Newsgroups: sci.environment

/ hpindda:sci.environment / dmocsny@piglet.UUCP (Daniel Mocsny) / 11:49 am  Mar 31, 1992 /
In article <40911691@hpindda.cup.hp.com> A.M. writes:

>4. According to Moravec again, human-level intelligence will exist
>in a computer somewhere around the year 2030 AD. (I'm not going to
>defend his estimate here, since I am not a biocyberneticist.)

This is the only point relevent to the replacement of humans with
robots.  I can recall this prediction having been made for 2000. 
Like fusion power, artificial intelligence is always about 30 years
off. [Except that my money is on fusion power arriving first, by a
long shot.]

Human intelligence is a specific set of biological adaptations peculiar
to one species. There is noting "general" about it -- the belief in
the existence of "general" intelligence abstractable from the biological
substrate is a myth of AI. Mind you, I am not saying that human intelligence
cannot be produced artificially: if you can emulate the neurobiology with
sufficient detail, you will emulate human intelligence. But we are a *very*
long way from being able to emulate the neurobiology. 

I'm sure that lots of practical applications will ulimately result from
using bits and pieces of synthetic brain -- real visual pattern recognition,
for example.  But "human level intelligence" of the Star Wars robot variety 
(I mean the movie) will not be one of them. Such human intelligence is tied 
to the human biological and social condition -- is tied to a long chain of
historical contingencies, just as any other biological adaptation is.

The myth of concocting "artificial intelligence" is much the same as
the myth of concocting new species _ex nihilo_. It rests on ignorance
of how such biological information is actually generated by evolution,
and the ignorance leads one to think that it would be a snap to do it
oneself. I predict that, just as biotechnology will be largely an affair
of finding novel uses for naturally evolved genetic information, so 
artificial intelligence, when it finally comes of age, will be largely 
an affair of finding novel applications for naturally evolved neural
designs -- possibly emulated in another substrate, possibly not. In neither
case will the generation of novel designs _ab initio_ be very practical:
there will be so much that can be done with the naturally evolved ones or
modifications of them, and the _ab initio_ approach will be so devoid of
easy results that it will have no appeal, except as a research curiousity.

Above all, AI based on anything other than emulation of biological
intelligence will remain as sterile as it is today: the AI of the
future will be a branch of applied neural science. 

[You can see that I am not an enthusiast for Cognitive Science....]

>Alan has not provided anything, except pejoratives, as
>evidence that humans can't build self-replicating robots.

OK, I've just done it -- though clearly it depends on what counts
as a "self-replicating robot". I certainly don't think it impossible 
to build artificial self-replicating *devices*, nor to incorporate
bits of neural machinery into them. I just don't see that as leading
to biologically liberated Supermen within 200 years -- and I sincerely 
hope our descendents are not so sick as to attempt anything so demented. 

>> If
>>a future sustainable equilibrium culture wishes to replace itself
>>with robots, it would still be able to do so. It would simply have 
>>plenty of time to think it over. It's the expansionists who want to
>>reduce options, and have faith that we (or some robots) will survive
>>in the end. Equilibrism is merely the observation that if we are not
>>pressed for survival we are far more likely to survive. Equilibrism
>>has some 3+ billion years of evidence for its workability. Faith in
>>technological expansion's ability to scramble fast enough to avoid the
>>consequences of the problems it creates has about one century of
>>evidence -- all pointing the wrong way! 
>
>*All* pointing the wrong way? This is too sweeping to be correct.
>While we have a number of ominous signs, there are at least a few
>successes. 

Ozone depletion, global warming, and the extinction crisis are all
products of technological and population expansion, and they certainly
prove that technological growth doesn't *increase* our long-range
chance of survival: it has up till now been *decreasing* it. It's useless
to say that it's supidity, not technology, that is responsible: technology
is not separate from the fools or the wise who produce it and use it. 
It was very stupid to have invented the automobile, for example, but as
a piece of technology it has been a great "success". If Moscny's fantasies
about metal Supermen should come to pass, perhaps it will have been
equally stupid for us to have invented computers. But here at least we
still have choices ahead of us: we can refuse to allow the technology
to be used in such a way. It is only the moral bankruptcy of our civilization
that speaks in Mocsny's assumption that if the technology *can* evolve
in that direction, it *must*. If we can be wise, then computer technology
will be a benefit to the biosphere and to our species. 

However, since AI -- even biologically based -- is a long ways off, we
have more pressing problems to solve -- such as how to make a technological
civilization survive the next century. Mocsny's continued appeal to 
"Information Power" to make the problem vanish is almost as silly as the
beanstalks and moving a billion people a year to orbit within 100 years.
It's not clear at this point that people living in 2100 will have as much 
technology as we do, and ensuring that they will requires us to make some
choices in the next few decades that aren't going to be helped by genies
out of technological bottles: choices like seriously curbing our population
growth, seriously redressing major imbalences between developed and 
developing countries, and so on. Much moral stamina will be needed to make
these choices, and we do nothing to improve it by constant appeals to
science fiction to save us.

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Alan McGowen