Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!psuvax1!rutgers!bellcore!tness7!killer!elg
From: elg@killer.UUCP (Eric Green)
Newsgroups: comp.society.futures
Subject: Re: The future of AI
Message-ID: <4441@killer.UUCP>
Date: 13 Jun 88 05:45:20 GMT
References: <53.22AB6402@isishq.UUCP>
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In message <53.22AB6402@isishq.UUCP>, doug@isishq.UUCP (Doug Thompson) says:
>>From: elg@killer.UUCP (Eric Green) 
>>So I have little doubt that the human mind IS succeptable to 
>>scientific analysis. As to whether it can be modelled (part 3), however, 
> 
>And therein I think you have expressed the problem clearly. You have 
>little doubt. It was Descartes who said that the only thing really 
>certain to him was his own capacity to doubt. It is critical to knowing 
>anything. I'd refer you to the history of scientific revolutions, in 
>which we find *doubt* is the primary engine of creativity and new discovery. 

Actually, the driving force behind scientific revolutions has been
EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE. That is, a man may doubt that the sun orbits the
Earth, and he may believ that the Earth orbits the sun. But, if he
does not collect evidence, it remains just that: a belief, no more
valid than the belief that the sun goes around the Earth. 

There has been evidence that the mind may be analyzable by scientific
methods. There has been no evidence of the pseudo-religious
assertation that there a quality of the mind (call it a "soul") which
renders it unanalyzable by scientific methods. Therefore.....

[tons of pseudo-religious babble about Religious Detirminism,
Mechanistic detirminism, etc., deleted, much to relief of net I'm
sure, who don't feel like listening to Doug be insulted by the thought
that he's just a bunch of neurons firing and thus "does not have free
will":]

With that out of the way: I do not believe that we will ever have a
machine intelligence which closely resembles human intelligence. A
large part of our human intelligence is derived from experiences
processed by our quite effective senses, and from factors such as
mobility, growth, the ability to grasp objects, etc. A machine
intelligence, fed on information typed into consoles or digitized via
cameras or whatever, most probably would have a much different "world
view", and thus might be almost incomprehensible to "normal"
intelligences.

With that out of the way, though, AI MAY eventually pay off. Currently
we use computers to mechanize tasks which are too repetitive and too
linear for our relatively slow (~50khz) brains to process at any
reasonable rate of speed (but, while we may be slow, we sure are
parallelized). AI could result in computers capable of handling
similiar tasks that require more "intelligence". For example, while
there are currently database services that will look up references
based upon keywords, usually you get either too many references to
look through, or you restrict the search too far and miss relevant
articles (some of which may be quite important). One can envison
describing what kind of criteria you're interested in, and having the
computer pick exactly the same papers as you'd pick if you were doing
it the old-fashioned way :-).

As for "naughty computers": I can't voluntarily stop breathing even if
I wanted to. After I topple over unconcious, I start breathing again.
It's possible to envision a computer that needs to do database
searches the same way (hmm, a bit extreme of an example, but you get
the point).