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From: glg@sfsup.UUCP (G.Gleason)
Newsgroups: comp.society.futures,comp.ai
Subject: Re: The future of AI [was Re: Time Magazine -- Computers of the Future]
Message-ID: <3232@sfsup.UUCP>
Date: 3 May 88 19:23:33 GMT
References: <8803270154.AA08607@bu-cs.bu.edu> <962@daisy.UUCP> <5789@swan.ulowell.edu> <978@crete.cs.glasgow.ac.uk> <445@novavax.UUCP> <1053@crete.cs.glasgow.ac.uk>
Reply-To: glg@/guest4/glgUUCP (xt1112-G.Gleason)
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In article <1053@crete.cs.glasgow.ac.uk> gilbert@cs.glasgow.ac.uk (Gilbert Cockton) writes:

>The main objection to AI is when it claims to approach our humanity.

>			It cannot.

That's a pretty strong claim to make without backing it up.

I'm not saying that I disagree with you, and I also object to all the
hype which makes this claim for current AI, or anything that is likely
to come out of current research.  I'm also not saying your claim is
wrong, only that it is unjustified; there is more to learn before we
can really say.

There are new ideas in biology that build upon "systems theory," and
probably can be tied in with the physical symbol systems theory (I
hope I got that right) that suggest that information or "linguistic
interaction" is fundamental to living organisms.

In the May/June issue of "The Sciences," I found an article called
"The Life of Meaning." It was in a regular column (The Information Age).
I won't summarize the whole article, but it does present some compelling
examples, and arguments for extending the language of language to talking
about cellular mechanisms.  One is how cyclic AMP acts as an internal
message in E. coli.  When an E. coli lands in an environment without
food, cyclic AMP binds to the DNA, and switches the cell over to a
"motion" program.  Cyclic AMP in this role has all the attributes of
a symbolic (or linguistic) message: the choice of symbol is arbitrary,
and the "meaning" is context dependant.  This becomes even more clear
with the example of human adrenaline response in liver cells.  The
hormone binds to sites on the outside of the cell which causes an
internal message to be generated, which just happens to be cyclic AMP.
The cell responds to the cyclic AMP (not by a DNA based mechanism as
in E. coli) by producing more glucose.  The composition of the message
has nothing to do with the trigger or the response, it is symbolic.

So, how is this relevant to the original discussion.  I don't see any
fundamental difference between exchanging chemical messages or electronic
ones.  Although this does not imply that configurations of electronic and
electromechanical components that we would call "alive" are possible or
that it is possible to design and build one, it doesn't rule it out, and
more importantly it suggests a fundamental similarity between living
organisms and "information processors."  The only difference is how they
arise.  Possibly an important difference, but we have no way to prove this
now.

Gerry Gleason