0057Z
About 800 words
For release:
THE CHALLENGE TO HUMAN UNIQUENESS
By Herbert A. Simon
The rapid development of artificial intelligence in
computers is about to challenge our sense of human
uniqueness as profoundly as anything since the days of
Copernicus or Darwin.
At one time, we might remember, human beings thought
they had been placed in the geometric center of the
universe.
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Then Copernicus came along and said we humans
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had it all wrong, that we really live on a planet
circulating around the sun.
So mankind had to develop a
new sense of its uniqueness that no longer relied on being
physically at the center of things.
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Next came Darwin.
He pointed out that we had been
resting our notions of uniqueness on the idea that we are
a specially cheated species unlike any other.
Darwin
showed that the human species evolved through processes of
mutation and selection just like all the others.
So now
mankind had to give up its notion of uniqueness not only
in the universe, but among species.
Nevertheless, we humans have continued to think of
ourselves as unique in the years since Copernicus and
Darwin.
Why?
In considerable part because of our
capacity to think and reason.
Other animals also think,
of course, but we are seemingly the only ones who can
think complex thoughts, abstract thoughts, thoughts
involving the use of language.
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Developments in artificial intelligence, the study
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of computers doing intelligent things, are now challenging
this aspect of uniqueness.
What do we mean by intelligence?
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a person is thinking?
How do I know that
I can check whether the person has
a studious frown on his face as he ponders a problem, of
course, but that is not very reliable evidence.
The only
empirical way to decide is to give a person a task and
then judge on the basis of his or her performance whether
a thought has taken place in reaching a solution.
It is only human chauvinism to refuse to call
something non-human, such as a computer, intelligent if it
does the same.
Computers today now play chess just below
the grandmaster level.
scientific laws.
They can examine data and discover
A program called BACON that I helped
develop was given the distances of the planets from the
Sun and their periods of revolution.
It discovered in
less than a minute that the periods vary as 3/2 powers of
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the distances.
This is Kepler's Thirdi«. Law, an important
discovery of the 17th Century.
Other computer programs
are diagnosing medical illnesses, prospecting for ore, and
synthesizing chemical reactions.
True, computers have not yet been able to write good
poetry or great music, or to solve certain kinds of
?analytic problems.
Large areas of human thought processes
still have not been explored.
Nonetheless, having worked
with artificial intelligence for almost three decades, my
bet is that every kind of human thinking will eventually
be able to be performed by non-human systems.
It is significant in this regard that robotic
devices for use in variable physical environments have
proven much more difficult to develop than computers that
mimic abstract human thought.
One reason is that higher
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human cognitive skills have been evolving for only a
couple of million years, whereas our sensory and motor
skills evolved over MOO million years and therefore are
more sophisticated and harder to replicate.
Given how
proud we are of our intelligence, it should give us pause
to remember that it's easier to automate a professor than
a bulldozer driver.
What are the likely implications for human society
of these developments in artificial intelligence?
POne of the most encouraging possibilities concerns
education.
Much teaching today is inefficient, largely
because it is based on remarkably little fundamental
understanding about how a student's brain processes
knowledge.
New insights, from artificial intelligence and
related fields may enable us to revolutionize education,
much as medicine was transformed when researchers finally
began to understand the biological bases of disease.
Increased knowledge about ourselves also should help
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us to become better problem-solvers and decision-makers.
The threat of nuclear war, stress on the environment,
scarcity of resources, and other problems in the world
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today are caused ultimately not by technology, but by
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ourselves.
We will solve these problems only when we
learn to improve the use we make of our own minds.
Most important is how we( will change our image of
ourselves and our sense of place in the universe.
It is
important to recall that most people did reconcile
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themselves to the discoveries of Copernicus and Darwin,
and did not feel any the worse for it.
One can have
confidence that people in the future also will find a way
to describe their place in the world without having to
believe that they are unique as thinkers.
Mankind f s development of a new self-concept is
likely to be as valuable as any specific benefits that it
will gain from computers themselves.
It is ironic,
perhaps, but the ultimate benefit of our search for
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smarter machines may well prove to be this deeper
knowledge of our own thinking, and of ourselves.
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Herbert A. Simon, winner of the Nobel Prize in economics
and a professor of computer science and psychology at
Carnegie-Mellon University, ga.ve a speech on artificial
intelligence recently for the National Research Council.
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