In the early 1980s, I interviewed one of the young students of Marvin Minsky, who told me that, as he had seen, his hero, Minsky, one of the founders of artificial intelligence (AI), “was trying to create a computer beautiful enough for a soul to live there”.
In the world of AI, things have gone from mythical to prosaic. Today, children grow up with robotics pets and digital dolls. They think it is natural to chat with their phones. New devices are published that offer information on films and music, but promise much more. We are what I call a “robotic moment”, not because we have built smart machines worthy of our business, but because we declare ourselves ready for their own. We are tempted by the prospect of artificial intelligence as companions. What to take care of us will be their work. That we will comfort ourselves in their business and their conversation. This is where we are, and that’s where we point.
(Read the Britannica test of Garry Kasparov on the AI.)
This is a station on our journey of oblivion. Forgetting starts well before having an artificial companion in place. It starts now because we plan to set it up. Before we even do the robots, we refuse as people ready to be their companions.
We change our expectations of what we are doing each other and what can be delegated.
But what do we forget when we talk to the machines? We forget what is special in the fact of human being. We forget what it means to have an authentic conversation. The machines are programmed to have conversations “as if” they understood what conversations are. So when we talk to them, we too are reduced and limited to “as if”.
(Read the Toby Walsh Britannica test on killers.)
That we seem to follow this path is a problem for my field and a problem for All of us.
This test was initially published in 2018 in 2018 in Encyclopædia Britannica Anniversary Edition: 250 years of excellence (1768-2018).