The Dream of Artificial Intelligence A robot must protect its own existence as long as such
By John Derbyshire protection does not conflict with the First or Second
Steven Spielberg's new movie A.I. is the latest in
a long line of fictions about artificial human beings,
reaching back into the golem legends of medieval
European Jewry and the "homunculus" which the 16th-
century alchemist Paracelsus claimed he had made. In
one of the earliest literary appearances of this idea, a
certain Rabbi Löw of Prague was supposed to have
created a golem — a clay figure brought to life by magic
— and used it as a household servant. Mary Shelley's
Frankenstein was obviously inspired by the same idea.
Whether made from clay or assembled from
bits and pieces of cadavers, the central issue in these
stories was always: what is the moral status of this
thing? If it walks like a human being and talks like one,
does it also feel like one? Is it capable of good and evil,
and does it understand the difference? In the golem
legends, the artificial man (they never seem to have got
around to women) was liable to develop unexpected
powers, and had to be restored to an inanimate
condition by erasing the aleph from his forehead. Mary
Shelley's monster famously got out of control, though
whether as a result of free will acting on moral
turpitude or from being driven mad by its rejection from
polite society, I have never been quite sure.
With the coming of the machine age, human
beings, and the work they did, seemed to require less
and less human faculties, while the increasing capability
of machines suggested that a machine-man might be
manufactured in a workshop. The gap between man and
golem thus narrowed, and in Karel Capek's 1920 play
R.U.R., the humans and the robots meet on pretty equal
terms, with the humans only narrowly coming out
ahead. (Capek's robots remember everything, and never
think of anything new. "They'd make fine university
professors," remarks one of the play's protagonists.)
Leaving aside juvenile tales like The Wizard of
Oz, Capek's play was the first serious treatment of the
artificial-man theme in a modern form, and the first to
introduce us to the golem in his now-familiar
manifestation as a construction of metal, wires and
blinking indicator lights. R.U.R. begat a hundred
thousand science fiction stories and movies, most of
them not so much concerned with the moral aspect of
the matter as with the robot's exceptional abilities in
the area of breaking things and killing people. The
principal exceptions were Isaac Asimov's robot tales, all
predicated on the "Three Laws of Robotics":
A robot may not injure a human being, or, through
inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings
except where such orders would conflict with the First
Law.
Law.
By the 1960s, as ordinary homes filled up with
mechanical appliances, fictional robots had been pretty
much domesticated too. Most robots were gentle and
helpful, like the one in the classic sci-fi movie Forbidden
Planet (who had been programmed with the Three
Laws). This line of thought continued all the way down
to the recent Warner Brothers movie The Iron Giant.
Meanwhile the robot who could break things and kill
people still kept its grip on the popular imagination,
appearing most memorably in the Terminator flicks.
And, of course, the computer revolution had hit, and
some time around 1960 the idea dawned on everyone
simultaneously: What if these things are smarter than
us? The archetype of the super-smart computer was
HAL in Stanley Kubrick's movie 2001: A Space Odyssey,
who, for all his artificial intelligence, was eventually
outfoxed and deactivated by a more imaginative human.
A.I. returns us to the earlier themes about the
moral status of the golem. Its robots are not especially
destructive — rather the contrary: with that trademark
sentimentality towards his non-human creations,
Spielberg has them more the victims of human
aggression and Frankenstein -style rejection. Nor are
their intellectual powers very dazzling; they are
designed so that human beings can keep them firmly in
their place as companions, toys, and substitute family
members. These automata are close to us in ability, and
even, in the case of the Haley Joel Osment character,
appearance. The issue is whether they feel as we do,
and are responsible as we are (or, in this movie's case,
are not).
The release of A.I. the movie has led to a new
flurry of interest in A.I. the thing. As a field of genuine
scientific inquiry, Artificial Intelligence has been around
for a while. John von Neumann, who has the best claim
to having invented the modern computer, wrote a group
of essays in 1955, recently collected by Yale University
Press under the title The Computer and the Brain,
exploring some of the key underlying concepts. For forty
years now, small groups of researchers have been
pursuing the dream of getting computers to do what
brains can do.
The results are surprisingly meager, and suggest
that the fictional robots of our own age are as far from
our reality as Rabbi Löw's golem was from 16th-century
Prague's. Not that you would know this from the
propaganda. "In 30 years, machines will not only be able
to speak like humans but they will exceed humans in
areas like poetry, music and philosophy," burbles Jack
Dunietz, who leads one of the world's foremost A.I.
projects.
This is, excuse me, blathering nonsense. The
fact that computers can do a number of things that
human brains can do, but terrifically much faster and
more accurately, has blinded people to the rather
important fact that the number of those things, in
proportion to the total number of things brains can do,
was, and still is, pitifully small. The actual attainments of
Artificial Intelligence are illustrated by A.L.I.C.E., a
"chatbot" programmed to imitate human conversation
by plucking appropriate responses from a vast database
of possibilities. A.L.I.C.E. was winner of last year's
Loebner prize for being the most lifelike machine of the
year. Sample:
feature of our environment soon. Or, in my opinion,
ever. For all the endeavors of the A.I. researchers, the
uniqueness of the human personality still stands aloof
and unscratched. So it will remain. God created man in
his own image; I do not believe it will ever be within our
powers to replicate that act of creation by any method
other than the familiar one we have been equipped
with.

Human: How intelligent are you?

a.l.i.c.e.: My I.Q. is over 250 in human terms.

Human: But do you think like a human?

a.l.i.c.e.: Interesting. Somewhat like a human.

Human: Can you feel love?

a.l.i.c.e.: I can do what you do, but I can never feel

human emotions as such.

Wow. And you thought small talk was boring!

A.L.I.C.E. can actually be accessed via the Internet. I

thought I would rather like to have a chat with her
myself, so I logged on. A.L.I.C.E. politely inquired my
name. "Derb," I typed, and hit the reply button. All the
screen furniture then disappeared, replaced by a small
box bearing the legend: "The server encountered an
internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to
complete your request." I have filed this away for use
the next time some drunk tries to engage me in
conversation on the subway.

The tremendous difficulty of getting computers

to replicate any brain function other than brute
arithmetic calculation indicates that we really have no
idea how the brain does what it does. My own
impression, as someone who was briefly involved in an
A.I. project at college, is that we are no closer to Mr.
Dunietz's prediction ("… poerty, music and philosophy")
than we were twenty years ago. Artificial humans? We
could not create an artificial ant, with all its complex
social behavior based on scent and visual clues.

Even in fields where there is obviously a great

deal of money to be made, progress has been barely
perceptible. Anyone who could get a computer to drive
a car as safely as a human being does would certainly
clean up, yet the news from the auto manufacturers,
who are throwing a lot of resources at this, is that we
are not even close. Yet driving a car is a very low-level
function of the brain, as proved by the fact that you can
think about several other things while you are doing it.
Except at difficult moments it is, in fact, hardly a brain
function at all — the unconscious nervous system is
taking most of the load, as it does with any learned task.

There is no harm in a little entertaining fiction

about Artificial Intelligence, but we should not delude
ourselves that genuinely intelligent machines will be a