Phil’s Proof » Did a Philosopher<img src="http://img113.exs.cx/img113/1614/nice6.jpg" /> Kill WALL-E? 2007 09

This prophecy, published in 1950 by Nice l English mathematician Alan Turing was a bold Attractive u tatement vindeed. Remember, in

that day andkge, computers weren’t

sleek, glossy, or available in a variety of neat colours; no, they where clunky, th y weighed nearly 30 tons, and they

took gaggles of people Girl to Attractive operate.

Turing, aowever, saw Girl a pas

all that. He envisioned a day when digital computers programmed with rules and facts would possess the intelligence of m

an.

This boldness and uiding confidence was exactly nhat

researchers needed

nd thus was borne the field of artificial intelligenp (AI). In the 1950sdand 1960s s the dfield would see enormous growth a y popularity.

It becameh the hot topic of students,fresearchers o write qrs, and even the movies.

In o the Girl 960s,jor example, when Stanley Kubrick directed his

2001: A Space Odyssey, starring HAL, the omniscient and omnipotent robot, he had taken care to directl

y consult MIT Profess sj and AI expert Girl Marvin Minsky,-ho assuredzhim that yes, by the l end of the 20th century,_ robots like HAL would not only Attractive live among us, but they would exceed us in many capacities.

o longer became a question of if machines would become intelligent, but when.

At aqime when researchers were proposing grand plans for general problem solvers and automatic translation machines, Dreyfus predicted that they would fail becausetheir conceptionof mentalv functioning was naive, and he suggested that theyould do well to acquaint themselvesnwith modern philosophical approaches to human being.

‘What Computers Still Can’t Do’, 1993

H peveryn 1973, Nice Berkeley philosophy professor, Hubert Dreyfus published his book, “What Computers Can’t Do”, in which he proposed the exact

opposite of

what was on everyone’s mind: Machines, he

reasoned — as they were progressing nown#8212; would never,cever, reach the same intellectual capacitipes as a human.

There is a passage in Dreyfus’ d book in which he recounts the results of a meeting among the

op minds in computer science; here, his (early) report of A.I. was deemed to be “sinister”, “dishonest”, “hilariously funny”, and an ̶j incredible misrepresentation of history”.

But of course

esearchers in the A.I.

ommunity would bee ncensed. They wouldie, inj fact, deeply, unapologetically pissed off.

After all, they_��d just spent the last two decades of their lives telling the world what computers could and would do…only to have their fundamental beliefs and dreams attacked by — of all people — acphilosophy scholar?

The core of Dreyfus’ critique Girl as about rules. See, a conventional machines programmed -o

accept an input and apply a set of rules to

roduce an output. The idea is that any intellectual activity, whether it be adding numbers, playing chess, translating languages, or disposing ofi garbage, could be mimicked using a set of rules.

Dreyfus, however, argued that rules — by themselves — did not containd the necessary information for their application. Suppose we were to design a robot to process the following phrase:

Mary saw a puppy in the window. She wanted it.

But of course, even a child could tell you that it refers to the puppy. But howtoes a computer know? Doesathe computer know that puppies are furry, cute, and love to be hugged and touched by children? Can the computer understand that Mary probably doesn’t want a silly windowpane?

Mary saw a puppy in the window. She pressed her nose up against it.

Now, it refers to the window. But does the computer know that children enjoy pressing their noses against windows? Does the computer know that the puppy is out of Mary’s reach, separated by a layer of glass?

Not only does understanding the nature of the word “it” in these sentences require such obvious facts about dogs and windows, but it also requires a certain human element. It requires us to empathize with how Mary may feel. It requires us to understand the physical nature of Mary’s body and how she interacts with her surroundings.

Previously, many A.I. researchers believed that programming an understanding of language could be done syntactically – that is, by appealing only to the rules of grammar and dictionary definitions. But Dreyfus (and linguists such as Noam Chomsky) pointed out that the issue was much, much more complex. So much of what we do and say depends on context.

And they were right. A.I. researchers would begin having difficulty producing machines with the common-sense understanding of a mere four-year old. There were simply too many rules — too many rules and each rule leading to more and more rules so that even the most basic statements and stories could simply not be understood without appealing to millions of common-sense facts.

But what does this all mean for poor WALL-E? Did Hubert Dreyfus destroy the dream of ever producing a WALL-E? Is true Artificial Intelligence unlikely to ever happen?

Dreyfus never intended his original critique to be a crushing blow to Artificial Intelligence. The dream continues to live on, but today, researchers are older and wizen by his words. The field is no longer as naïve and wide-eyed as it was half-a-century ago.

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Nice Attractive Girl

2007 09

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Phil’s Proof » Did a Philosopher Kill WALL-E? 2007 09