agenda was revealed. If you take into account the built-in goals
of the biological machines we inhabit (to beg a few swift questions)
such as the procreation of the race, it becomes rather hard to assert
that human behaviour is, in this larger perspective, anything other than
rational, with our commonplace use of the term "irrational" meaning no
more than quite simply "I can't think of a reason" which is a fairly
trivial observation, i.e., a understandable failure of the imagination
in a situation requiring considerable and perhaps superhuman knowledge
to understand.

After all, it may well be the case that in order to be able to
understand ourselves we would have to be so complicated that we
couldn't. We could still be rational though; it would just be impossible
to know it.

>We are attempting then, to create rational machines that model
>irrational human behavior

Seems a long way to go about it. Why not use irrational machines if it
makes it simpler?

> -- machines that pursue false goals for
>dubious (or devious) reasons.

Sound like either you're a misanthropist or you've been very unfortunate
in your choice of friends.

>Okay, so it's the best we can do. But
>let's not lie to ourselves and call it intelligence. Let's call a
>spade a spade and a pseudo-intelligent bomb-controller a weapon.

Ah, now I see! You've been associating with military people! No wonder
you think people are irrational, unintelligent, dubious, etc.!
-- 
Chris Malcolm    cam@uk.ac.ed.edai   031 667 1011 x2550
Department of Artificial Intelligence, Edinburgh University
5 Forrest Hill, Edinburgh, EH1 2QL, UK