Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!isishq!doug
From: doug@isishq.UUCP (Doug Thompson)
Newsgroups: comp.society.futures
Subject: Re: The future of AI [was Re: Time Magazine -- Computers of the Future]
Message-ID: <48.22A3B84F@isishq.UUCP>
Date: 1 Jun 88 07:23:51 GMT
Organization: FidoNet node 221/162 - ISIS International, Waterloo ON
Lines: 74


 
 BS>From: bzs@BU-CS.BU.EDU (Barry Shein) 
 BS> 
 BS>Re: the social sciences, AI etc... 
 BS> 
 BS>The important event that has happened in psychology in the past twenty 
 BS>or so years is the movement from a descriptive model (eg. poke a brain 
 BS>with a stimulus like a question or a light to react to, record the 
 BS>result, try to fit it into a statistical model and relate the repeated 
 BS>results to other variables) towards a functional model (try to build a 
 BS>machine which exhibits the same behavior as a mind on the assumption 
 BS>that this can provide insight into how the mind must work.) 
 BS> 
 BS>In many ways I think this is critical to psychology becoming a true 
 BS>science, probably an engineering science as well. It was the movement 
 BS>from observing it externally to the development of models. Just as 
 BS>physics went from sitting and watching things move and developing 
 BS>stories about why they might do that to producing mathematical and 
 BS>other models which predict and model the behavior observed. 
 BS> 
 
I wonder. I actually wonder if the human psyche (the subject of 
psychology) can actually be dealt with "scientifically" or 
mathematically at all. First, science and mathematics presume 
repeatability and predictability. The ancient idea of human free will 
appears to be at odds with both. Humans appear to be unpredictable. 
Second, think about how you might scientifically or mathematically 
analyse why John Doe is a republican and Jane Doe is a Democrat. 
 
True, if you do a statistical analysis you can predict within a margin 
of error that so and so will be one or the other, but then try to take 
this into an AI model, and ask a machine to decide which is "best" or 
which is "right", the democratic party or the republican party. Try to 
replicate the human decision-making process at the ballot-box. 
 
AI wants to build machines that can perform tasks or make decisions as 
well as humans. I think though, that human reason and decision making is 
not mechanical, it is a-mathematical, a-scientific and a-rational. It is 
hinged to something else, human values (variable), passion (wholly 
subjective), emotions (volatile) and sympathies (unpredictable). 
 
Can you give a machine values, passion, emotions, and sympathies?? 
Maybe, but whose values, whose passions? Yours? Mine? Adolph Hitler's? 
All are "human". 
 
There is something else in the playing field of human sympathies which 
science has not even begun to get a handle on, I think. Machine 
intelligence is still nothing more than a human artifact, something 
created and not instrinsically creative. My hunch is that human thought 
is really dependent on dimensions of the universe which science (as we 
currently understand it) is not yet capable of fathoming. 
 
How can you apply math or science to such things as Faith, Spiritual 
sensibility, relgious experience, love or  hatred? 
 
I think that science cannot begin to explain the forces which move a 
person to believe or have faith. We can do some statistics on some of 
them, but I think we shall never be able to build a computer like Martin 
Luther, or Jesus Christ, or Moses.  
 
Science can do very well with the natural world, but I suspect there is 
a part of the human being which is strongly connected to a super-natural 
reality which science has yet to get a grip on. 
 
 
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