From: moffat@uvapsy.psy.uva.nl (Dave Moffat)
Subject: Re: Human intelligence vs. Machine intelligence
Organization: Faculty of Psychology, University of Amsterdam
	<26536@castle.ed.ac.uk>
Date: Wed, 7 Oct 1992 09:50:34 GMT


In article <26536@castle.ed.ac.uk> cam@castle.ed.ac.uk (Chris Malcolm) writes:
   In article <BvM75v.AEF@eis.calstate.edu> wstein@eis.calstate.edu
	(William K. Stein) writes:
   >rob@apache.dtcc.edu (Rob Jarman) writes:

   >> I'm looking for information or references on human intelligence vs.
   >> machine intelligence for a research paper. Could any of you help?

   >  Read Penrose's,  "The Emporer's New Mind".  All the rest is nonesense.

Lovely.  Have you read "all the rest"?
Or did you just knowed it?

   [...]
   Penrose, although a famous physicist, can't be counted as an expert in
   this field.

Dead right, of course.
To call him a "famous physicist" is a little mild though.
He's also a brilliant one, one of the world's best, and
in contrast to your point below, he's also noted for
having a very fertile and productive imagination indeed.
This book is proof of that.

   His entertaining and otherwise instructive book unfortunately suffers
   from not being very well informed about machine intelligence. He
   [...]

Hmmm, everything you say is factually correct, and I don't want to
read more into it than you intend, but your defence is similar
to others in AI that are more clearly piqued by Penrose's attack.

Rather than criticise folks from the outside for not knowing our stuff
so well, we should welcome their novel opinions and perspectives.
It's people like Penrose (and Searle and Dreyfus etc) who help us
in AI from walking trancelike into a rut and getting stuck there.

"Why is AI uniquely singled out by such types?" we ask ourselves.
We complain that it's not fair, and counterattack.
Searle and Penroe were both surprised by the strength of
the reaction from the AI community that engulfed them.

One reason we're attacked is that we still haven't got a coherent
story to tell about what we're doing in AI and why.
Idealogically, we're a mess.
An adolescent science with an identity crisis,
we've got the whisky, got our father's keys to the big red sports car,
but we can't agree where we want to go for the evening.

When we mature a bit more we'll be able to take a punch on the chin.
We'll lose some of our paranoia, and even be able to criticise ourselves.
Then nobody else will have to.

   Alas for Penrose, the fate which so often befalls those who argue on
   the basis of failure of the imagination struck rather quickly. Not
   long after the publication of his book Scientific American published
   an article by some scientists with rather more fertile imaginations
   than Penrose, who provided an explanation for the crystallisation
   observations without requiring any new physical effects. This leaves
   [...]

That sounds like a great article!
Have you got any more information on it - issue number,
authors, title etc?

Your point about lack-of-imagination being inadmissible as
scientific evidence is right on.
And that someone like Penrose (who has a rich imagination)
can also fall into this trap actually only adds power to the point.

   An indication of the status of Penrose's critique of artificial
   intelligence is that -- apart from reviews at the time of publication
   -- nobody in the field is bothering to refute it, whereas the
   criticisms of such people as Searle and Dreyfus (which are covered in
   the books I cited) have spawned more books and papers than you could
   carry.

Now finally here's what I originally meant to say.
There's an extensive paper by Aaron Sloman in the latest AI journal
doing exactly this -- refuting Penrose, point by point.

If other AI-ers didn't refute him before, it's because they didn't
know how to.
Naturally they all thought that they were right, and that their
intuitions were sound (and I'm just as vulnerable here),
but expressing all that in a way that covered the whole ground,
and could persuade independent outsiders,
was clearly too much for them.

Of course AI-ers reading this may well be infuriated,
convinced they really understand the issues and simply
stood aside to let the bullets fly without even bothering
to answer the fire.
They're wrong, however.
They don't understand what they're doing, or why, well enough.
Attacks from Penrose and friends are proof of this --
if the AI case was well-explained, these books would
never have been written.

So it seems we still have a PR job to do to tell the good people
what AI is really all about, no?

   -- 
   Chris Malcolm    cam@uk.ac.ed.aifh          +44 (0)31 650 3085
   Department of Artificial Intelligence,    Edinburgh University
   5 Forrest Hill, Edinburgh, EH1 2QL, UK                DoD #205


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