Show Why Computers dont don't rule the world Johnathan Lamb Contributing Writer We Ve have all heard o of f doomsday computers going berserk on society from The Matrix to Terminator But the basic pretense of all of these movies is that machines or computers will advance so quickly that they will will start start to out think their human cohabitants I The main support for this is Moores Moore's law of transistors which according to is that every twenty months memory capacity the ability to process information on computers would double The ability to process information is a baseline for intelligence because unprocessed information is nothing more than unusable data The thought is that if computers get twice as much memory almost every two years than this would lead to a point where computers could develop self And i if f human history has taught us anything think Spartacus these machines would try to free themselves from slavery even trying to eliminate obsolete life forms The first flaw in this thought path is that tha t machines computers willever will willever willever ever be able to understand As of yet not any research h L group has been able to i create a true intelligent t machine Though actually y defining intelligent is i s i somewhat speculative an anfor and d I for interest in brevity it will wit 1 1 not be discussed further The first test for testing g computer intelligence stated at was s proposed by Alan Turin Turing g 5 during the Hi His sa s summation was that if a i person A sitting in a roo room m i i I. I f 4 writing to either a machine B or another person C with no visualization of either machine B or person C could person A determine which was human and which was machine If the machine B could simulate to person A effectively enough that it was a person then it could be said to be beas beas as intelligent nt as a a person However as explained in ih Minds M Machines chines and Searle by Stevan Hamad John Searle critiqued the Turing Test and thought that even if a machine could successfully pass the Turing test it would not necessarily be intelligent He supposed that if Person PersonA A writes to Machine B in Chinese and Person A does not know Chinese then any simulated response from Machine B could not be understood by Person A. A Any simulation of being a person would be lost so you would not say it was intelligent Then again The second flaw is multiple Multiple explained at com corn is that there is varying forms of intelligence and intelligence exists in many dimensions As an example a medi medical cal doctor is generally considered very intelligent however when it would come to fixing his vehicle which is not his profession would he be said to be beless beless less intelligent To place this on machines would a web server sewer that holds an encyclopedic database a avery very large some of facts be said to be smart The server itself merely follows input commands and can give information however it in itself does not have to understand anything in its memory B But t yet since sine it does posses so much information would it not be intelligent since it would be able to answer nearly any question or postulate Then if we could say that a machine with encyclopedic knowledge is not intelligent since it does not understand its knowledge then how can we ever say that machines will ever be intelligent enough to develop awareness The final flaw is is' what is self awareness There are many varying views of awareness from the superficial I am aware of myself to the metaphysical metaphysical metaphysical meta meta- physical the universe has hasan hasan hasan an awareness And there is ismy ismy ismy my surrounding am I aware of them The most famous example of awareness is the common quote I I think there for I am from Renee Descartes de dela dela dela la method Descartes tried to to rationalize what the physical world could be the awareness of his surroundings and even his own existence Through his discourse he surmised that he could not be sure of his surroundings or of himself but that since he can ask the question of his existence than he must exist From Descartes' Descartes example what can a machine be said to have any awareness To exemplify this does a squirrel know of its existence Or if it does does it know about its insignificance in the universe For any animal or machine what can we qualify as having self awareness If we cannot truly answer that question then how can a machine ever become self aware i r f c. c 1 f t J. J 01 r i J. J I. I |