Singularity IV: Will Computers Become Super Human
Some computer-scientists are rewriting the creation myth to place computers at the pinnacle of creation. Will super-intelligent computers take over the world? Dr. Mae-Wan Ho takes a cool long look and discovers some surprising answers.
British playwright Alan Ayckbourn’s Comic Potential opens with the scene of a young man lying in a hospital bed with the mother crying at bedside. The doctor is trying to tell the mother of an operation that has to be done to save the boy’s life, and a nurse is standing in attendance. In the gloom above on a platform sits a man watching and directing the scene.
The doctor takes a clipboard from the nurse and shows it to the mother.
"There! You don’t have to be an expert. Just look at these X-rays, woman. They speak for themselves. There’s massive damage to the foot. I’m going to have to operate immediately. I’m going to remove the temporary pluster cust and umputate just above the unkle…"
Nurse laughs.
The director curses. Behind him, a flustered computer programmer looks in dismay at her console, and the technician tries to explain what has happened. The programmer and technician have been operating controls to make the ‘actoids’ – robot actors - do what the director wants.
The software has glitched, making the doctor substitute ‘U’s for ‘A’s. But what’s the matter with Nurse? She isn’t programmed to laugh, and certainly, isn’t supposed to laugh at jokes.
Worse yet, love subsequently blossoms between actoid Nurse and human Adam, a visiting fan of the director’s old movies, before the age of actoids. A robot that laughs at jokes and falls in love? Is she conscious like a human being?
IT DREAM TURNING TO NIGHTMARE
Of course, no robot today can laugh at jokes or fall in love, no robot can even tie a pair of shoelaces. Decades of artificial intelligence research have yielded nothing that approaches natural intelligence.
That’s not to say robots can’t do some impressive routine tasks. A computer has beaten the world’s chess champion by dint of calculating the consequences of all the possible moves many steps ahead in order to choose the best. Sophisticated computer programmes can write poems, make music and even paint pictures. Computer games, even for someone like me who hates them, are marvels of animation. I, for one, hardly ever write except on a computer, and where would any counter-culture or protest movement be without the internet? I am told that several recent revolutions were won with the help of the internet.
In a fascinating book, Technomanifestos (2002), Adam Brate charts the history of the digital age, from cybernetics to the World Wide Web, through the biographies of a collection of radical visionaries who brought it about. I was especially impressed with the attempts of people like Norbert Wiener, Vannevar Bush, J.C. R. Licklider, Doug Engelbart and Tim Berners-Lee to keep knowledge open and circulating, enabling information technology to thrive and develop in the public domain, even after the likes of Bill Gates have set up private monopolies. The now played-out IT boom would probably never have happened but for the collective efforts of computer scientists working in all corners of the world sharing knowledge and software without reserve and with little or no financial reward.
But more importantly, those pioneers shared a dream. "[T]he goal of the information revolutionaries", Brate tells us, "is to create new systems – technological, social, political, and economic – that adapt to people instead of the other way around."
What has happened to that dream since? It has all the signs of turning into a nightmare, so let’s take a cool long look.
To be continued...
British playwright Alan Ayckbourn’s Comic Potential opens with the scene of a young man lying in a hospital bed with the mother crying at bedside. The doctor is trying to tell the mother of an operation that has to be done to save the boy’s life, and a nurse is standing in attendance. In the gloom above on a platform sits a man watching and directing the scene.
The doctor takes a clipboard from the nurse and shows it to the mother.
"There! You don’t have to be an expert. Just look at these X-rays, woman. They speak for themselves. There’s massive damage to the foot. I’m going to have to operate immediately. I’m going to remove the temporary pluster cust and umputate just above the unkle…"
Nurse laughs.
The director curses. Behind him, a flustered computer programmer looks in dismay at her console, and the technician tries to explain what has happened. The programmer and technician have been operating controls to make the ‘actoids’ – robot actors - do what the director wants.
The software has glitched, making the doctor substitute ‘U’s for ‘A’s. But what’s the matter with Nurse? She isn’t programmed to laugh, and certainly, isn’t supposed to laugh at jokes.
Worse yet, love subsequently blossoms between actoid Nurse and human Adam, a visiting fan of the director’s old movies, before the age of actoids. A robot that laughs at jokes and falls in love? Is she conscious like a human being?
IT DREAM TURNING TO NIGHTMARE
Of course, no robot today can laugh at jokes or fall in love, no robot can even tie a pair of shoelaces. Decades of artificial intelligence research have yielded nothing that approaches natural intelligence.
That’s not to say robots can’t do some impressive routine tasks. A computer has beaten the world’s chess champion by dint of calculating the consequences of all the possible moves many steps ahead in order to choose the best. Sophisticated computer programmes can write poems, make music and even paint pictures. Computer games, even for someone like me who hates them, are marvels of animation. I, for one, hardly ever write except on a computer, and where would any counter-culture or protest movement be without the internet? I am told that several recent revolutions were won with the help of the internet.
In a fascinating book, Technomanifestos (2002), Adam Brate charts the history of the digital age, from cybernetics to the World Wide Web, through the biographies of a collection of radical visionaries who brought it about. I was especially impressed with the attempts of people like Norbert Wiener, Vannevar Bush, J.C. R. Licklider, Doug Engelbart and Tim Berners-Lee to keep knowledge open and circulating, enabling information technology to thrive and develop in the public domain, even after the likes of Bill Gates have set up private monopolies. The now played-out IT boom would probably never have happened but for the collective efforts of computer scientists working in all corners of the world sharing knowledge and software without reserve and with little or no financial reward.
But more importantly, those pioneers shared a dream. "[T]he goal of the information revolutionaries", Brate tells us, "is to create new systems – technological, social, political, and economic – that adapt to people instead of the other way around."
What has happened to that dream since? It has all the signs of turning into a nightmare, so let’s take a cool long look.
To be continued...
Comments
s1m0n first of all I would to thank you for being the first person to reply me on this blog. I am still in the process of bathing in the joy of having a blog and in this sense still going through the growing pains that come with having a blog. With that said I fully understand your opinion and good one indeed on greater than human intelligence in computers. Your scenario is very plausible.
I really feel that we can not overlook the aspect that the so called "elite" among us may find ways to gain control over these super human intelligent machines. Whether if it is through downloading their consciousness into these super computers or any other number of ways...
Now with this will the "elite" have even greater contorl of the masses?