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Machine intelligence?

I just posted a response to a message about "machine intelligence" that came over the nettime-l email list. Here's what I posted; feel free to comment:

The concept of AI as "conscious machine" is, in my opinion, bogus. So often we hear terms like "machine intelligence" or "artificial intelligence" where "intelligence" is undefined, and the implication is that somehow machines will become "consious." To me, that's like saying once we have a critical mass of light switches in the world, thrown in just such pattern, the electrical grid will become "conscious."

So the reason machine intelligence is persistently predicted but never quite manifest seems clear to me. You can build the golem and you can assume that the more like a man you make him, the more likely he is to self-animate and do a little dance. However he n ever quite moves, because replication of human form is insufficient... just as machines that mimic intelligence are not truly intelligent, and machines that may seem to be 'conscious' really aren't, unless you redefine consciousness to fit machine reality.

My friends Max More and Natasha Vita-More are more sensible about the singularity - it's not about machines becoming like humans, but about the increasing cyborgization of humans - we become increasingly closer to our machines, and we enhance our capabilities as a result. But we won't become machines and machines won't become human. Our robot fantasies are probably just an indication that we don't quite know what it means to be human.

jon posted this at 10:34 AM
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Comments

I don't think we need to redefine intelligence or consciousness in order for them to potentially apply to machines. If you look up extant definitions, you get things like:

"Intelligence: Capacity for learning, reasoning, understanding, and similar forms of mental activity; aptitude in grasping truths, relationships, facts, meanings, etc."

"Consciousness: the state of being conscious; awareness of one's own existence, sensations, thoughts, surroundings, etc."

I can certainly see machines attaining those capacities. If you want to hold that human intelligence or consciousness will always be special or different in some way than that of machines, that's a different argument, but it seems that existing definitions will encompass machine intelligence just fine.

Posted by: Scot Hacker | September 30, 2006 9:42 AM