I watched Horizon last night, as I saw it was about
artificial intelligence, which I find quite interesting.
There were a few examples of present robots and computers,
varying from the incredibly knowledgeable but non-robotic Watson computer
(which triumphed in a special edition of the US
quiz Jeopardy) to more anthropomorphic creations.
The programme did pose some interesting philosophical
questions about intelligence and whether AI can truly exist. The presenter,
mathematician Marcus Du Sautoy, did a Chinese room experiment. He was in an
enclosed room with a letterbox through which a fluent Chinese speaker posted
simple messages. He then replied, despite knowing no Chinese at all and having
no idea what he was saying, by posting back messages in accordance with a
rulebook he had in the room. The Chinese speaker said that if she’d been
speaking with him online she would have thought he knew it fluently and would
have no idea he was utterly unaware of what he’d been saying.
The point of that is that we cannot know whether a robot is
truly thinking as we do, or whether it’s blindly following instructions. Du
Sautoy countered this by suggesting that humans themselves follow
‘instructions’ in the way we think (a view to which I’m inclined).
He also encountered a robot deliberately made to have many
human structures, with a plastic skeleton, joints and thread doing the work of
tendons. The scientist behind that creation thought that real intelligence was
contingent upon having a physical form that interacts with the world. He
pointed out that robots are phenomenally good at things we thought they might
find hard (playing draughts) but very bad at things we thought they’d find easy
(moving the pieces).
The final chap, a German, that Du Sautoy met had perhaps the
most interesting robots of all. There were three of them, roughly 60% the size
of a human and with a similar composition (2 legs, 2 arms). They invented their
own language, giving a word to a gesture and then teaching it to one another
and then Du Sautoy (who got it wrong at first). The German scientist suggested
that robots really need to evolve in the same way that humans develop from
infancy to adulthood, and the fascinating interaction between his creations
seemed to back this up. It is hard to know, however, how much behaviour is
simply programmed and how much is due to the robots ‘thinking’ for themselves.
For those Britons wanting to watch the programme, here’s a
link to it on the iPlayer, which should be up for the next few days:
There’s also an interesting moral question. If we created a
robot species with roughly equal intelligence to our own, would they be free,
or slaves? Would the abolition of ‘off’ switches become a political rallying
point for robot rights activists?
Whilst we’ve had tremendous progress in computing power I’m
not sure how long it’ll be before those questions become live issues. It’s
worth mentioning, though, that mobile telephones were fiction not so very long,
as was the internet.
In related news, I read a tweet by the lovely Miss Plato
featuring a new video from those clever boffins at Boston Dynamics. This time
they’ve made a little robust robot that can jump rather impressive heights:
Thaddeus
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