Some Things Never Change
The second example concerns the relation between Al and the public media. The media also has played an especially prominent role in the promotion motion of utopian discourses about Al. Journalists, typically looking for eye-catching and news-making stories, have found in Al a plentiful source of titillating stories, and Al researchers, especially those with the opportunity to make it to the front pages, have seldom refrained from providing them. We have seen examples from interviews with Douglas Lenat about Cyc or with Rodney Brooks about Cog. Publicizing one’s views and projects is not, of course, reproachable in and of itself. It becomes so, however, if it feeds into and increases confusion on issues of public interest. Brooks, for instance, on a PBS documentary on the subject of HAL and 2001 (November 27, 2001), used the phrase “in principle” at least three times while discussing the possibility for robots to become as intelligent as human beings. This kind of cautious approach was laudable, setting Brooks apart from the more utopian futurists. However, there is a problem even here: For someone with sufficient knowledge edge of the issues, the term “in principle” suggests a vast gap between current robots and human consciousness, but the casual observer typically does not realize how much of a hedge lies buried in the words “in principle,” and thus takes this argument as evidence for an around-the-corner realization. The hedge becomes evident, however, when we notice that Brooks’s examples of successful Al are fuel injectors, airport gates, and the like (see Chapter 8). It also becomes evident in the types of media presentations of the artifacts themselves — for instance, when Cog is portrayed only from the “waist” up, hiding the extensive array of machinery, cables, computers, and software that “support” it. That this kind of presentation also erases the enormous human labor that is invested in the design, implementation, and minute-to-minute operation of the robot is the another important side of the story that rarely gets media attention (Suchman 2007: 238).
The confusion generated by these kinds assertions and presentations was quite manifest during Ray Kurzweil’s interview on National Public Radio’s Talk of the Nation Science program (December 23, 2005) about his more recent book Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (Viking Press, 2005), which, building on the same assumptions as we saw in Chapter ter 3, now discusses the possibility of eternal life, eradication of illness and poverty, the solution of energy problems, and so on. During this program, both the host and calling listeners raised important questions about the social, philosophical, economical, and technical feasibility of Kurzweil’s claims, only to receive the repetition of the same ideas in response: the law of increasing ing returns, exponential growth, nanotechnology, and so on.
H. R. Ekbia. Artificial Dreams: The Quest for Non-Biological Intelligence (Kindle Locations 4385–4400). Kindle Edition.
