By James L Hill (aka J. L. Hill)
I have been working with computers for nearly 40 years. My day job, I’m a software engineer, my nights and weekends too quite often. And it never ceases to amaze me that people, otherwise very intelligent people, believe computers can think.
Ever since HAL, in ‘2001 A Space Odyssey’, people have had the notion that computers actually have reasoning or intelligence. The fact that we now have “smart phones” which can talk to us reinforces the misconception. This is not a knock against the iPhone engineers, my hat is off to them, and I use my iPhone more than my desktop or laptop computers. The scientist working on AI (Artificial Intelligence) has come a helluva long way since 2001 A Space Odyssey. But we are not at HAL yet, and thank God not at Skynet - the master computer behind the Terminator.
We are still in the dark as to what is intelligence, artificial, animal, human, or Extra Terrestrial. For example, there are different ways to write a date, July 01, 2019; July 1st, 2019; 07-01-2019; 01-07-2019; 01JUL19; etc. When I ask someone, “What is today Date”? They could answer in any of the forms listed, and the only one that might make me wonder if the person just awoke from a coma is 01-07-2019. Then if I surmised, they are European or been in the military it makes perfect sense.
For a computer to validate the answer is correct, there must be a complex set of condition checks and algorithm pre-existing in the computer’s memory, having nothing to do with the person’s background. And the truth is the computer’s logic and mine are no different. Both needs recognize the format given as Day-Month-Year. The difference comes, and this is the big one, if I did not know this was a proper format a simple explanation that this is how it is written in Europe would suffice. For a computer no such reasoning is possible. It will throw an error or do something even worst until a software engineer (me) adds the format to its memory. A computer cannot learn.
I have sat in countless meetings with reasonably intelligent people trying to explain why the computer doesn’t know what you ‘mean’. It does not have deductive reasoning capabilities. In Sci-Fi to defeat the evil computer we hit it with a big dose of deductive reasoning. Or better yet, circular logic, the Kryptonite of the computer world. This is the same logic you can use on 6-year-olds for hours of fun. I call it the ‘You said, I said’ game.
My Grandson would say, “You’re going to buy me ice cream.”
And I respond with, “That’s nice you’re going to buy me ice cream.”
He immediately responds, “No I said … YOU’RE going to buy me ice cream.”
And of course, I come back with, “That’s what I said… you said YOU’RE going to buy ME ice cream.”
He knows I am twisting his words around but can’t figure out how to get out of it and still get his ice cream. He almost got out of it when he replaced YOU with Grandpa, but then didn’t know he could replace ME with his name. Before the age of 6 they look at you with a blank stare and go ask someone else for ice cream. I employed this sort of circular reasoning in Pegasus: A Journey To New Eden, when Zack and Zuri must match wits with the ship’s computer to override its prime directive to protect the ship and its inhabitants, which includes them.
Although we have made tremendous strides in the fields of computers, true AI remains the domain of Sci-Fi. But once we understand what intelligence is, or how learning works, maybe we can make a truly smart computer. God forbid.
I have been working with computers for nearly 40 years. My day job, I’m a software engineer, my nights and weekends too quite often. And it never ceases to amaze me that people, otherwise very intelligent people, believe computers can think.
Ever since HAL, in ‘2001 A Space Odyssey’, people have had the notion that computers actually have reasoning or intelligence. The fact that we now have “smart phones” which can talk to us reinforces the misconception. This is not a knock against the iPhone engineers, my hat is off to them, and I use my iPhone more than my desktop or laptop computers. The scientist working on AI (Artificial Intelligence) has come a helluva long way since 2001 A Space Odyssey. But we are not at HAL yet, and thank God not at Skynet - the master computer behind the Terminator.
We are still in the dark as to what is intelligence, artificial, animal, human, or Extra Terrestrial. For example, there are different ways to write a date, July 01, 2019; July 1st, 2019; 07-01-2019; 01-07-2019; 01JUL19; etc. When I ask someone, “What is today Date”? They could answer in any of the forms listed, and the only one that might make me wonder if the person just awoke from a coma is 01-07-2019. Then if I surmised, they are European or been in the military it makes perfect sense.
For a computer to validate the answer is correct, there must be a complex set of condition checks and algorithm pre-existing in the computer’s memory, having nothing to do with the person’s background. And the truth is the computer’s logic and mine are no different. Both needs recognize the format given as Day-Month-Year. The difference comes, and this is the big one, if I did not know this was a proper format a simple explanation that this is how it is written in Europe would suffice. For a computer no such reasoning is possible. It will throw an error or do something even worst until a software engineer (me) adds the format to its memory. A computer cannot learn.
I have sat in countless meetings with reasonably intelligent people trying to explain why the computer doesn’t know what you ‘mean’. It does not have deductive reasoning capabilities. In Sci-Fi to defeat the evil computer we hit it with a big dose of deductive reasoning. Or better yet, circular logic, the Kryptonite of the computer world. This is the same logic you can use on 6-year-olds for hours of fun. I call it the ‘You said, I said’ game.
My Grandson would say, “You’re going to buy me ice cream.”
And I respond with, “That’s nice you’re going to buy me ice cream.”
He immediately responds, “No I said … YOU’RE going to buy me ice cream.”
And of course, I come back with, “That’s what I said… you said YOU’RE going to buy ME ice cream.”
He knows I am twisting his words around but can’t figure out how to get out of it and still get his ice cream. He almost got out of it when he replaced YOU with Grandpa, but then didn’t know he could replace ME with his name. Before the age of 6 they look at you with a blank stare and go ask someone else for ice cream. I employed this sort of circular reasoning in Pegasus: A Journey To New Eden, when Zack and Zuri must match wits with the ship’s computer to override its prime directive to protect the ship and its inhabitants, which includes them.
Although we have made tremendous strides in the fields of computers, true AI remains the domain of Sci-Fi. But once we understand what intelligence is, or how learning works, maybe we can make a truly smart computer. God forbid.
RSS Feed
