Putting the
finishing touches on my dissertation, so not much time available to muse on the
web about the divine and the humane. Not much reading, either, outside of long
dead philosophers (which mostly happen to be more lively and interesting than
the vast majority of today’s commenters), and the odd Viennese crackpot (I’m
seeing more and more in the media news about Elizabeth’s Roudinesco new biography of said
crackpot, just published in Spanish, and it amuses me to no end that, after the
perspective we should have gained on his oeuvre,
there is still people willing to
make a fool of themselves defending it… but then again Ms. Roudinesco has been
reared in the very noxious fumes of French haute
culture, where it is apparently still OK to take such balderdash seriously).
But in the rare occasion I’ve been peering outside of my private ivory tower
this little article caught my attention:
Call to ban development of "intelligent" sex dolls.
But of course! the whole web was, to a considerable extent, launched by
pornography (you still can read here and there that up to 40% of the
information travelling through the wires –and increasingly airwaves- is
pornography that people discreetly download), so why wouldn’t the much heralded
Artificial Intelligence be much speeded by it?
As long as it
had to be crafted by cranky old doctors in dusty lab coats, struggling in their
offices with deep learning, neural networks, semantic loading and whatnot, I
stick to my original prediction that one hundred years from now we still will not
have anything closely resembling artificial intelligence, neither in a strong
nor in a weak sense of the word (that is, anything that would fool anybody
above three years old after barely two minutes of conversation). But the moment
sex enters in the equation, man that changes everything! I bet any clever Joe
is willing to ascribe not just somewhat above average intelligence to his
natural-sized doll, but considerable foresight, outstanding sensibility and
sensitivity, amazing grace and moral agency in spades as soon as he has banged
her to his full satisfaction. And for that she doesn’t even have to open her
mouth (to speak, that is). Just givin’ him a lovin’ look may be more than
enough. If the thing as much as speaks (even if it is a limited set of
predefined phrases)… Jeez, I just hope the Nobel committee members are not
between the clients of Abyss Creations or True Companion, as we may be shocked
by some of their future choices for the award.
Now let’s get
(just a bit) serious. There is a solid reason why I have argued that AI is
nowhere near: the key component of intelligence is not the ability to compute
(which we know how to replicate in a machine since the invention of the abacus),
or the ability to put concepts into ever more abstract categories consistently
(something that had to wait a few more millennia, to the advent of neural
networks, and which is really all there is to most modern wonders like image and
speech recognition). The key component of intelligence is the ability? Capability?
Event? Of CARING about something. Of picking up an element of our perceptual
field (or of our memory) and assigning some value to it. Of making it
differentially important, relevant to us. Not surprisingly, there is one verb synonymous
with “caring” which is highly relevant here: when we want to convey that we
care about something we can also say that we MIND about it. We can use the
gerund verb tense to describe the process and say we are “minding”: our own
business, the outcome of some action, the decision someone we care about has to
make… that is the true essence of intelligence, inseparable of the reality of
having a conscious mind. A mind that “minds”
about the things it perceives or the ideas it harbors, or the memories it
stores. And that “minding” requires a number of things to happen: it requires a
self (I mind about the pain in my knee in a totally different way that I would
mind about a pain in yours, regardless of how well you describe it to me) that can
identify, and follow, and monitor. It requires phenomenal experiences that I
have direct access to (I’d rather use a technical terms that gives the
proponents of strong AI the jeevies: it requires qualia, which they don’t have a clue about how to explain or how to
start replicating in a machine). It requires a flow of conscience that I can
control to a certain extent (so I stop minding my surroundings to do some
introversion, to concentrate on some idea or some memory that I want to direct
my attention to… but that attention thing is highly suspect to the
aforementioned proponents; a homunculus! A ghost in the machine! They cry every
time they hear the term) and that can even be interrupted by external causes
(so when I’m anesthetized –or sleeping- there isn’t much I mind or feel or
realize).
So I’ve
always been very skeptic about AI claims because I recognized that we were
entirely, utterly, completely, astoundingly clueless about how any of those
essential components worked, and I firmly believed that until we had a
passingly operational understanding of how they come to be we would be unable
to even start working on anything resembling a conscience, and that without a
functioning conscience we would never get the first inklings of anything resembling
an intelligence. Call it my “working theory of intelligence”: Intelligence is the set of mechanisms our
mind has for identifying another conscience. So you want an intelligent
machine? Start by creating a conscious machine, and everything else will kinda
sort itself out. And for the record, nobody has the darnedest clue on how to
build a conscious machine, because nobody has the darnedest clue of what
consciousness is (do not be fooled by books titled Consciousness Explained, as Raymond Tallis put it in his excellent Aping Mankind the author should be sued
for breaching the Trade Act with such patently misleading description). My own
hunch, which I have already presented elsewhere (yep, the shortcomings of dualism: why monism sucks)
is that the fact we are conscious ourselves, we have qualia, we mind what
happens not just around us, but in the Universe in general (and specially to
people we care about, but we may get somewhat self-referential here), we value
things, or states-of-affairs (which is the same as the previous minding), we
recognize non-material qualities (beauty, justice and truth, which I posit are
more than “categories of categories of material things”) is in the end
attributable to the fact that mind is substantially different from matter, and
can not be reduced to it. So we can delude ourselves thinking our sex dolls (or
the poor slaves we have robbed of their dignity and freedom and thus turned
almost in a machine, regardless of their biological origin) have intelligence, or
that any other device, for what is worth, has that same slippery quality, but
it will be a delusion, and an easily dispelled one at that.
But may be it
is not so easy to dispel, after all, as my theory of intelligence has one
gigantic loophole: people (but let’s be honest here, I would be willing to bet
my hat that it is mostly men) are willing to project the most astounding and
bizarre qualities in those things that catch their fancy, specially if “catching
their fancy” is a polite way of saying “making them believe they can give them
sexual satisfaction”. So the nice “consciousness identifying mechanism” theory
collapses when the dick takes charge and sees some opportunity of giving
himself some action. I can see droves of guys ordering “robots” (and paying
good bucks for ‘em) that can give them a conversation that, in the lips of a “real”
human being would point her out as barely literate, but then coming out of the
experience feeling they had a thoughtful exchange with a mixture of Dostoevsky
and Aristotle (well, as long as it is followed by a not so thoughtful but more
physical exchange, that is). If the thing catches on, the demand for some
talking capability can only go up, as the window dressing in these matters is
as important as the window herself. Call it the “Playboy effect”, as in the reputed
magazine of the same name, where you could find some notable pieces of
journalism that gave it a veneer of respectability (and the wild dollars they
made by selling photos of naked girls to excite the imagination and facilitate
the masturbation of kids that probably could have achieved the same effect
looking at the photograph of a brick allowed the editors to hire and finely pay
some outstanding authors, by the way). If talking sex robots kinda become
mainstream I can very well envision the iterative development of more and more
sophisticated interaction capabilities, until in the end they become more or
less indistinguishable from the real thing (indistinguishable for someone who is
sure to get the thing to the sack with no resistance at all, were there some
doubts as to the final result I guess people would be more discerning).
So I would
expect five years from now to have some of my friends point to me the
astounding advances in the conversational abilities of the latest sex toy (I
hope that is all they tactfully point,
as I don’t expect to be all that interested in their abilities beyond that,
which will surely develop as exponentially) to try to convince me of the
imminence of the advent of fully developed AI. Of course, that particular
astonishment will have to compensate for self-driving cars never having materialized
commercially by then, translation software being almost as clunky as it is
today, and no machine yet having won the Loebner prize (for a good report on
how that works, see The most human human).
Well, at least by then we will be only 25 years from Kurzweil’s predicted date
for the arrival of the Singularity, close enough to confirm the idea was bonkers
all along
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