Jan 20, 2015 06:30 AM
John Brockman’s Edge question for 2015 asks 182 intellectuals: "What do you think about machines that think?"
http://edge.org/responses/q2015
EXCERPT (Intro, Brockman): For more than fifty years, I've watched the ebb and flow of public opinion about artificial intelligence: it's impossible and can't be done; it's horrendous, and will destroy the human race; it's significant; it's negligible; it's a joke; it will never be strongly intelligent, only weakly so; it will bring on another Holocaust. These extremes have lately given way to an acknowledgment that AI is an epochal scientific, technological, and social—human—event. We've developed a new mind, to live side by side with ours. If we handle it wisely, it can bring immense benefits, from the planetary to the personal.
[...] Since we can't seem to stop, since our literature tells us we've imagined, yearned for, an extra-human intelligence for as long as we have records, the enterprise must be impelled by the deepest, most persistent of human drives. These beg for explanation. After all, this isn't exactly the joy of sex.
Any scientist will say it's the search to know. "It's foundational," an AI researcher told me recently. "It's us looking out at the world, and how we do it." He's right. But there's more.
Some say we do it because it's there, an Everest of the mind. Others, more mystical, say we're propelled by teleology: we're a mere step in the evolution of intelligence in the universe, attractive even in our imperfections, but hardly the last word.
Entrepreneurs will say that this is the future of making things—the dark factory, with unflagging, unsalaried, uncomplaining robot workers—though what currency post-employed humans will use to acquire those robot products, no matter how cheap, is a puzzle to be solved.
Here's my belief: We long to save and preserve ourselves as a species. For all the imaginary deities throughout history we've petitioned, which failed to save and protect us—from nature, from each other, from ourselves—we're finally ready to call on our own enhanced, augmented minds instead. It's a sign of social maturity that we take responsibility for ourselves. We are as gods, Stewart Brand famously said, and we may as well get good at it.
We're trying. We could fail....
http://edge.org/responses/q2015
EXCERPT (Intro, Brockman): For more than fifty years, I've watched the ebb and flow of public opinion about artificial intelligence: it's impossible and can't be done; it's horrendous, and will destroy the human race; it's significant; it's negligible; it's a joke; it will never be strongly intelligent, only weakly so; it will bring on another Holocaust. These extremes have lately given way to an acknowledgment that AI is an epochal scientific, technological, and social—human—event. We've developed a new mind, to live side by side with ours. If we handle it wisely, it can bring immense benefits, from the planetary to the personal.
[...] Since we can't seem to stop, since our literature tells us we've imagined, yearned for, an extra-human intelligence for as long as we have records, the enterprise must be impelled by the deepest, most persistent of human drives. These beg for explanation. After all, this isn't exactly the joy of sex.
Any scientist will say it's the search to know. "It's foundational," an AI researcher told me recently. "It's us looking out at the world, and how we do it." He's right. But there's more.
Some say we do it because it's there, an Everest of the mind. Others, more mystical, say we're propelled by teleology: we're a mere step in the evolution of intelligence in the universe, attractive even in our imperfections, but hardly the last word.
Entrepreneurs will say that this is the future of making things—the dark factory, with unflagging, unsalaried, uncomplaining robot workers—though what currency post-employed humans will use to acquire those robot products, no matter how cheap, is a puzzle to be solved.
Here's my belief: We long to save and preserve ourselves as a species. For all the imaginary deities throughout history we've petitioned, which failed to save and protect us—from nature, from each other, from ourselves—we're finally ready to call on our own enhanced, augmented minds instead. It's a sign of social maturity that we take responsibility for ourselves. We are as gods, Stewart Brand famously said, and we may as well get good at it.
We're trying. We could fail....