e have apprised ourselves of the sheer mathematical improbability of a random change in a complex well-W integrated system producing a beneficial result.
Through sentience, however, we can better guide and manage changes such that they produce a beneficial result—even an enhancement. This makes us able to do things faster—it might seem—than the blind clockmaker. Fully sighted, we simply see what he has attained and we replicate and even exceed it.
In this respect, computers not only help expand the range of what we can do, they have also shown us our limitations.
There are certain things a simple calculator can do which the average person cannot emulate.
On the other hand, there are few tricks the human—even a baby—can do that even the most sophisticated computers cannot emulate. At least as things stand. Consider what the old, rather superstitious way of looking at the world around us is, compared to now.
OLD VIEW
MODERN UNDERSTANDING
spirit
high frequency wavelength
brain
computer, processor
gray matter
central processing unit
body
very advanced, sentient “robot”
thinking
routines and subroutines
thinking “right” programmed logic that is able to solve problems through experience garnered
from trial and error or other sources of
external information
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Chapter Five Trailing Behind the Curve Does it mean that at some point we are going to catch up with nature and produce sentient logic circuits and robots? At present we can only call it Artificial Intelligence because it is only as brilliant as the mind of its programmer. Indeed, it has no mind of its own. It is not alive but only seems to be.
Scenarios such as in movies like Terminator, Singularity, and I, Robot portray what might happen if computers become self-aware. But all of them make some attempt to stay in safe parameters, each in its own way.
The common denominator in all the stories is that a brilliant programmer reaches the point where he enables his program—
deliberately or inadvertently—to wrest control away from him and either enact what he himself is incapable of (machines can be much bigger, more powerful and quicker calculating than ourselves), or it was because the machine took “sneaky”
advantage of a powerful algorithm that renders it sentient and thus able to come to its own decisions—going even beyond the parameters set by the programmer.
Artificial Intelligence enables a robot to learn complicated physical maneuvers by simply seeing and/or feeling its way about. Some can dance or do gymnastics or make their way through difficult terrain on their own. In warfare, others make snap decisions on the spot based on whether the object it sees seems to constitute a legitimate target or not. Thus equipped, it is as if the robot has a life of its own…
But in reality, the robot was simply given a clear objective in its memory—which it then tries to r eplicate in the real world.
It integrates—seemingly on its own—what it has been taught, building up a database of knowledge that, to a limited extent (depending on what those “teachings” are), it can further on its own But at some point it will get stuck.
This is where the program requires a safe “opt out” such as an error-handler. If not, this is where it can get dangerous, as it will continue killing (for example, or maybe just cleaning) 20
even where a human assessor would have liked it to stop. Not that it is sentient at all. And this is the point we are at.
Will we ever be able to create sentient logic circuits? I consider this to be highly unlikely. Here is what I think we can, and cannot, do with robots in the foreseeable future.
What we could make robots do in the near future:
Calculate possibilities and come up with a solution or intelligent suggestion
Simulate personality through encoded responses to known external stimuli
Design and build up other robots provided all material is available at the factory
Sense and calculate when it is attacked and attempt an appropriate-level response or intervention
What we are unlikely to make a robot do in the near future—or even at all:
Identify purposes on their own when faced with unique challenges they had not confronted before
Display consistent tendencies and choices that causes it to acquire a core personality different from other similarly programmed robots
If under threat make it wish to survive and to even create strategies of what to do in each unique situation
If threatened as a group along with other robots, be able to articulate a coherent group strategy that enables the group to partially survive or survive as a whole
Be able to repair itself by creating new components using elements found within its own structure or environment
Have sensors that elicit or transmit an experience of real pleasure and pain
Learn a new language simply by intermittently listening to others and viewing their actions
Reproduce after its kind by inserting into a recipient robot coded identities of itself contained in a small sample of fluid generated from within it that causes a new robot to grow 21
Chapter Five Trailing Behind the Curve inside the recipient robot with the aid of elements and compounds ingested from the environment and within its own physical storage.
But all these capabilities in the listing above were present and functioning in countless organic bodies many, many
millions of years ago—even in the relatively-recent and now-extinct dinosaur that died off a mere 65 million years ago! Nothing functional was missing.
Nature has long ago wielded technologies like ultrasonic detection (bats and dolphins), flight (birds), jet propulsion (squids) and many other technologies we are still trying to copy from these “lower” species we are supposed to be ahead of and on top of—which ought to regard us as the “epitome”
of all designs.
Even when we look at the brilliant achievements of ancient mathematicians and philosophers, we realize that we may be getting more knowledgeable…but not necessarily any more intelligent. We ought to excuse discernments that suspect, or have evidence that something—an Intelligence of sorts—has long been completely knowledgeable. There are no signs of its “mistakes” in the fossil record and some—like aging—seem deliberate and intended.
So what makes us think that humans are “evolving” if the tiniest aspects of us (cells) have been more knowledgeable than we are in certain important areas like self-repair, locomotion, and reproduction? And all this from so long ago—
going much further back than the era of the dinosaurs.
And as Dawkins’ partially sighted clockmaker “climbs the hill”, learning and making small intelligent choices and steps until he has achieved something hugely complex, what disappoints is his failure to consciously understand the final result: himself. Is a half-dormant process truly ahead of us only because it has had millions of years’ head start? There must be something more to this.
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Ultimately, no matter what we believe in, there seems to be no running away from a Designer. Even evolutionists, we saw, end up saying, “Evolution designed this, Evolutio n designed that ”. The concept of “Evolution”, I now aver, is a cop-out that conveniently slows everything down to our thinking pace; to what we can, in turn, mold in our image.
Frankly speaking, we are simply frightened of something hugely cleverer than us being out there. But then, if there was a Designer-God, where is “he” now?
Two things tend to mislead us: the “Absentee Landlord problem” and the “Biblical God predilection”. We will deal with the first problem in this book, in a later chapter. As regards the biblical God, a knee-jerk mistake we tend to make whenever the concept of “God” turns up is the tendency—
prevalent in all Abrahamic-religion-dominated countries—to imagine that “God” means one is automatically speaking of the God of Israel.
Indeed, most of my work is devoted to deconstructing that error. Through these books, we learn enough to see what God is not…if not necessarily enough to know what or who God is. And there is much to say there—spread over a number of books…and so much misleading history to clear up.
In this book we turn things around. We aim to find out what or who God is— and why atheists conflate things when they say they do not believe in the existence of a God.
In the next chapter we examine the fundamentals of Life and Existence, and introduce a paradigm that one cannot afford to overlook if ever we are to resoundingly solve the question of “Life, the universe and everything in it”.
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