Artificially Intelligent
Will machines wipe out the human race?
“The business plans of the next 10,000 startups are easy to forecast: Take X and add AI” — Kevin Kelly
And Kevin is not wrong. From cars to thermostats, mattresses to alarm clocks, the next (present) generation of products all have, or claim to be intelligent. What does it really mean to be intelligent? Google’s definition — the ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills, is not comprehensive. Britannica does a better job defining ‘human intelligence’ as the mental quality that consists of the abilities to learn from experience, adapt to new situations, understand and handle abstract concepts, and use knowledge to manipulate one’s environment. As we delve deeper, the meaning of intelligence expands. In 1983, American developmental psychologist Howard Gardener described 9 types of intelligence: Naturalist (nature smart), Musical (sound smart), Logical-mathematical (number/reasoning smart), Existential (life smart), Interpersonal (people smart), Bodily-kinesthetic (body smart), Linguistic (word smart), Intra-personal (self smart), Spatial (picture smart).
No doubt machines (including computers and other products) have come a long way, but I would not say there exists an intelligent machine (yet), or rather, one that matches human intelligence. This is because, machines are often created to excel in one of the above intelligences. An intelligent car can self-drive but not read you stories. An intelligent home robot can read you stories but not drive you. I understand this could mean that humans have not yet been able to impart all that they have to machines. But I really doubt we ever will. Machines have long existed to make our life easier, and will continue to do so. They sure are, and will become smarter in the coming years but not intelligent. I say this because I see being smart as a reaction to a particular situation (like 1 of the above intelligences), and machines are good at this. However, every human has some level of conscious thought with respect to every intelligence outlined by Gardner. Arguments from Various Disabilities is what Alan Turing calls this arguement. They generally take the form “I grant you that this machine can do all that you have mentioned but it will not be able to do X”. And there will always be X, and X’s. This does not mean a single human can do everything. However, any human, through learning and experience, can attempt to do anything.
Having said that, I wonder if things would change if the way in which intelligence is fed to machines is altered. Machine brains are made to be like an adults, someone who is good at his job and has a fixed schedule and does particular things. What if machines were given the brain of a child? A brain that is not fully developed, has immense learning capabilities through education and experience and grows up to be something that nobody has control over. It is like raising a child. This reminds me of Steven Spielberg’s AI. I had the chance to talk to a fellow graduate student working in the machine learning space about his subject. I have been thinking of the trolley problem off late and when I brought it up, he said that machine learning happens in a way that machines are fed data, a lot of data. Machines then, when faced with a situation, access this data and find a reaction closest to what it has been taught. Now to think of it, don’t humans work the same way too? However, there is one dissimilarity in the form of Lady Lovelace’s Objection that “The Analytical Engine has no pretensions to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform”. A variant of this objection states that a machine can never really do anything new. One can argue that there is nothing new under the sun, but this is an extension to the arguement that machines are Master of one, only what it is made for.
Another argument that I resonate with in Turing’s paper is the Argument from Consciousness. Professor Jefferson’s Lister Oration in 1949 said “Not until a machine can write a sonnt or compose a concerto because of thoughts and emotions felt, and not by the chance fall of symbols, could we agree that machine equals brain — that is, not only write it but know that it had written it”. Consciousness. He goes on to say “No mechanism could feel pleasure at its successes, grief when its valves fuse, be warmed by flattery, be made miserable by its mistakes, be charmed by sex, be angry or depressed when it cannot get what it wants”. Would a machine ever understand why it is doing what it is doing? Would it ever learn to be context-aware?
I am not sure how I feel about artificial intelligence. One one side, I am fascinated by the advancement in the field but on the other, I will always see humans as a superior race to machines, and wonder if machines can ever truly be intelligent. As a designer, I feel responsible, more than ever for what I will be designing in the coming years. I hope to be able to acquire more in-depth knowledge of such topics to be able to take conscious (unlike machines) decisions that would affect thousands of humans (and machines). In closing I would like to say that, the fact that it is called ‘Artificial’ intelligence, says a lot and we humans are safe!
