With the
rapidly increasing technological capacity of artificial intelligence, there are
all sorts of thoughts and opinions doing the rounds about robot intelligence,
and whether robots will ever have intelligence on a level with humans, and
whether they can ever have feelings that are qualitatively comparable to the
feelings we experience.
There is a
sense in which things like technology are combinatorial; that is, where new
technologies arise from existing ones - the constructive aspect of technology
and human endeavour is an example of creating systems out of other aspects of
the self-same systems. The term for this is called 'autopoietic' (it's from the
Greek, it means 'self-creating'). Of course, these systems don’t create
themselves on their own - they require the agency of human minds, a little like
how coral reef creates itself from itself with the agency of small organisms.
Now when one
thinks of nature and the huge potential with which she endows us, we see a
similar situation occurring - only in the grand scheme of things the mind is a
stupendously complex thing doing the creating: it builds on its neurological
composition, on its innate cognition, on experiences, on receiving information,
on analyticity, on processing, and it even has facilities (specifically, the
dopamine neurons in our angular cingulated cortex) through which we can become
aware of patterns and formations which, when conflated with memory and
experience, alert us to deviations which help with perceptions like 'trust' and
'reliability'.
Some biologists
define life in a similar way - as an autopoietic system - that is, one whose constituent
products sustain the structural integrity in order to propagate its genetic
material. But that doesn't really tell us very much, because it fails to zoom
in on what is a whole ladder of vast complexity regarding sentience and
consciousness.
We have often
asked whether other animals have consciousness like us, and whether a machine
could ever think in the same way humans think (in this blog post here I elaborate on why I think it's impossible to replicate the human brain). But here’s the fundamental problem;
the trouble with consciousness is that it is so hard to define that it is all
but useless to claim such a thing to be existent in something that isn't human.
In Language, Truth and Logic, Ayer
gave his own version of the Turing Test by considering a man and machine. To
determine whether a machine is conscious it would have to pass tests that look
for the presence of the same kind of consciousness that humans exhibit.
In the past I've
volunteered to interact with one or two Turing-type programs in which participants
were able to engage with a 'mind' that responds to your typing, and you it, in
order to see if volunteers can distinguish between a computer pretending to be
a person, and an actual person on the other end of a keyboard. My conclusion
was that it was quite evident that it is easy to tell a computer with its rule
that transforms my comments into a reciprocated sentence.
Just like
Searle's Chinese Room experiment, a program that simulates the ability to
understand Chinese is not proof that the machine understands the meaning of
what it returns - it can simply be programmed to respond by use of correct
symbols. The qualitative difference between this kind of rule-based response
and a genuine human is immense.
Incidentally,
from feedback I received, I was one of only three people to successfully *out*
the computer as being non-human. I am not sure how the other two volunteers
managed it, but my method was to try to use a linguistic trick that I conjectured
a human would comprehend that a robot unfamiliar with subtle human nuances may
not. So I asked the computer to give a view on a little syllogism I created:
Nothing is better than eternal paradise
A weekend in Great Therefore a weekend in Great
You can see
what I did there with the wordplay on 'nothing'. I figured that a human would
get it but a robot would not, and that turned out to be the case as I exposed
the program doing the typing as being non-human.
My gut feeling
is that one of the major hurdles in our ever being able to declare a robot as
being alive in any meaningful sense is that the term 'life' is either
subjectively definitional as a human construct, or it is far too complex to be
properly defined (sometimes both).
Consider
the question of whether a virus is classed as a living organism. Definitions of
this kind are somewhat imprecise simply because we are relying on our own
definitions of what is living and what is not. When dealing with such issues,
we mustn’t ever get caught in the trap and forget that the things we are
defining are done so within the definition of the languages employed, and that
definitions become less fuzzy as we become more precise about where to draw the
line. The chances are the question of
whether a virus is a living organism or not will not apply to the science of
thirty or forty years henceforward.
The notion of things
like species, genetic similarity, and even in many cases ‘life’ itself, are humanly
constructed notions that help us classify and categorise what we have
discovered. The reason people disagree so much on abortion issues is because
they can't agree on what constitutes life - it is not because they disagree on
whether murder is bad. Some people argue that life begins at the point of
conception because they consider life to be 'information', and they maintain
that the information to create a human is already present upon fertilisation.
In that case, if we copied the information onto a CD (it would fit) I assume
they must then believe that the CD is alive. Further, if a cell is life, does
that mean a virus is alive? Such issues show how people get into epistemic
difficulties.
A virus has
the genetic information necessary for its own growth and propagation, but it
requires the machinery from a host cell to do so. Thus if we define ‘life’ as
autonomous growth and reproduction, then by that definition a virus is not
truly alive: a virus is acting in nature’s physical laws but it is not
answerable to human descriptions – it is humans that have defined living
organisms as being able to adapt to their surroundings, and being able to achieve
homeostasis, and being able to identify with proteins, and having a characteristic
genetic code, and having the ability to reproduce.
Viruses do fit
some of the criteria; they do have genetic material and they have both living
and nonliving characteristics, but as we’ve already said, they do not survive
without the metabolic machinery of host cells for survival and propagation.
That was the
definitional ambiguities, but now to complicate matters further, consider a thought
experiment I wrote a while back, which tries to cover the second part of the equation
- the vast complexity of life:
Think of the notion of removing atoms one
by one in the physical world, and imagine we have a method of physically doing
so with ultimate computational precision and high speed capacity. If I reduce
bit by bit a plane or a car or a microwave to a random aggregation of atoms and
then reassemble them exactly as they were, then I would have a fully working
plane or a car or a microwave, because neither of these systems is biologically
alive. But if I did the same to an insect, a bird or a human (at several
trillion atoms at a time), there would come a point when its being 'alive'
would cease.
If I reassembled those atoms exactly as
they were I would never reconstitute life, because once a thing dies it cannot
be brought back to life. At least that is our current understanding of
biological systems. But do we believe this only because of our limitations in
reassembling the atomic or sub-atomic structure back to full constitution?
In other words, if, when a young bird died
by hitting a tree, I had the apparatus to reassemble its structure into the
exact atomic form before it flew into the tree, would it be alive as it was
before? I think the idea of life as being explicable in terms of matter,
information and computation is interesting, because it leads to the question of
whether it can be reconstituted with the ability to reassemble matter, or
whether there is some law in nature that would preclude this.
To know if the
bird's life can be reconstituted after death with the right retaining of atomic
structure we have to know what life is. There are practical problems with this.
In the first place, we are alive, but we cannot step out of this state of being
alive to measure its true complexity, and we can't therefore look back in on
this perspective and know whether our judgements of the relations between
life's constituent parts are accurate.
Yes, on the
face of it, we know the difference between a live mouse and a dead one, but we
don't know if the complex internal arrangements of substances that make up the
mouse's state of being alive can be brought back once that state has ceased, or
whether there are barriers unknown to us.
Our definition
of ‘life’ seems to me to be far too simple to capture all the goings on. What
my thought experiment indicates is two things; 1) definitions of life probably
are arbitrary and humanly constructed to remain consistent with the utility of
definition. And 2) the physical universe probably conceals enough complexity to
render those definitions nigh on impossible to ascertain once we begin the
componential process.
Consequently,
then, if we do ever get to the stage where some people think they can define
life sufficiently to ascribe those properties to the cognition of artificial
intelligence, you can bet your bottom dollar that there'll be all sorts of
quarrels and protest groups much like there are now in the abortion debates,
the genetically modified food debates and the cloning debates.
