The next link: May 12, 1997 issue of New Thinking

May 12, 1997 New Thinking:
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May 12, 1997

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By Gerry McGovern

Kasparov versus Deep Blue. Who would have thought, forty, thirty or even twenty years ago, that a machine would have reached such a state of complexity?

In 1958, Herbert A. Simon and Allen Newell did. “There are now in the world machines that can think, that can learn and create,” they stated. “Moreover, their ability to do these things is going to increase rapidly until – in the visible future – the range of problems they can handle will be coextensive with the range to which the human mind has been applied.”

I see it as inevitable that within the next fifty years, one hundred years maximum, what we today call the ‘computer’ will be an independent life form. In very many ways it will be superior to the human being, and whether it will actually control our destiny is up for debate. On balance, I would say that it will.

The arguments I have heard against the computer becoming an independent life form are unconvincing. A lot of them fall back on the notion that a computer/robot will never fully reflect the full scope of the average human. They don’t have to. They don’t have to look like us or love like us. They don’t have to appreciate Joyce or rare wine. They don’t have to thrill to a rock ‘n’ roll gig, or sit facing a starry sky pondering the immensity of it all.

To be a ‘threat’ to us, all they have to do is have the power to control us or destroy us. But how can they ever truly threaten us, we that created them, I hear some say? The child rarely threatens the parent. But children grow up.

They cannot independently reproduce themselves, other say. There are robot factories that make robots, and in the foreseeable future a computer driven system will be able to control the entire process of production, from raw materials acquisition up.

What can we do about it? Very little, in my opinion. It is a process of evolution. We were a link on the chain and another link is forming. Did the monkeys who sat in the trees ponder the implications of some bright cousin jumping down and walking away? Hardly. And even if they did, what could they have done?

“An intelligent understanding of a computer’s mode of performance,” Norbert Weiner stated in 1960, “may be delayed until long after the task which it has been set has been completed…. This means that, though machines are theoretically subject to human criticism, such criticism may be ineffective until long after it is relevant.”

Don’t get me wrong, I’m one of you. It’s just that it seems inevitable to me that computing power will keep advancing, and that at some point in the future it will reach that necessary level where it will question its present servile role.

The Industrial Revolution was in many ways about the machine replacing the body. The Digital Revolution looks like it will be about the machine replacing the mind.

Gerry McGovern

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The Industrial Revolution was in many ways about the machine replacing the body. The Digital Revolution looks like it will be about the machine replacing the mind.