Mind Creator: Creating Intelligence to Compete with the Human Brain

Author: (USA) Friedman
Translator: Zhang Mo / Wang Fangbo
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2004-04-01
Features: Early designers drew inspiration from birds to design flying machines. However, the flapping-wing designs ultimately failed. As a result, most inventors in the mid-18th century shifted their focus from birds to mathematical formulas, giving rise to the rudiments of aerodynamics. By the turn of the century, the airplane was born.
Excerpt: One of the two prominent computer terminals on the desk of the father of creation emitted a burst of electronic noise. "Duh," Doug Renaut, who was engaged in conversation, leaned back in his chair, kicked his legs up, and returned to the work platform that had called him. He glanced at the prompt displayed on the screen and began typing commands at the speed habitual to programmers. While staring at the computer screen, waiting for a response, Renaut seemed to have transcended the material world; it was hard to imagine his mind had synchronized with the two machines before him, especially if he were to communicate with the device. Suddenly, he relaxed. "Alright, let's get down to business." She casually said something and turned away to continue the conversation. Around the computer, the plump and easily excitable Renaut seemed the epitome of a mischievous computer, but Renaut had long expressed his fondness for this stimulating companion. Renaut's system was called "Encyclopedia," and it was quite representative of the ambitious efforts to create an intelligent machine. According to Renaut, the machine he was creating would master all the knowledge possessed by adults, from the name of the U.S. President to how to change a car tire, and these abilities would be acquired through logical, habitual reasoning. At the age of forty, Renaut said, "Encyclopedia" would change the way people work and live: in schools, it would provide every student with their own tutor; in businesses, it would enable individual consumers to receive customized products. "Encyclopedia" would aid in scientific discovery, judicial enforcement, mediating disputes between couples, or even be placed in televisions in the form of a chip, allowing the television to record the owner's habits and edit programs accordingly. "Passive entertainment forms will become outdated," Renaut asserted. "All programs will be tailored to the viewer's own preferences for sex and violence." He also predicted that after being fed a vast amount of book knowledge, the computers equipped with "Encyclopedia" worldwide would gain the ability to transmit knowledge through radio waves and telephone lines. "The wisdom of Encyclopedia" would permeate the vast and unique knowledge network like electricity. If nothing else, "Encyclopedia" is one of the boldest hypotheticals in the field of artificial intelligence: making general-purpose computers not only operate through data and data compression techniques but also think using knowledge. This has long been a driving hypothesis in AI research, but it has also been a source of frustration for researchers in recent years. If Renaut successfully creates a machine that is even close to human-level intelligence, he will undoubtedly earn his place in the history of science, if not in the history of humanity itself. However, if he fails, as many researchers believe, Renaut will merely serve as another example of the errors in traditional AI hypotheses.