reid (01/21/83)
This newsgroup is awfully dry, after so much traffic in net.misc. I have been wading through "The Mind's I", by Hofstadter and Dennett. I find myself intrigued by some of the stuff in there, in particular people's tendency to immediately "trust" and "identify with" computers, or to ascribe human tendencies and even emotions to cleverly written programs. I think we all ascribe some sort of muse or "mind" to the computer to which we type so much and so often. If nothing else, it makes life simpler to ignore the hardware and the nuts and bolts. That is the point of all high-level goings-on anyway. It seems to me that there will quickly reach a point where we can treat computers in much the same manner as we treat fellow humans, without ever assuming that they are human or should be. For instance, I think it not unreasonable to ask a computer to understand me (maybe someday in natural language), to cooperate with me, to take some ini- tiative on its own, and to make life simpler for me. It is reasonable for the computer to not understand occasionally, and to need clarification, or even for it to screw up and do as I said, and not what I meant. Contrast this with one of your subordinate workers (human). Why is it necessary for us to ascribe human emotions to things which may well function very much like humans someday? In the workplace, especially. I think that computers will not likely be suitable marriage material, no matter how sophisticated they become, and probably not very good for discussing literature or problems. That is why it will be important to have people around. Think how nice to be able to make your computer do all the dirty work for you so you can think lofty thoughts and discuss Tolstoy, without the guilt of having just made your secretary do all the work for which you are getting paid.... "TERRY, how about writing up a report on the latest MumbleNet protocol for me, I have a game of chess to play...." Respectfully, Glenn Reid
cutler (01/23/83)
A few points about the view I recently stated: 1) I'm not expressing a philosophical statement on AI or anything that comes from AI. If a program acts human and is as (un)predictable as a human, then for all practical purposes I would treat it as though it understands human behavior and associated functions. From this point of view it is irrelevant whether or not the program actually does understand or just mimics understanding. 2) Will an AI intelligence necessarily be human? No, but to paraphrase a leader in the field, we know humans can achieve a high level of intelligence, but we don't know for certain that there is any other form of highly intelligent "life", so at least for now we should use the only available model. This expresses two goals which I share: to create an artificial intelligence and to figure out how people work. Ben Cutler decvax!yale-comix!cutler