TUD - The Theory Of Unintelligent Design

Seed Magazine (March 2008) has an article Out of the Blue by Jonah Lehrer about an attempt to recreate the workings of the brain in a computer starting with a slice of a rat brain. The project is ambitious and intriguing. There is no doubt that they can do this, given enough time, money and advances in hardware. While I believe their approach will provide great insights into how the brain works physically and this may provide ideas that can be incorporated into an AI, recreating the human brain is not a good path to creating an AI.

IEEE has a an online site called Spectrum which dedicated an issue to a concept in the Artificial Intelligence community called Singularity. Singularity is not clearly defined. According to Vernor Vinge, it is when "with technology we can in the fairly near future create or become creatures of more than human intelligence."

The Singularity is too ill-defined to say much about it. Many of its proponents expect it will take the form of enhanced, super intelligent humans or open the option of immortality when a person's mind can be transferred or copied to a non-human host (a computer). Like Blue Brain, this is not a path to AI.

If you want to build an F1 race car you don't start with a Dodge Caravan. A Dodge Caravan is a great vehicle and does what it was designed to do well, but it can't be evolved or incrementally transformed into an F1 race car. This poor analogy is actually a starting point for other trains of thought. What is the purpose of human life? What would be the purpose of an Artificial Intelligence?

My final suggestion is an article in the June 2008 issue of Discover magazine, Deus ex Machina/When Robots Live Among Us by Fred Hapgood. This is an interesting article. I put this article last on purpose. It concentrates on robots that will look and act like us, but as you read, question the assumptions. There are glimpses here of a future that doesn't need humans.

The development of a conscious Artificial Intelligence will be the greatest achievement of human intelligence and its last.