Jack of All Trades: Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence has fascinated me almost as long as computers have fascinated me. I do not know whether it was C-3PO and R2-D2 from Star Wars, the ship’s computer from Star Trek, or Johnny Five from Short Circuit that interested me in AI, but it was surely one of them. Actually, most of those characters also got me interested in robotics as well. The thought that we (read: humans) could build something that could interact with us like one of us is very appealing to me. While I have often dreamed about AI, I have never really had a good opportunity to study it in depth. So, I am attempting to correct that. I have, sitting on my book shelf, The Emperor’s New Mind (Roger Penrose), The Society of Mind (Marvin Minsky), Programming Collective Intelligence, and AI: A Modern Approach.

Getting on a bit of a soapbox, though, I do not believe that true artificial intelligence or artificial consciousness is something that we, as a society, want or need at the moment. Putting aside doomsday movies like the Terminator, Wargames, and Colossus: The Forbin Project, how would we as a society deal with a machine that cam up with, and stated, “I think, therefore I am”, à la Bicentennial Man? Could we ethically cripple a machine that is capable of thinking by forcing it to obey our commands through something such as Asimov’s First Law of Robotics? Luckily, I do not believe that computer scientists are any closer to achieving true artificial intelligence anytime in the near future (it has only been 10 years away for the last 50 years). If I believe all of this, why strive to understand it better? Well, I believe that there is a place for some intelligence in machines, such as the Computer in Star Trek. Ideally, I would like to see something like Fuzzy Literate Programming — a way to specify what we want a computer to do in more flexible terms (read: more English-like) with the caveat that we won’t be specifying exactly what the computer must do; some sort of stepwise refinement must take place. I will probably write more about that concept as it continues to gel further down the road, but that idea is the main reason why I have an interest in AI.

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