In a post titled, “Google to Rule the Earth”, Duncan Riley writes:

In a speech Friday night to the Annual American Association for the Advancement of Science conference, Google co-founder Larry Page let slip with a truth we all suspected:

“We have some people at Google [who] are really trying to build artificial intelligence (AI) and to do it on a large scale…It’s not as far off as people think.”

And Duncan’s readers went ballistic.

The whole concept of AI apparently taps into some of our deepest sci-fi-George-Orwell-T2 fears. Surely ‘AI’ means ’self-aware’, and obviously the first thing any ’self-aware’ being would do is ‘blow up the earth’.

Seems to me there’s a massive breakdown in logic somewhere along that train of thought.

Hats off, though, to ‘xoc’, who wrote this insightful comment:

Personally, I can’t see how millions of humans connected via the internet could be anything other than a form of AI - a kind of meta-intelligence. We can never know another’s consciousness, but in our arrogance, we assume we are the highest and only form of intelligence around. We can only guess at intelligence by behaviour. We don’t speak the language of this meta-intelligence, so communication will have to be more basic. Try and turn off the internet, and you’ll find it will fight for life as hard as any human. The only way you could possibly achieve it would be to do all the planning in secret and entirely off-line. If the ‘net got wind of it, it would put a stop to it in no time. Surely fighting for survival is a basic test for sentience.

Thank you, thank you! That’s what I spoke about in my last post—the greater-than-the-sum-of-its-parts power of millions of small contributions.

There are infinite forms of intelligence out there, and the likelihood of the movie scenario is so highly improbable as to be practically impossible. Let’s look at a few:

• A large company (such as… oh yeah! Google!) has its own intelligence, which is distinct from the intelligence of the individuals who work there.
• The planet has its own intelligence, which is what runs our weather patterns and makes the grass grow.
• Animals other than humans have their own intelligence. Beavers and bees and ants far outrival us in architectural skills.

Artificial intelligence is merely the ability to make a decision when there is more than one alternative and no fixed means of choosing. So sleep easy, my friends. Arnold isn’t back yet.

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 24th, 2007 at 2:26 am and is filed under Artificial Intelligence. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.