The reason why this came up embarrasses me so I am not going to mention it here. It is so bad that every time that I use the spell checker to correct my crimes against the alphabet here, correcting that line of this tirade crashes the system. Telling you that I was embarrassed has killed my word processor twice already. Maybe I should just run with the typos. Do you remember what I was getting at?
Being an observant stand up philosopher, I can see the title at the top of the screen. Regular readers will know about my ‘virtual intelligence’ idea. Do machines actually have to be intelligent or is it enough for them to simply appear intelligent as a result of exposure to intelligence? Would you like your coffee maker to understand Plato or is it enough for the machine to make a good cup of coffee for you when you wake up in the morning? This does imply that you do wake up in the morning, which I do not.
I read a recent book synopsis in which the author was quoted as saying something like, “a religion that does not account for intelligence being a calculation will not survive.” Defining what intelligence is would be too long for this tirade. This tirade is too long for this tirade if I was to make my point properly. What we ended up with is the Touring test. “A Machine becomes intelligent when we can no longer tell the difference.” Am I alone in thinking that this is bad grammar?
My point with virtual intelligence has always been that a machine can appear intelligent without being intelligent. This word processor can often guess the word that I am misspelling. That is either a form of virtual intelligence or sorcery. You have not seen my unedited typing. As you can sometimes see with homonyms or the list of words that the word processor giver you, the program cannot actually read the text that you are typing. What the machine lacks is understanding.
Some time ago, I read “The Emperor’s New Mind” by Roger Penrose. He seems to agree with me. The term ‘Hard Artificial Intelligence” is actually his. I do not believe that it would ever be enough for a machine to be able to appear intelligent to the point that it could pass for intelligent. Outside of public office, intelligence implies understanding. If a machine ever attained true understanding, and the ability to feel emotions, then it would cross the line from artificial to intelligent. After all, there has to be a line between artificial intelligence and true intelligence.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 24th, 2007 at 12:01 am and is filed under Comics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.