harnad@mind.UUCP (Stevan Harnad) (10/26/86)
Topic: Machines: Natural and Man-Made On mod.ai, in Message-ID: <8610240550.AA15402@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU>, 22 Oct 86 14:49:00 GMT, NGSTL1::DANNY%ti-eg.CSNET@RELAY.CS.NET (Daniel Paul) cites Daniel Simon's earlier reply in AI digest (V4 #226): >One question you haven't addressed is the relationship between intelligence and >"human performance". Are the two synonymous? If so, why bother to make >artificial humans when making natural ones is so much easier (not to mention >more fun)? Daniel Paul then adds: > This is a question that has been bothering me for a while. When it > is so much cheaper (and possible now, while true machine intelligence > may be just a dream) why are we wasting time training machines when we > could be training humans instead? The only reasons that I can see are > that intelligent systems can be made small enough and light enough to > sit on bombs. Are there any other reasons? Apart from the two obvious ones -- (1) so machines can free people to do things machines cannot yet do, if people prefer, and (2) so machines can do things that people can only do less quickly and efficiently, if people prefer -- there is the less obvious reply already made to Daniel Simon: (3) because trying to get machines to display all our performance capacity (the Total Turing Test) is our only way of arriving at a functional understanding of what kinds of machines we are, and how we work. [Before the cards and letters pour in to inform me that I've used "machine" incoherently: A "machine," (writ large, Deus Ex Machina) is just a physical, causal system. Present-generation artificial machines are simply very primitive examples.] Stevan Harnad princeton!mind!harnad harnad%mind@princeton.csnet (609)-921-7771