[lbo-talk] AI

[Dwayne Monroe]

Having worked with AI based systems and huge computing
clusters for a few years now, I find this faith in
strong AI bewildering and disappointing.  It is
perhaps, an indication of the deep complexity of the
systems we depend upon that many people believe almost
any innovation to be possible - as if via magic.

 

Computers, as symbol manipulators via instruction set
execution, are without peer among devices.  Someone
once called them the *proteus of machines* and I
agree.

But strong AI is a failure and will remain a failure
because its underlying assumption - that minds can be
built or evolved using canned mimicry of certain
(poorly understood) aspects of human cognition - is
deeply flawed.

*Learning systems* are cleverly constructed and very
useful tools.  So are massively parallel neural nets. 
But these systems do not think now and do not form the
foundation of some future thinking apparatus because
of fundamental differences between what minds and
machines do.

Prof. Hawking's error, and the error of all believers
in so-called *strong AI* is confusing hardware's ever
greater processing potential with a greater potential
for cognition.  Since brains are wildly complex and
capable of *processing* incredible amounts of
information in very complex ways, the assumption is
that a machine approaching the brain's level of
complexity, will, sooner or later and with the right
instruction set, think.

There are many things wrong with this starting with
the seldom commented on fact that our hardware far
outstrips our software in performance.  or, to put it
bluntly, software sucks.

Greater processing power gives computers the ability
to manipulate symbols and execute complex instruction
sets with greater speed.  This does not lead to
cognition.

A belief in consciousness in existing machinery is
anthropomorphism.  Belief that future developments
will, somehow, produce strong AI is magical thinking.

There may be hidden potentials in initiatives such as
quantum computing but the methods we employ today -
and their foreseeable improved successors - are not
walking down the road to sentience.

Well phrased and on-point criticisms of Searle's
arguments are fine and necessary but do nothing to
change the fundamentals: machines do not think.

Searle explains the Chinese Room in an interview -

http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/people/Searle/searle-con4.html

DRM

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Protect your identity with Yahoo! Mail AddressGuard
http://antispam.yahoo.com/whatsnewfree