Tag: artificial intelligence

We’re Doomed! Says Science Big Shot

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

Scientists are nothing if not resourceful. Where there’s a will, there’s a way!

Unable to find alien life forms anywhere else in the universe, now they reckon they’ll be able to create their own aliens right here on Earth–and that’ll be the ol’ ball game for the human race.

Seth Shostak, the director of that so far fruitless endeavor, SETI (“Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence”) has predicted that “re-engineering our children” through technology will lead to our replacement by a “new species as different from us as dogs are from grey wolves” ( http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3405312/Could-humanity-s-century-Expert-says-engineering-children-lead-creation-new-species.html ). Our new designer babies will be as different from us as dogs from wolves.

Gee, I thought they’d already done that.

The successful creation of Artificial Intelligence, he goes on, will also help make human beings obsolete.

People have some awfully funny ideas about what constitutes some desirable thing to do.

He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh; the LORD shall have them in derision. —Psalms, 2:4

It’s when He stops laughing that you’d better watch out.

Zillionaire to Build Robo-Nanny

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Mark Zuckerberg, the grand panjandrum of Facebook, has vowed to build a robot “to look after his house and keep tabs on his newborn daughter,” The Independent has reported ( http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/mark-zuckerberg-to-build-robot-butler-to-look-after-his-child-as-part-of-2016-new-years-resolution-a6795376.html ).

I’m old-fashioned. I thought your wife did those things. Or you could do them together.

This is a milestone–or will be, if it works out all right and the robot doesn’t wind up shoving assorted Zuckerbergs into the microwave–in the quest to create true Artificial Intelligence: an enterprise that is not even logical, much less potentially successful.

Sinful, fallible, psychologically vulnerable, misinformed, under-informed or even ignorant, wishful-thinking human beings cannot create any kind of intelligence superior to their own. We can build computers that can do certain simple things–like playing chess, for instance–without making bonehead moves of the kind that human players make because they’re tired, distracted, or whatever. But we can’t build a computer that can use chess as a way of thinking about love.

We cannot build robots that are wise.

We cannot build robots that are better than we are.

“Artificial Intelligence” can never be anything but artificial. It is not true intelligence, but an unthinking simulation of intelligence.

But hey, who listens? Go ahead and let the bot mind the baby. How much worse can it be than public school, or television?

We Are Not in Control

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

Michael Crichton wrote a lot of books. Prey, which first came out in 2002, is not among his most famous works. All the same, it still makes fascinating reading.

What would happen if nanotechnology were used to create a kind of artificial life that could learn and change and remember, that would have artificial intelligence–and that would soon evolve an agenda of its own? What if it quickly passed beyond our control?

“Science” as an ideology, and more than an ideology– a belief system, a species of religion, a way of relating to the world–and technology, which is the instrumentality of Science: hey, everybody, these things can be dangerous. Michael Crichton, a close student of many sciences, and a close companion to many scientists, sounded this warning all his life. Even the scientists themselves oversimplify incredibly complicated things, leading them into a false sense of security and finally into a delusion that “we are in control, nothing can go wrong.”

And we all know what happens when you think that.

So Prey is another one of these stories about what happens to those who succumb to that delusion. Folly can be fatal. It’s a thriller, it’s a page-turner… and something more than that.

Michael Crichton wanted to believe in Science. In the end, he couldn’t: his integrity would not let him blind himself to its false claims and pretensions.

But he also most emphatically did not want to believe in God, nor did he accept the salvation held out to him by Jesus Christ. I don’t know why.

Instead, he sought for some other myth that would turn out to be true, something with which to bind together the sheaves of reality. We see him groping for this in Prey, with the notion that nature somehow “organizes itself” without conscious direction by God. But again Crichton is tripped up by his own honesty. As he writes about scientists and profit-seekers trying to imitate the self-organizing dynamic that they think they find in nature, he can’t help writing it up as a disaster. “Nothing can go wrong” just never comes out right.

I’m not much interested in the science behind Prey, but I am intrigued by the author’s inner struggle. I wish it had turned out better for him.

Michael Crichton never found God. But there is always hope that somehow God found him.