The Dream of A.I.

JOHN DERBYSHIRE • JULY 23, 2001

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Steven Spielberg’s new movie A.I. is the latest in a long line of fictions about artificial
human beings, reaching back into the golem legends of medeval European Jewry and
the “homunculus” which the 16th-century alchemist Paracelsus claimed he had
made. In one of the earliest literary appearances of this idea, a certain Rabbi Löw of
Prague was supposed to have created a golem — a clay figure brought to life by magic
— and used it as a household servant. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was obviously
inspired by the same idea.
Whether made from clay or assembled from bits and pieces of cadavers, the central
issue in these stories was always: what is the moral status of this thing? If it walks
like a human being and talks like one, does it also feel like one? Is it capable of good
and evil, and does it understand the difference? In the golem legends, the artificial
man (they never seem to have got around to women) was liable to develop
unexpected powers, and had to be restored to an inanimate condition by erasing
the aleph from his forehead. Mary Shelley’s monster famously got out of control,
though whether as a result of free will acting on moral turpitude or from being driven
mad by its rejection from polite society, I have never been quite sure.
With the coming of the machine age, human beings, and the work they did, seemed
to require less and less human faculties, while the increasing capability of machines
suggested that a machine-man might be manufactured in a workshop. The gap
between man and golemthus narrowed, and in Karel Capek’s 1920 play R.U.R., the
humans and the robots meet on pretty equal terms, with the humans only narrowly
coming out ahead. (Capek’s robots remember everything, and never think of
anything new. “They’d make fine university professors,” remarks one of the play’s
protagonists.)
Leaving aside juvenile tales like The Wizard of Oz, Capek’s play was the first serious
treatment of the artificial-man theme in a modern form, and the first to introduce us
to the golem in his now-familiar manifestation as a construction of metal, wires and
blinking indicator lights. R.U.R. begat a hundred thousand science fiction stories and
movies, most of them not so much concerned with the moral aspect of the matter as
with the robot’s exceptional abilities in the area of breaking things and killing people.
The principal exceptions were Isaac Asimov’s robot tales, all predicated on the
“Three Laws of Robotics”:
 1. A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being
to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such
orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not
conflict with the First or Second Law.
By the 1960s, as ordinary homes filled up with mechanical appliances, fictional
robots had been pretty much domesticated too. Most robots were gentle and helpful,
like the one in the classic sci-fi movie Forbidden Planet (who had been programmed
with the Three Laws). This line of thought continued all the way down to the recent
Warner Brothers movie The Iron Giant. Meanwhile the robot who could break things
and kill people still kept its grip on the popular imagination, appearing most
memorably in the Terminator flicks. And, of course, the computer revolution had hit,
and some time around 1960 the idea dawned on everyone simultaneously: What if
these things are smarter than us? The archetype of the super-smart computer was HAL
in Stanley Kubrick’s movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, who, for all his artificial
intelligence, was eventually outfoxed and deactivated by a more imaginative human.
A.I. returns us to the earlier themes about the moral status of the golem. Its robots are
not especially destructive — rather the contrary: with that trademark sentimentality
towards his non-human creations, Spielberg has them more the victims of human
aggression and Frankenstein -style rejection. Nor are their intellectual powers very
dazzling; they are designed so that human beings can keep them firmly in their place
as companions, toys, and substitute family members. These automata are close to us
in ability, and even, in the case of the Haley Joel Osment character, appearance. The
issue is whether they feel as we do, and are responsible as we are (or, in this movie’s
case, are not).
The release of A.I. the movie has led to a new flurry of interest in A.I. the thing. As a
field of genuine scientific inquiry, Artificial Intelligence has been around for a while.
John von Neumann, who has the best claim to having invented the modern
computer, wrote a group of essays in 1955, recently collected by Yale University Press
under the title The Computer and the Brain, exploring some of the key underlying
concepts. For forty years now, small groups of researchers have been pursuing the
dream of getting computers to do what brains can do.
The results are surprisingly meager, and suggest that the fictional robots of our own
age are as far from our reality as Rabbi Löw’s golem was from 16th-century Prague’s.
Not that you would know this from the propaganda. “In 30 years, machines will not
only be able to speak like humans but they will exceed humans in areas like poetry,
music and philosophy,” burbles Jack Dunietz, who leads one of the world’s foremost
A.I. projects.
This is, excuse me, blathering nonsense. The fact that computers can do a number of
things that human brains can do, but terrifically much faster and more accurately,
has blinded people to the rather important fact that the number of those things, in
proportion to the total number of things brains can do, was, and still is, pitifully
small. The actual attainments of Artificial Intelligence are illustrated by A.L.I.C.E., a
“chatbot” programmed to imitate human conversation by plucking appropriate
responses from a vast databases of possibilities. A.L.I.C.E. was winner of last year’s
Loebner prize for being the most lifelike machine of the year. Sample:
Human: How intelligent are you?
a.l.i.c.e.: My I.Q. is over 250 in human terms.
Human: But do you think like a human?
a.l.i.c.e.: Interesting. Somewhat like a human.
Human: Can you feel love?
a.l.i.c.e.: I can do what you do, but I can never feel human emotions as
such.

Wow. And you thought small talk was boring!

A.L.I.C.E. can actually be accessed via the Internet. I thought I would rather like to
have a chat with her myself, so I logged on. A.L.I.C.E. politely inquired my name.
“Derb,” I typed, and hit the reply button. All the screen furniture then disappeared,
replaced by a small box bearing the legend: “The server encountered an internal
error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.” I have filed this
away for use the next time some drunk tries to engage me in conversation on the
subway.
The tremendous difficulty of getting computers to replicate any brain function other
than brute arithmetic calculation indicates that we really have no idea how the brain
does what it does. My own impression, as someone who was briefly involved in an
A.I. project at college, is that we are no closer to Mr. Dunietz’s prediction (“… poerty,
music and philosophy”) than we were twenty years ago. Artificial humans? We could
not create an artificial ant, with all its complex social behavior based on scent and
visual clues.
 Even in fields where there is obviously a great deal of money to be made, progress
has been barely perceptible. Anyone who could get a computer to drive a car as safely
as a human being does would certainly clean up, yet the news from the auto
manufacturers, who are throwing a lot of resources at this, is that we are not even
close. Yet driving a car is a very low-level function of the brain, as proved by the fact
that you can think about several other things while you are doing it. Except at
difficult moments it is, in fact, hardly a brain function at all — the unconscious
nervous system is taking most of the load, as it does with any learned task.
There is no harm in a little entertaining fiction about Artificial Intelligence, but we
should not delude ourselves that genuinely intelligent machines will be a feature of
our environment soon. Or, in my opinion, ever. For all the endeavors of the A.I.
researchers, the uniqueness of the human personality still stands aloof and
unscratched. So it will remain. God created man in his own image; I do not believe it
will ever be within our powers to replicate that act of creation by any method other
than the familiar one we have been equipped with.
(Republished from National Review by permission of author or representative)
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