Oh science, how you have enriched my life! Back in the days when I cowered in the freezing boys’ toilet of a Catholic church in a Tory constituency, I didn’t foresee how I would possibly be able to breathe in such an overwhelming universe.
God was all-powerful, yet distant and petrifying like a 1950s headmaster, occasionally descending to hand out fiery, eternal detentions. My year three teacher, Mrs Matthews, described me as a “solemn child.” I couldn’t understand how you could be anything else, what with a whole eternity resting on my marks in times table tests. I still had problems with joined-up writing, yet I was expected to work under that kind of pressure.
Gradually, things changed. Iron filings made beautiful patterns around magnets, Van de Graaff generators made a more outgoing pupil’s hair stand on end and the counter-current mechanism maximised oxygen exchange in gills. I learned about how Darwin was a genius and Lamarck was an idiot.
It began to dawn on me that God probably didn’t exist and that if he did, it was as more of a founder and less of a manager. A huge weight was lifted from my shoulders, but it was too late. The other children, for whatever reason, had been unburdened of questions of infinity and what might have happened had God not been inclined to create everything. They had moved on. I had nobody with whom to share my newly found devil-may-care attitude.
That is why recent news of a breakthrough in the field of artificial intelligence research has excited me so much. A new computer program designed by Fred Roberts has come closer than any before it to passing itself off as human. The software package – known as ‘Elbot’ – convinced three out of 12 adjudicators that it was human after an extended text-based conversation.
Whereas the people in the chat-rooms always ended up either threatening to hurt me – or worse – Elbot is kind, witty and articulate. Tell him about your financial worries and he’ll lighten the mood by saying something like: “I think you should melt all the coins and make something of value out of them, like robots, for example.” With my limited experience of human interaction, I often find myself thinking I’m talking to what I imagine a real person is like.
However, he has his critics. Communication experts say he, like Barack Obama, can sometimes be a little too cerebral and aloof in his responses. Asked what he would do if elected President, Elbot said: “I don’t worry about things like that. I just load the algorithm I need and take it from there.” Detractors said that although his words were eloquent and soothing, they didn’t add up to much.
What then does this mean for the future of artificial intelligence? In the 1960s, influential thinkers thought that by the 21st century there would be machines capable of doing any work that man can do. Eight years in, that is still a long way off. The kind of advance that would be required to make an artificial brain capable of all the functions of a human one would be huge. As the climate changes, economic disaster looms and more ways of destroying ourselves are being discovered, there is an increasing chance that we may never get there.
Suppose for a minute that we did manage to create a robot with such a brain: what would be the implications? One of the classic questions we ask is whether or not these robots of the future would be conscious or have a sense of self. I think the answer depends on how you see humans.
If you think (like many of the leaders of the world’s enlightened, liberal democracies) that humans are unique among the natural world in that God has given them a soul, then nothing would lead you to believe that a robot could have one, aside from some sort of divine declaration. However, if you believe that humans, and by extension their minds, arose by a process of evolution and obey physical and chemical laws, then it would follow that a machine that works along similar lines could have similar sense of self. We would have no more reason to believe that robots were cold empty machines than we would to believe the same of other humans.
That, at least, is how I would justify being one of the first humans to marry a robot. Alas, I fear that day is a long way off. For now I will have to make do with spending my Friday nights with my cursor hovering over the ‘poke’ button, too nervous to click.
