More on Robot Love
Am I right? Consider this: would you enjoy watching a TV show in which
contestants competed to solve complicated math equations as quickly as
possible? Now, would you be excited to see a computer compete against
the humans in this contest? I didn't think so.
Yes, computers can crunch numbers. In fact, in essence, that's all
they do. The natural language used for the questions in Jeopardy are
broken down by the computer into bits and bytes and then processed.
Very quickly.
From the computer's point of
view, all of the questions are nothing more than math equations to be solved
with speed.
It's a Binary World
Now this one really bugs me: "KG Blankinship" writes in a letter to the New York
Times that "of course we can build machines that exhibit purely random behavior by
exploiting quantum mechanics as well". Before that he says something even more absurd: "Self-awareness
and the ability to adapt creatively can also be programmed into a computer". The statement
is self-contradictory but he hits on a truth: "can be programmed" into a computer. Next, he'll
tell us that a computer can program itself. As if the program that told it to program itself could ever
be something that was not, no matter how many steps down the chain, the product of human intervention.
Can a computer's behavior ever be truly "random"? Or is the appearance of randomness merely the
irreducible fact that the human's have hidden the schedule for the behavior from humans by employing
elaborate and obtuse mathematical formulae? Yes, always. And it's always ultimately math. And the
computer is always ultimately binary, which means it can never not be math. And if someone jumps up
and shouts "yeah, but sooner or later they will find a way to integrate organic cells..." I say that
on that day the organic cells will be self-aware or random, not the computer.
2011-Feb-22
Why does it matter? Because sooner or later someone is going to tell someone
else that something is true or must be done and can't be contradicted because a
computer said it was true or must be done. No, the programmer said it was true
or must be done. The computer is only doing what it can only do: parrot the input
of it's master.
It occurs to me that some of the people defending the idea that computers can
"think" like humans operate under the assumption that the human brain is binary
in function, that is, that neurons are all either on or off, with no meaningful
in-between state. (I suppose you could also argue that a very, very large
number of computer chips could attain a level of virtual analog operation, where
there are so many simulated "in-between" states that is operates like a human
brain.)
It's an intriguing line of thought. I don't believe the human brain is
binary in that sense. I believe that human beings are an integrated system
in which any particular state of virtually any part of the body has an infinite
range of values, which, combined with every other part of the body having an
infinite range of values, produces an organism that can never be matched by any
device that is, by definition, at its fundamental level, always binary.
There has been a bit of noise this week about the
IBM computer that supposedly defeated some of the top human Jeopardy
Contestants. I have rarely heard such unmitigated bullshit in the past
few years. Consider this:
The computer was allowed to store the IMDB
and several encyclopedias including Wiki on it's hard drives. The
human was not even allowed to use Google.
The computer did not express the
slightest desire to play the game or win. The IBM programmers did.
They cheated by having the IMDB and Wiki with them when they played while
the human contestants, of course, did not even have a dictionary.
Some of
the observers were dazzled that the computer was able to understand a
rhyming word-- what animal living in a mountainous region rhymes with
"Obama"? They were surprised that the computer had been programmed to
"know" that llama rhymes with Obama? You are indeed easily
impressed.
The odd thing is that the computer's performance hasn't even been
all that impressive, even if it was actually a "performance" in any human sense of the word.
Apparently, it is offered the question in text rather than verbally. 25 IBM programmers
in four years couldn't do better than that? And why does it get a bye on the verbal
questions? Human contestants can't ask for a print out of the question before they
offered verbally to other contestants.
This is a scam.
The bottom line, of course, is that
computers can't "think".
They will never think. All they can do is process
data. The data and the processing are constructed by humans.
The computer contributes nothing but the illusion of autonomous operation.
People who think computers think are staring at the puppets at a puppet
show and wondering what they do at night after the performance.