Artificial Cleverness

The other day I received a survey request from some survey company. “Would you like to answer a few questions about AI?” a woman asked. “Sure,” I answered. Why not?

Then I was asked a few dozens of questions about my opinions on AI, AI Data Centers, and power plants built just to satisfy the voracious appetite for megawatts that those AI Data Centers will suck up.

I know that the dirty bits of technological advances are always placed far away from those who benefit most from them. Elon and the rest can’t bother themselves with the detritus their technology produces, after all. Why would they?

My opinions are overall negative. At one point I had to repeatedly say, “I told you already that I do not voluntarily use AI if I can avoid it. Only if it is forced upon me. So, no. I don’t have an answer to your question since it assumes that I use AI. I do not.” I didn’t tell the interviewer what I call Microsoft’s AI, Copilot. My name for it is, Copulate. Cause that’s what it does to us.

I grew up in the nineteen sixties. I remember the Lost in Space Environmental Control Robot, simply called Robot. I remember HAL 9000 from 2001, A Space Odyssey, and Scottie talking to the computer in Star Trek.  “Hello, Computer.” 

I remember, from reruns, Robby the robot from Forbidden Planet. I remember the annoying computer voice in Babylon 5 that Mr. Garibaldi shot with his plasma gun to shut it up because it was being so annoying.  And any number of Scifi novels where sentient machines were prominent characters. I remember somebody, maybe Scottie in Star Trek, telling a troublesome computer to, “Compute the last digit of Pi,” at which point it cried out and fell into an infinite loop. Clever.

Sentient machines were part and parcel with my thinking while growing up. And yet they always irked  me. Oh, not that machines could parrot a human mind. Chat-bots do that every day. Maybe it was Frank Herbert’s admonition against, “making a machine in the likeness of a human mind,” that always gave  me the willies. What does that mean, exactly? To make something in another thing’s image? How Old Testament!

Roger Penrose, in his 1989 book, “The Emperor’s New Mind,” argued that there are things that algorithms, programs run by a Turing machine, simply cannot compute. Things like Alan Turing's Halting Problem and Set Theory’s contradictions suggest that there are things a computer just can’t comprehend. They would literally, “run forever,” trying to figure it out. Penrose called it, “Artificial Cleverness” instead of, “Artificial Intelligence.” It’s clever. And it can fool people into thinking it is more than that. But it isn’t. 

Beware of Geeks bearing gifts.

Then there are the infinities. I have a theory that what separates us from thinking machines is our understanding of infinities. Actually, infinities and singularities. The infinitely huge and the impossibly minuscule. We can look at a mathematical problem and reduce it to an infinite progression. And then we say, “Oh, that will take forever,” and give up. That’s what Newton and Leibniz did when they co-invented Calculus. 

I still hate calculus. I just can’t see how it applies to real life. In none of the YouTube videos and classes I have taken in calculus, and I have taken several that I can remember. I have learned about calculus, learned but not understood, do they give a concrete example of how this relates to the real world? No. You know. Just give me an example and show me how it pans out. But that’s just me. Maybe I’m just an artificial intelligence? Nah, can’t be.

And it’s not that we haven’t built a powerful enough computer. No computer, no matter how big, no  matter how many teraflops it can chew on, will ever comprehend it. Roger Penrose, now in his nineties, is an honorary fellow of St John's College, Cambridge, and several other institutions. A position similar to that of Isaac Newton, according to Wikipedia. If you were so bold, it would not be amiss to call Penrose, “The Pope of Mathematics.” I like the moniker. It suits him.

In his book, Penrose argues that a Turing machine, which is the mathematical framework of all computers today, cannot do what a human mind does routinely. It can’t just look at something and say, “Oh, that’s ridiculous. That’ll never work.” It cannot create consciousness, sentience, or everything else that goes to construct a human mind. Look at thought experiments like, “The Chinese Room,” or “Mary’s Room.” We cannot make a machine in the image of a human mind, no matter how hard we try. As the saying goes, “There’s no, ‘There,’ there.”

Isaac Asimov, in his short story, “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream,” purports a machine that has become conscious but without any of the tactile inputs provided by a body of flesh and blood. So it is a machine consciousness with none of the senses that we have. And somehow it knows this, though he doesn’t explain why that might be the case. There’s just no ’there’ there. 

The conscious machine has killed all but five people, who he then tortures. He does this out of spite and to try and make the five living, later just one, persons, suffer like it does. The machine has not mastered human consciousness but it knows about spite.

Notice the pronoun. “It” instead of, “He” or “She.’ It’s an “It,” not something with a sex. Not something that can flirt and make goo-goo eyes at you. Not something that can enjoy the thrill of a first kiss. Not something that will ever enjoy poetry. Or loath it. There is no ‘There’ there.

It’s Alan Turing’s Imitation Game. And it is just that. We call it Artificial. Turing called in Imitation.

I call it a preposterous.