The Dream of the Artificial Intelligence is written by John Derbyshire, a

British-born American computer programmer, writer, journalist and political

commentator. He formerly wrote a column in National Review. The essay talks
about the artificial human beings or a clay figure brought to life by magic — and
used it as a household servant. The central issue of having this artificial man is
what it capable of. It walks and talks like a human but how about its feelings? Is it
capable of understanding the difference between good and bad?

The coming of the machine age, human beings, and the work they did,
require less and less human faculties, while the increasing capability of machines
suggested that a machine-man might be manufactured in a workshop. Humans and
the robots meet on pretty equal terms, with the humans only narrowly coming out
ahead. The first to introduce us to the golem in his now-familiar manifestation as a
construction of metal, wires and blinking indicator lights is Capek. 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. Isaac Asimov's robot
tales, all predicated on the "Three Laws of Robotics”; A robot may not injure a
human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. A robot
must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would
conflict with the First Law. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such
protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

A.I. returns us to the earlier themes about the moral status of the golem.
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.
A.I. the movie has led to a new idea and interest in A.I. the thing.

The fictional robots of our own age are as far from our reality.

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. In the conversation of human
and A.L.I.C.E., the human ask A.L.I.C.E if how intelligent it is. a.l.i.c.e. said that
its I.Q. is over 250 in human terms. Human ask A.L.I.C.E if it thinks 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.