April 03, 2000 New Thinking:
Artificial common sense

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“The historical Jesus was a marginal Jew in a marginal province of the Roman Empire.”
John P. Meier, Biblical Scholar

Proponents of artificial intelligence tend to have a fundamental flaw at the centre of their thinking. It is that humans are logical and that life and nature follows logical patterns that can be predicted.

If life were truly logical, then a properly designed system should have been able to predict the rise of Jesus Christ in human consciousness. But the logical Roman chroniclers of the time didn’t even register his existence.

It never fails to amaze me the amount of intelligent people who have a blind faith in the power of technology to solve all our problems. It’s a truly scary thing too because many of the people who blindly believe in technology have immense power and influence. They are the scientists and computer engineers who are at the hub of the engine of our future.

I actually believe in the power of technology but in a perverse sort of way. I feel that humanity is like a womb for a future intelligent entity that ultimately will be superior to the human race that helped create it. The more logical that entity is the less kindly it will view the often random, emotional behavior of humans.

‘Think global, act random’ was the memorable motto I once saw at the bottom of an email. Isn’t it just wonderful that we all are capable of the unpredicted gesture. That some of us will energetically run up a blind alley, only upon arriving at the wall, to shrug, pull out a few crates into the centre and start talking about something we know nothing about.

Being friendly is not a particularly logical way to behave, yet it is the emotional currency that if not spent turns us all into misers. Today’s technology is a long way from being friendly. In fact, much of it is a long way from being functional. Much technology is still created as a pursuit of logic, rather than as a pursuit of helping people, of making their lives better and easier. Too much technology focuses on the person as the problem; that if only people learned to use it right, it would work better.

Much of what makes our lives interesting would never have been predicted by even the smartest of machines, because it simply could not have been predicted. Our lives have their unexpected moments that changed our lives. What looks like an innocuous event at the time can change the course of history.

Too many people have forgotten already what made the Internet first hum. It was not the whirr of our computers, not the screech of our modems, but rather the dance of our words as millions of people reached out to communicate, to find and share information.

As long as people and not technology are at the center, then the logical will have to share the stage with the illogical. Artificial intelligence may be the holy grail of some but personally I would prefer common sense, peppered with a few miracles, a little bit of madness, and that occasional slice of the unexpected.


Gerry McGovern


 

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