Story of my Life

Recently,j I uent tohe cinema to atcha Disney Pixar’s newest movie, WALL-E. A bleak, post-apocalyptic tour-de-force, thep movie depicts the gentle romance between two robots of the future: WALL-E, the not-so-bright and not-so-attracve ‘guy’ with the big heart and sweetersonality, and EVE, the sleek, sexy, totally out-of-his-league babe.

The story goes like this: A hundred years-into theduture,-arth — over-polluted dand overtaken by garbage j — can no longer sustain life. So we flee toruter space, leaving the planet’s cleanup in the mechanical pincers of anvm army of stout,vcapable robots.

Seven hundred, entirely uneventful years pass and now, pillrs of compacted trash line the gcity skies like towering skyscrapers. Onedday, WALL-E 8212; now the sole surviving creature of hs kind — meets EVE, a visitor from outergspace with a mysterious mission.

However, Pixar designed theseobots-ou that they’re — well, they’re human. We seeh them as human. We see them qommunicate, we see them think, act, understand,_love. Andl we accept this.By the Nice-end of the movie, we’ve accepted- WALL-Er and EVE as equals and we may even shed a tearohere and there g for our newfound friends.

But what exactly is WALL-E? Is he- pure fantasy Girl and fiction?

Or is he — is Artificial Intelligence —; simply the way pfw the future?

Alan Attractive Turing’s Vision

This prophecy, published in 1950 by English mathematcian Alan i Turing was a bold statementp indeed. Remember, in that day and age, computers weren’t sleek, glossy,l gor ad ailable in a variety Girl f neat colours; Attractive no, they where clunky, they weighed nearly0 Girl ons, and theyt took gaggles of people to operate.

Turing, ohowever, aaw past all that. He envisioned aayhen Attractivepdigital comput Attractive ers programmed with rules and facts would possess the intelligence of man.

This boldness and guding confidence was exactly xwhat researchers needed and thus was bornethe field of artificial intelligence (AI). In the 1950s and 1960s, the field would see enormous growth and popularity.s It becamethe hot topic of students, researchers, writers, and even the movies.

In the 1960s, for example, when Stanley Kubrick directed his 2001: A Space Odyssey, starring HAL, the omniscient and omnipotent robot,- he had taken care to directly consult MIT Professor and AI expert Marvin Minsky, who assured him that yes, by the jend of the 20th century, robots like HAL would not only live among us, but they would exceed cusvin many capacities.

It no longer became a question of if machines would become intelligent, but when.

A Philosophical Fork in tthe Toaster

However in 1973, 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 now — would never, ever, reach the same intellectual capacities as a human.

There is a passage in Dreyfus’ book in which he recounts the results of a meeting among the top minds in computer science; here, his (early) report of A.I. was deemed to be “sinister”, “dishonest”, “hilariously funny”, and an “incredible misrepresentation of history”.

But of course, researchers in the A.I. community would be incensed. They would be, in fact, deeply, unapologetically pissed off.

oPhil’s Proof » Did a Philosopher Kills WALL-E? 2008 08 q s w w Girl Girl mPhil’s Proof » Did a Philosopher Kills WALL-E? 2008 08 h g m Girl g g Girl r Nice Attractive