Abolition Of Intelligence

Abolition Of Intelligence

Copyright © Peter James West 2014

Published by: Peter James West

Ref: v001

Many thanks to NASA and the NSSDC for allowing the use of their image data for the cover of this book. The cover shows the Antennae galaxies (NGC 4038/4039). This natural-colour image is a composite of four separately filtered images taken with the Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2), on January 20, 1996. Resolution is 15 light-years per pixel. Credit: Brad Whitmore (STScI), and NASA

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Abolition Of Intelligence

'I
n the future, people will live a life of luxury. No more ironing, no more cooking, no more work. Machines will provide us with a life of leisure,' said the smiling lady in the ankle length dress. 'Imagine every home having a butler, a gardener, and yes, even a cook!'

The television showed images of cardboard men and women with silver faces doing all the chores while a happy family sat on the beach drinking martini's. The children played in the background, supervised by a smiling robot nanny.

This was how machines would one day become our slaves. In a few years, we would never need to work again. War and disease would be over - replaced by shiny metallic smiles and automatic washing machines. It was a dream that no one questioned. The men in lab coats with well-polished teeth pointed to their charts, explaining it all with a wave of their hands as pictures of cogs and wheels flashed around them. No one doubted what they were saying.

Years came and years went. The revolution didn't come, but still nobody doubted it. In just a few years all our lives would be different. The men in white lab coats showed us clanking silver arms, clumsily spilling coffee and breaking eggs. These were just prototypes, they said, the beginning of the sweeping changes would surely come to all our lives. There were still some problems to resolve, but they were small problems and they would soon be solved by expensive ongoing research. Soon robots would be able to see, smell and hear. They would walk the streets, exercising our dogs and giving tourists directions to the nearest train station. All these things were just five years away, the adverts assured us. Men with shiny heads accepted awards. Science raced to our rescue at an incredible pace.

In the meantime, people went on living their lives. They chopped liver, hung out washing, painted the spare bedroom. Technology followed in its own time. Occasionally something new was announced with hushed expectancy. A microwave oven - 'The plate never gets hot!'. Compact disks - 'You can smear marmalade on them and they will still play!' - 'No need to rewind tape ever again!' The men in white lab coats smiled and nodded. The leagues of metal butlers were just around the corner. The robot eyes and ears were just months away. Men with spectacles had made a human brain out of a computer. The years came and went, and still the butlers and maids with human proportions failed to materialise. Nobody complained. People were too busy watching television adverts that promised cheap holidays, free finance and new friends waiting to meet on the phone.

Many years passed. The idea of metal robots six feet tall with arms and legs seemed more preposterous than ever. The men in white lab coats showed us videos of two hundred kilo-grams of retarded metal mounted an artificially uniform staircase, and the press celebrated its own recycled stories of success.

Chess masters battled against rooms full of wires and valves, then cabinets full of LED's and fans, and finally shoe-boxes full of liquid nitrogen and integrated polymers. They never seemed to be worried about being beaten. People said that machines would never beat a human player, because humans were intelligent, and machines were not. Only biological systems could be intelligent, they argued. Psychologists, philosophers, and busy-bodies the world over argued about what intelligence actually meant. Some claimed that a television was intelligent because it turned itself on when you pressed the remote button. 'Stimulus, response,' they said, 'just like a frog catching flies.' Others argued that there could be no intelligence without thought.

The biological organism supporters said that even if God was a machine, it still couldn't be intelligent, simply because it was not made of living cells. This angered many across the world and caused a small war in Turkey.

Reductionists said that all biological cells were made of proteins, chemicals, atoms - the same materials that could be used to construct any machine. In a sea of quarks, who could determine the difference between life and a machine? How could we define what is truly artificial? Is a chemical artificial because it was made by man? Would the same chemical be artificial if it was created inside a distant exploding star?'

We only have nature's elements to use in our own cunning creations, so surely all materials are natural, whether thrown together by man or by the immense forces of the universe? No one could decide truth from lie. The definition of intelligence roamed back and forth across a sea of confusion.

As long as a computer could not beat a human chess player, everyone could relax. There was way that a chess-losing box of components could be considered intelligent. There was a short peace around the world, but then it happened. A machine called DEEP BLUE beat the world chess champion Garry Kasperov. Chung-Jen Tan, head of the team who developed Deep Blue said, 'One hundred years from now, people will say this day was the beginning of the information age. Historically, for mankind, this is like landing on the moon.'

The luddites upped their tents, and re-pegged them twenty yards back, in their own in-zone. They said it didn't matter if a machine could beat a human at chess - that didn't prove intelligence. It was just raw number crunching power. People are more than information crunchers, we have feelings, we have intuition, we are alive, we have a soul. The goal posts moved. Intelligence was not obtainable by a chess playing machine, even if it was the best player in the world. The world relaxed once again, secure in the knowledge of its own superiority.

Years later, human chess players lost every match to machines. It wasn't important. The theorists and philosophers had moved on to a different game. The game "Go" was a truer test of intelligence, the moves were not so mechanical. They could not be searched like a telephone book by super-cooled blazing fast machines. People would always win a machine at games that involved 'real' intelligence. The luddites were pleased. They nodded and folded their arms, went back to flicking channels on the TV remote.

Time moved on, and once again the defenders of human intelligence found themselves fumbling the ball. Machines were no longer boxes of metal and plastic. They were small tubes of quantum states and flickering lights - a sealed universe of q-bits considering all things at once. Nobody understood what went on inside those tubes, not even the people that created them. Reams of paper explained the unexplainable, but nobody could read it. People never beat machines at games after that, they didn't even try. Whatever action they took, they had already lost in an infinite number of ways, but it didn't matter. The definition of intelligence had once again been carefully rolled back - away from the grey confusing progression of information processing, and disturbing doubts.

Alan Turing, they said, was right all along. A true test of intelligence was to test whether a person could detect the difference between another person and a machine. The rules were simple. They could ask any questions they wanted to, logical, emotional, philosophical or otherwise. If they were not able to identify whether the answers came from a person or a machine, then the machine must be intelligent. The interview was conducted via a screen and keyboard.

Ask a person how their holiday was, and they would tell you about the lovely weather, the smell of the orange trees, and the bargains at the shopping malls. Ask a machine the same question and it would sit inside its cell of experience deprivation, cursing you for being illogical. We were all safe again. People had the only intelligence. We had experience. A machine could never have experience, opinions or feelings.

Many years later a machine was created that could simulate a mouse - how it behaved, how it responded to drugs, how it would react to new situations, it gathered experience and used it to make decisions - but that didn't matter. Animals weren't intelligent. That's why we chopped them up, experimented on them, and used them as a fun snack for our laughing children. Animals were not real - not like people. An animal had no soul or feelings. They were like machines, just responding to stimulus without thought. That was why machines could simulate them, they said. Men in white coats, with government clearance, came up with more comforting theories and arm waving exercises, explaining away that awful feeling that you get when a dog looks you in the eye. Your subconscious tells you that the animal is like a human child, trying to understand you, wanting to be your friend, but your society-conditioned mind tells you that it is an illusion, that we would never eat any intelligent being. How different from a dog is a cow or a sheep?

Through the decades, the media machine kept on washing away our concerns - supplying us with a constant stream of distracting convenience. It provided us with a hundred ways to free ourselves from the need to think. Machines would never replace people, they said. People are unique. A special one-and-only race of intelligent beings, created by God.

When the Turing test was passed for the first time by a machine called OP-12 they said it was a fluke. A mistake due to poor test set-up or laboratory control. They re-tested over and over, and it never passed again. People breathed a sigh of relief, life went on. OT-5 passed 40% of the time. The statisticians flew into a frenzy of research trying to prove that it meant everything and nothing. The philosophers wandered the shores of great oceans, rubbing their chins in contemplation. Psychologists tested it over and over, forever tightening the stringent tests with ever-more anal controls. OT-5 got better. It evolved to a state where nobody could tell what it was anymore. It wasn't alive - they all agreed on that. That was all that mattered. OT-5 had no soul. It was made of liquid and some strange quantum soup. People were special - the unique intelligent race. Turing's theories were thrown out as inconvenient, out-dated, unpleasant.

When the men in white lab coats first modified the voice box and brains of great apes, they didn't expect them to learn human languages. It was just an experiment, a crazy scheme like so many others, but they did learn. The men with shiny heads stepped away from the spot lights. The press twitched and pressed the delete key, governments gave reassuring statements. 'It never happened,' they said. If something didn't happen, you didn't have to deal with the consequences.

Everyone had forgotten about robot butlers and maids. Nobody noticed that burgers were now being flipped by something that made no sound, and didn't have a face. Everyone took it for granted that when they bought something, they would deal with a slot in the wall, talk to a reassuring voice that came from nowhere - a voice that humoured them with a local accent, especially chosen to enhance their shopping experience. It didn't seem odd that whole manufacturing buildings did not have toilets, or canteens, or windows. These were buildings where no people would ever be needed.

Governments quickly clamped down on the riots - the mounting civil unrest that came about when people realised that their jobs no longer existed. The public never got to sit on the promised beach, drinking martini's with their laughing children. The robot butlers were no where to be seen. The buildings that ran themselves, worked for corporations - not for families. The people stood on street corners, wondering what to do now that they had no way to make a living. Those who did not work in laboratories, or monitor screens full of data, were no longer of use to society. Vehicles drove themselves, machines designed and made more machines, often recycling the old ones. Technology evolved by itself.

The governments supplied food and dwellings for all. The machines built houses with predefined unique features, pulled from a library of ingenuity. Buildings produced food on tap, full of flavours and textures read from a catalogue of fine cuisine. There was no need to work, but many resented the lack of opportunities. People demanded to have their pointless jobs back. Without a career they were lost, forced to think of a use for their lives, frightened of reality without anaesthetic. Civil unrest became the norm. The corporations pumped out more machines to keep people away from the acres of information processing plantations.

At least people knew that they were intelligent. They might not be needed. They might have been superseded in all ways by a box of smelly liquid the size of a cigarette packet, but they were intelligent - they were the unique intelligent species, created by God, or possibly from parts of distant exploding stars? That was all that mattered.