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Artificial Intelligence Illuminated (2) - 46-50
Artificial Intelligence Illuminated (2) - 46-50
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
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.