CHAPTER 2

Uses and Limitations

The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.

—Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.
—Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass

Who hath put wisdom in the inward parts? Or who hath given understanding
to the heart?
—The Book of Job, Chapter 38, Verse 36

2.1 Introduction
As was explained in Chapter 1, the early history of Artificial Intelligence
was filled with a great deal of optimism—optimism that today seems at
best to have been unfounded. In this chapter, we look at some of the argu-
ments against strong AI (the belief that a computer is capable of having
mental states) and also look at the prevalence of Artificial Intelligence
today and explain why it has become such a vital area of study.
We will also look at the extent to which the Artificial Intelligence commu-
nity has been successful so far in achieving the goals that were believed to
be possible decades ago. In particular, we will look at whether the computer
HAL in the science fiction film 2001: A Space Odyssey is a possibility with
today’s technologies.
We will also look at the prevalence of Artificial Intelligence, and how it is
used in the world today, the 21st century.
20 CHAPTER 2 Uses and Limitations

2.2 The Chinese Room

We will start by examining philosophical objections to strong AI, in partic-
ular the Chinese Room argument of John Searle.
The American philosopher John Searle has argued strongly against the pro-
ponents of strong AI who believe that a computer that behaves sufficiently
intelligently could in fact be intelligent and have consciousness, or mental
states, in much the same way that a human does.
One example of this is that it is possible using data structures called scripts
(see Chapter 17) to produce a system that can be given a story (for example,
a story about a man having dinner in a restaurant) and then answer ques-
tions (some of which involve a degree of subtlety) about the story. Propo-
nents of strong AI would claim that systems that can extend this ability to
deal with arbitrary stories and other problems would be intelligent.
Searle’s Chinese Room experiment was based on this idea and is described
as follows:
An English-speaking human is placed inside a room. This human does not
speak any language other than English and in particular has no ability to
read, speak, or understand Chinese.
Inside the room with the human are a set of cards, upon which are printed
Chinese symbols, and a set of instructions that are written in English.
A story, in Chinese, is fed into the room through a slot, along with a set of
questions about the story. By following the instructions that he has, the
human is able to construct answers to the questions from the cards with
Chinese symbols and pass them back out through the slot to the questioner.
If the system were set up properly, the answers to the questions would be suf-
ficient that the questioner would believe that the room (or the person inside
the room) truly understood the story, the questions, and the answers it gave.
Searle’s argument is now a simple one. The man in the room does not
understand Chinese. The pieces of card do not understand Chinese. The
room itself does not understand Chinese, and yet the system as a whole is
able to exhibit properties that lead an observer to believe that the system
(or some part of it) does understand Chinese.
 2.3 HAL—Fantasy or Reality? 21

In other words, running a computer program that behaves in an intelligent

way does not necessarily produce understanding, consciousness, or real
intelligence.
This argument clearly contrasts with Turing’s view that a computer system
that could fool a human into thinking it was human too would actually be
intelligent.
One response to Searle’s Chinese Room argument, the Systems Reply,
claims that although the human in the room does not understand Chinese,
the room itself does. In other words, the combination of the room, the
human, the cards with Chinese characters, and the instructions form a sys-
tem that in some sense is capable of understanding Chinese stories. There
have been a great number of other objections to Searle’s argument, and the
debate continues.
There are other objections to the ideas of strong AI. The Halting Problem and
Gödel’s incompleteness theorem tell us that there are some functions that a
computer cannot be programmed to compute, and as a result, it would seem to
be impossible to program a computer to perform all the computations needed
for real consciousness. This is a difficult argument, and one potential response
to it is to claim that the human brain is in fact a computer, and that although it
must also be limited by the Halting Problem, it is still capable of intelligence.
This claim that the human brain is a computer is an interesting one. Upon it
is based the idea of neural networks. By combining the processing power of
individual neurons, we are able to produce artificial neural networks that are
capable of solving extremely complex problems, such as recognizing faces.
Proponents of strong AI might argue that such successes are steps along the
way to producing an electronic human being, whereas objectors would point
out that this is simply a way to solve one small set of problems—not only
does it not solve the whole range of problems that humans are capable of,
but it also does not in any way exhibit anything approaching consciousness.

2.3 HAL—Fantasy or Reality?

One of the most famous fictional accounts of Artificial Intelligence comes
in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, based on the story by Arthur C. Clarke.
One of the main characters in the film is HAL, a Heuristically programmed
ALgorithmic computer. In the film, HAL behaves, speaks, and interacts
22 CHAPTER 2 Uses and Limitations

with humans in much the same way that a human would (albeit in a dis-
embodied form). In fact, this humanity is taken to extremes by the fact that
HAL eventually goes mad.
In the film, HAL played chess, worked out what people were saying by read-
ing their lips, and engaged in conversation with other humans. How many
of these tasks are computers capable of today?
We shall see in Chapter 6 that there has been a great deal of success with
developing computers that can play chess. In 1997, a computer, Deep Blue,
beat the chess world champion Garry Kasparov. As we discuss in Chapter 6,
this was not the end of supremacy at chess for mankind, however. The vic-
tory was not a particularly convincing one and has not been repeated.
Chess-playing computers are certainly capable of beating most human
chess players, but those who predicted that chess computers would be
vastly superior to even the best human players by now were clearly wrong.
In some games, such as Go, the best computers in the world are able to play
only at the level of a reasonably accomplished amateur human player. The
game is so complex that even the best heuristics and Artificial Intelligence
techniques are not able to empower a computer with the ability to come
close to matching the capabilities of the best human players.
In Chapter 20, we look at techniques that are used to enable computers to
understand human language and in theory to enable them to engage in
conversation. Clearly no computer program has yet been designed that is
able to pass the Turing test and engage fully in conversation in such a way
that would be indistinguishable from a human, and there is no sign that
any such program will be designed in the near future.
The ability to interpret spoken words by examining the movement of lips is
one that only a few humans have. It combines a number of complex prob-
lems: first, the visual problem of identifying sounds from the shape of lips.
In Chapter 21, we will see how computers can be programmed to interpret
visual information in the same kinds of ways that humans do. Interpreting
the shape of human lips would probably not be impossible, and it is likely
that a neural network could be trained to solve such a problem. The next
problem is to combine the sounds together into words—again, not a diffi-
cult problem given a suitably large lexicon of words. Finally, HAL would
have needed to be able to interpret and understand the words in the same
way that he would have done when listening to spoken words.
 2.4 AI in the 21st Century 23

HAL, as portrayed in the film, did have some capabilities that Artificial
Intelligence has given to computers today, but it is certainly not the case
that computers exist with the breadth of capabilities and in particular the
ability to communicate in so human a manner. Finally, the likelihood of a
computer becoming insane is a rather remote one, although it is of course
possible that a malfunction of some kind could cause a computer to exhibit
properties not unlike insanity!
Artificial Intelligence has been widely represented in other films. The Stephen
Spielberg film AI: Artificial Intelligence is a good example. In this film, a cou-
ple buy a robotic boy to replace their lost son. The audience’s sympathies are
for the boy who feels emotions and is clearly as intelligent (if not more so) as
a human being. This is strong AI, and while it may be the ultimate goal of
some Artificial Intelligence research, even the most optimistic proponents of
strong AI would agree that it is not likely to be achieved in the next century.

2.4 AI in the 21st Century

Artificial Intelligence is all around us. The techniques described in this
book are used in a staggering array of machines and systems that we use
every day. Fuzzy logic, for example, is widely used in washing machines,
cars, and elevator control mechanisms. (Note that no one would claim that
as a result those machines were intelligent, or anything like it! They are
simply using techniques that enable them to behave in a more intelligent
way than a simpler control mechanism would allow.)
Intelligent agents, which are described in Chapter 19, are widely used. For
example, there are agents that help us to solve problems while using our
computers and agents that traverse the Internet, helping us to find docu-
ments that might be of interest. The physical embodiment of agents,
robots, are also becoming more widely used. Robots are used to explore the
oceans and other worlds, being able to travel in environments inhospitable
to humans. It is still not the case, as was once predicted, that robots are
widely used by households, for example, to carry shopping items or to play
with children, although the AIBO robotic dog produced by Sony and other
similar toys are a step in this direction.
Expert systems are used by doctors to help with symptoms that are hard to
diagnose or to prescribe treatments in cases where even human experts
have difficulty.