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"In the world ye shall have tribulation: but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world." –John 16:33

Tag: artificial intelligence

Will technology, artificial intelligence and evolution allow us to live forever?

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On Friday, March 13, 2015

In culture

I assigned this post to the “culture” category because it certainly does not fall within the domains of science and/or technology. Seemingly qualified people have been saying some loony things about artificial intelligence for quite a few years now. It seems like the cacophony about the idea that a computer will achieve “awareness” in some kind of singularity increases every year even though there are fewer and fewer rational reasons to think it is in any way possible given our current understanding, both of this ill-defined “awareness” and the current state of computer technology and artificial intelligence.

Erik J. Larson wrote a great post over at the Evolution News and Views blog on the Discovery Institute website about this phenomenon.  As a successful, long-time researcher on artificial intelligence, Larson is superbly qualified to write on the subject. The post addresses an article in Bloomberg Markets that talks about Google’s Bill Marris and his thinking about these technologies and their ability to allow us to live longer.

About this, Marris actually says, “It will liberate us from our own limitations.”

Larson’s first paragraph of a much longer response to this goofiness really nails it.

A total joke. There’s a story here, though, as Silicon Valley embraces a kind of techno-materialism that disparages traditional religion as sorcery and then ends up with something that actually looks quite a bit like sorcery in its place. Technologist Jaron Lanier has written about this. Lanier calls the movement Digital Maoism, source of a “new online collectivism.” Whenever you hear about some billionaire in the Valley talking about the Singularity, or the Web evolving into a collective mind, it’s actually part of an underlying worldview. A major piece of the worldview is to use science to create a Heaven on Earth. And eventually to create a Heaven in the cloud, when computers go “spiritual.”

I highly recommend reading Larson’s entire take on the subject in this article.

Betty Blonde #276 – 08/08/2009
Betty Blonde #276
Click here or on the image to see full size strip.

Google makes a “huge” artificial intelligence breakthrough?

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On Thursday, October 30, 2014

In culture, Science

I love the way the Discovery Institute’s Evolution News and Views blog takes down new artificial intelligence hype from the pop-science New Scientist’s website. The post is titled Is Google a Step Away from Developing a Computer that Can “Program Itself”?. The New Scientist article in question is sensationalistically titled Computer with human-like learning will program itself. In the introduction to the ENV post, author, Erik J. Larson says:

“Human-level learning” and “self-programming” (more generally: self-replication) are central memes in the latest Sci-Fi fad hyping smart machines becoming smarter and smarter, imminently overtaking mere humans. But, predictably, the scientific merit of the purported “breakthroughs” is paltry at best. Notwithstanding the fad and the hype, there’s, well, no news here.

It kind of gives one pause (again) about a lot of the stuff reported in New Scientist.

Consciousness, artificial intelligence and the image of the beast

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On Monday, October 13, 2014

In Christianity

Denyse O’Leary often writes about the mind-brain problem. Her most recent article over at Evolution News and Views is titled Would We Give Up Naturalism to Solve the Hard Problem of Consciousness? I was reminded of a discussion Christian and I had the day before yesterday about Information Theory and one of Christian’s graduate school projects. At one point the discussion turned to Christianity, eschatology, and artificial intelligence. Christian made the comment that the current state of Artificial Intelligence was no where close to what would be necessary to create the conscious image of the beast described in Revelation 13.

O’Leary’s article gives a good explanation of why we are so far from any understanding of how to create a conscious entity. It centers on an idea articulated by philosopher and cognitive scientist David Chalmers in a paper titled Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness published in 1995. He divides the problem of consciousness into those parts that are tractable with our current understanding and abilities and the really big problem for which we do not have a clue.  The part he calls the easy problems include things like the deliberate control of behavior, the ability to discriminate, categorize and react to environmental stimuli and other measurable phenomena.

For the hard part of the problem, I recommend a reading of the entire article. It set off a firestorm of response and really framed this issue for our generation. Here is the paragraph that starts his description of the part on which naturalistic science is stuck:

The really hard problem of consciousness is the problem of experience. When we think and perceive, there is a whir of information-processing, but there is also a subjective aspect. As Nagel (1974) has put it, there is something it is like to be a conscious organism. This subjective aspect is experience. When we see, for example, we experience visual sensations: the felt quality of redness, the experience of dark and light, the quality of depth in a visual field. Other experiences go along with perception in different modalities: the sound of a clarinet, the smell of mothballs. Then there are bodily sensations, from pains to orgasms; mental images that are conjured up internally; the felt quality of emotion, and the experience of a stream of conscious thought. What unites all of these states is that there is something it is like to be in them. All of them are states of experience.

I think Chalmers did a great service in framing this problem properly. Almost two decades have passed since this paper was written. Many people, including Chalmers (see the bottom half of the linked paper), have taken a run at providing a naturalistic explanation of this hard problem of consciousness and failed. O’Leary has spent a good chunk of her career writing about these failures. The upshot is that the image of the beast described in Revelation 13 is beyond the scope of our current understanding. I do not know whether that is a relief or not.

Betty Blonde #184 – 03/31/2009
Betty Blonde #184
Click here or on the image to see full size strip.

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