Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!wuarchive!bcm!dimacs.rutgers.edu!aramis.rutgers.edu!athos.rutgers.edu!christian From: mmh@cs.qmw.ac.uk (Matthew Huntbach) Newsgroups: soc.religion.christian Subject: Re: Impact of Artificial Intelligence on Religion Message-ID: Date: 25 Oct 90 07:08:41 GMT Sender: hedrick@athos.rutgers.edu Organization: Computer Science Dept, QMW, University of London, UK. Lines: 33 Approved: christian@aramis.rutgers.edu In article mclarke@ac.dal.ca writes: >There are two evolving technologies which will gradually change the >way society makes day to day choices. They are artificial intelligence >and parallel processing. Essentailly this means that within about 20 years >computer technology should be able to emulate the human reasoning process.. > I happen to be a researcher in the fields of "artificial intelligence" (I don't like the term myself - I prefer something like "experimental computing") and parallel processing. From my experience I believe this is absolute nonsense. It is not possible to see where anything remotely human-like could even come from. >computers. They will be more efficient, faster, more accurate and much >cheaper. Professional jobs will be done by computer. This includes >medical, legal, etc. positions. A computer simply obeys rules. That's it. What you are really complaining about is a rigid adherence to rules. There is no need to bring computers into it - exactly the same situation would arise if doctors and lawyers always stuck rigidly to a fixed set of rules. Doctors and lawyers don't usually behave in this way though, they bring in their own human knowledge to interpret the rules, and deal with special cases that weren't considered when the rules were drawn up. In this way they can come up with better solutions. However humans can go against the rules by mistake, which is where use of computers has an advantage. Rather than confuse the issue by bringing in "artificial intelligence, you should be thinking in more practical terms. Matthew Huntbach