YESTERDAY IN AN UPDATE to my first post commenting on Joseph Weizenbaum's introduction to his book (which I hope people will read as it is more important than ever) Computer Power And Human Reason, I said:
Update: I should point out, in regard to the point about very young children attributing human minds to dolls and teddy bears, that Weizenbaum may have been unintentionally prophetic in his use of the character from Shaw's Pygmalion. The play given the name from the classical story of the sculptor who fell in love with one of the statues he carved. In that story, as I recall, it took divine power to bring the statue to life, not human agency. Something that atheists fervently believe is within human power. I have come increasingly to consider atheism as typical of many a superficial mind.
To which the most persistently OCD troll of my blog and me said:
Seriously -- raise your hand if you ever met anybody, let alone an atheist, who believed they could bring a statue to life from sheer power of will.
Bueller? BUELLER????
While I'm aware of there being an old movie with a character named that, it was made in the period after I pretty much gave up watching movies so I've never seen it, no doubt something the typical blog-rat pseudo-lefty will see as a fatal defect in my education. So I don't get that. However, as the atheist whose viewpoint I am advocating, Weizenbaum mentioned that article, In Praise Of Robots by the celebrity atheist-public-scientist Carl Sagan (who wasn't yet a celebrity when he wrote the article), that is exactly what he was doing in the article, even his more informed view of robots in the mid 1970s was that that feat, of human beings making what from his 19th century-style materialist, atheist ideological point of view were living beings. That's obvious from what he said and, especially the language he used to say it. Note, I have opted to copy and paste the text from the "Full Text" "machine read" version at Archive dot org, but to edit out the ad-copy that the "machine intelligence" didn't know to remove from Sagan's text (the "machine intelligence" not knowing what any of it meant), however, I have kept the typos from the "machine intelligence" to give a flavor of it since my troll is always holding my typos and lapses of editing against me among his audience of his fellow mid-brow, blog-rat, atheist-materialists. Note the clever use of 1970s style quasi-lefty academic political cant he uses for audience persuasion, it makes me feel all nostalgic again. Though I remember the 70s quite well and they sucked.
The word "robot," first introduced in the 1920s by the Czech writer Karel Capek, is derived from the Slavic root for "worker." But it signifies a machine rather than a human worker. Robots, especially robots in space, have lately been getting a bad press. We have read that a human being was necessary to make the terminal landing adjustments on Apollo 11, without which the first manned lunar landing would have ended in disaster; that a mobile robot on the lunar surface could never have been so clever as the astronauts in selecting samples to be returned to earth- bound geologists; and that machines could never have repaired, as men did, the sunshade that was so vital for the continuance of the Skylab missions.
All these comments turn out, naturally enough, to have been written by humans. I wonder if a small self-congratulatory element, a whiff of human chauvinism, has not crept into these judgments. Just as whites can sometimes detect racism and men can occasionally discern sexism, I wonder whether we cannot here glimpse some comparable affliction of the human spirit— a disease that as yet has no name. The word "humanism" has been preempted by other and more benign activities of mankind. From the analogy with sexism and racism I suppose the name for this malady could be "speciesism"— the prejudice that there are no beings so fine, so capable, and so reUable as human beings.
I have to break in here
and point out Sagan's dishonest use of some very legitimate mid-70s political
morality in regard to how people treat other PEOPLE to try to persuade his audience to extend the
habits of thought and feeling to humanly constructed machines.
Something which it is easy enough to gull people into doing. I remember
one of her Miss Manners columns in which the wonderful Judith Martin
told such a confused reader that it was perfectly OK to hang up on a
robo-caller without saying anything because courtesy wasn't something a
human being owed to an unconscious object. Something which a
materialist like Sagan wouldn't twig onto because they figure human
beings are objects of the same kind as a robo-call machine programmed to
lie to or swindle the unwary.
I remember the first couple of times I
heard the very charismatic Carl Sagan, I think it was on the old, still science program NOVA, and
being fascinated by him as he talked about his area of expertise,
planetary astronomy and physics. Then I heard him on other things and
he seemed utterly banal and predictable as he recited the tropes of pop
cultural conceptions of things like history and philosophy. I watched
some of his Cosmos series and I did, actually, get that he laid out his
intentions at the start as he declared that "The Cosmos is all that
there is and all that there ever will be," his intention then as in this
article was to promote his 19th century materialism to an audience using
show biz-ad agency persuasive tactics and some science, too. I quickly grew to find Sagan extremely annoying and tedious and I hadn't yet figured out that materialism was an ideology that leads inevitably to something like Nietzschean decadence.
This is a prejudice because it is, at the very least, a prejudgment— a conclusion drawn before all the facts are in. Such comparisons of men and machines in space are comparisons of smart men with dumb machines. We have not asked what sorts of machines could have been built for the thirty or so bil-hon dollars that the Apollo and Skylab missions together cost.
----------------
Another sign of the intellectual accomplishments of machines is found in games. Even exceptionally simple computers— those that can be wired by a bright ten-year-old— can be programmed to play perfect tic-tac-toe. One computer has played master-class checkers— it has beaten the Connecticut state champion. Chess is a much more difficult game than tic-tac-toe or checkers. Here, programming a machine to win is not easy, and novel strategies have been used, including several successful attempts to have a computer learn from its own experience in playing previous chess games. For example, computers can learn empirically that it is better in the beginning game to control the center of the chess board than the periphery.
So far no computer has become a chess master; the ten best chess players in the world have nothing to fear from any present machine. But several computers have played well enough to be ranked somewhere in the middle range of serious, tournament- playing chess players. I have heard machines demeaned (often with a just audible sigh of rehef) because chess is an area in which human beings are still superior. This reminds me of the old joke in which a stranger remarks with wonder on the accomplishments of a checker-playing dog, whose owner replies, "Oh it's not all that remarkable. He loses two games out of three." A machine that plays chess in the middle range of human expertise is a very capable machine; even if there are thousands of better human chess players, there are millions of worse ones. To play chess requires a great deal of strategy and foresight, analytical powers, the ability to cross-correlate large numbers of variables and to learn from experience. These are excellent quaUties not only for individuals whose job it is to discover and explore but also for those who watch the baby and walk the dog.
Chess-playing computers, because they have very complex programs, and because, to some extent, they learn from experience, are sometimes unpredictable. Occasionally they perform in a way that their programmers would never have anticipated. Some philosophers have argued for free will in human beings on the basis of our sometimes unpredictable behavior. But the case of the chess-playing computer clearly tells us that, when viewed from the outside, behavior may be unpredictable only because it is the result of a complex although entirely determined set of steps on the inside. Among its many other uses, machine intelligence can help illuminate the ancient philosophical debate on free wUl and determinism.
Someone, get back to me when a computer, unprompted by their programming chooses to play a game of checkers when another computer so unprompted suggests playing one. Here I won't again go into the story of the greatest checker player yet, the late Dr. Marion Tinsley when he played a game against the then most sophisticated checker's program.
With this more or less representative set of examples of the state of development of machine intelligence, I think it is clear that a major effort over the next decade, involving substantial investments of money, could produce much more sophisticated programs. I hope that the inventors of such machines and programs will become generally recognized as the consummate artists they are. [there you go, computer programmers as life-creating Pygmaleons]
In thinking about the next generation of machine intelligence, it is important to distinguish between self-controlled and remotely controlled robots. A self-controlled robot has its intelligence within itself; a remotely controlled robot has its intelligence located someplace else, and its successful operation depends upon successful communication between its external central computer and itself. There are, of course, intermediate cases in which the machine may be partly self-activated and partly remotely controlled. The mix of remote and in situ control seems to offer the highest efficiency for the near future.
I would note that even as the atheist-materialist Sagan bestows the status of thinking individuals on to man-created machines, elsewhere in the article he discusses their utility and their disposability. I doubt it occurred to him that if you could both hold that computers were doing what people can do, think and act independently but still consider them in terms of utility and disposability to those who control them, not noting that to treat a thinking being as such is immoral, there is no step at all different between thinking that's OK with machines that it's also OK with the people whose own intelligence and existence can be, as well subject to external control. Though in the case of human beings, it's not in the control of their maker but in other human beings. It's subtle and would probably escape someone as shallow as my most constant troll, but his use of the question of free will is directly relevant to that consequence of Sagan's materialist faith.
I doubt that occurred to him because I don't think very highly of Sagan as a philosophical thinker, though I'm sure he read some pop versions of some selected authors or at least descriptions of what they wrote - generally his philosophical knowledge is like what you could get today from reading about it at Wikipedia, though I suspect his source was what was published by the atheists' version of Regnery. "Prometheus publishing" and, maybe Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy with a few popular treatments of Buddhism and Hinduism thrown in [Oh, yes, and Taoism, I just remembered, Taoism was very trendy just then]. In every way Joseph Weizenbaum was a far smarter, far deeper thinker, one who was capable of understanding just what he and his fellow computer scientists were doing and the danger of people like Sagan making ridiculous claims about it.
Update: I have never hesitated to praise atheists who are honest and rigorous thinkers and admirable people. I wouldn't be surprised if the self-admitted ideological materialist Richard Lewontin was up there with Walter Brueggemann and Marilynne Robinson in frequency of citation and praise here. Lewontin is someone who I have never had any reason to doubt as to whether or not they had actually read the philosophical figures he cites.
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