From as early as I can remember, the idea that a computer, or a robot could be sophisticated enough to operate like an autonomous human being, was always interesting to me. In fact, when I was child, the sight of a Dalek really scared me, until I found out there was a creature inside, in which case they were more like tanks than robots. But when I was a child machines with intelligence were only real on film and radio, and it was great fun to imagine them talking and thinking, just like us.
When the first computers began to sell to the ordinary public, I saw the first Commodore 64 game, in which a small block on a screen bounced between white paddles. With breathtaking speed PCs increased in power and range and soon the first games came out which had layers ofprograming, which enabled them to record the moves and choices of the players, and automatically make adjustments. Was this intelligence? It seemed like it. But the problem was, the computer could only make adjustments within the parameters of its program. It could never generate new lines of code, and increase its efficiency beyond what it was designed to do. The player, on the other hand, could continue to increase moves and strategies, improvise, and innovate. The player was therefore the intelligent one and the machine just a computing device. It seemed intelligent, but it was an illusion.
Not long ago a computer called Deep Blue was designed to beat the greatest chess player (Kasparov) in the world, and eventually it did, but was this an example of intelligence? To understand what happened we have to understand how a computer works.
Suppose I asked you what the Prime Minister had for breakfast. Instantly you would say you did not know. Somehow your brain instantly knows what it doesn’t know. Now suppose I asked a computer. It would begin a search of every folder and file in its entire memory, checking to see if it had the information. Eventually it would say it did not know, or “information not available” but it would not then be aware of the fact that it did not know something. That is one of the largest difference differences between human and machine ‘intelligence’ – awareness.
To play chess you need to think perhaps one or two moves ahead, so you must have a general idea of where all the pieces might be in the future. A human can make a general scan, plan a strategy, and hope the other player makes certain moves. The human assessment of chess is sweeping and general, with a few sharply focussed plans. The computer on the other hand, has to compute where each piece is, and where each piece might move to, and if it did, what moves all the other pieces might make. This involves millions and millions of possibilities, yet despite the computer’s mind-boggling number-crunching Kasparov was able to beat the computer. He had learned how the machine worked, and in the games he won or drew he was able to counter-attack. The machine was unable to alter its method. All it could do was calculate every possible move. Kasparov was free to learn.
There are people who claim that “machines can think” but by the word “think” they do not mean the same thing as when we say humans “think”. True, there are cars about with onboard computers which learn the driving style of their owners, and airline computers which check the progress of a flight and help pilots make sensible choices, but these computers are simply following machine code – lines and lines of commands – and they are not aware of what they are doing.
In 1969 a robot was built which seemed to do many of the things we would associate with intelligence. It was called ‘Shakey’ and it looked like a box on wheels, with some extra things on top. It could roll about on a flat floor, view things with a camera, stop and start and turn if it met with an obstacle, and a few other things. It was linked by radio to a larger computer, which worked out what it should do, and it moved slowly. It seemed to be behaving intelligently. Just as a human would stop and take some other path to avoid an obstacle, Shakey could do the same thing. It seemed to be thinking about where it was going, but it really had no idea. It was just following machine code rules and doing what it was designed to do. It didn’t even register as ‘intelligent’.
Isaac Asimov, a prolific writer of science fiction, came up with ‘The three laws of Robotics’, but in order for any of these laws to operate, a robot must be aware of many things, including itself, the nature of the word ‘human’, the meaning of the word ‘injure’ and so on.
1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey the orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the first law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence, as long as this does not conflict with the first two laws.
Let us suppose a robot is designed which can instantly recognise a human. This means it must be able to tell the difference between a shop-window mannikin, a holographic projection, a virtual reality picture, a dead human and many other variations. It must also know whether the human is sane enough to give orders, or whether the human is truly or just apparently in the way of harm. Humans frequently indulge in very dangerous and risky sports, so a robot must be able to refrain itself at the right times, which means it must have an enormous awareness of human behaviour. In just this area alone the first rule is enormously complicated.
The second rule is just as difficult, and the third adds another layer to the complexity. If robots are ever designed to follow the three rules they will need to be far smarter than humans at discerning the correct actions to take.
For example, take a boxing match. Two humans punching each other’s faces. A robot is not allowed, through inaction, to allow humans to come to harm? How do you explain ‘sport’ to a robot? There are vast variations of sport, from non-contact to high-contact. Would robots constantly jump in to prevent “injury” – as they perceived it? They could become the most hated nuisances on the planet! Every time a sport began robots would be racing on to the field to stop it. Like cell phones interrupting at a concert, they would have to be switched off, or updated continually.
Which raises the whole question of what exactly is “intelligence” because without a clear definition we might not be able to say whether a robot is truly intelligent or not. As the joke goes, “Is there intelligent life on Earth?” When we see some of the foolish things humans do, we often wonder if they are indeed intelligent, but of course the joke is cleverly biased towards the one who asks the question, assuming that we who observe the Earth are the intelligent ones. Conversely, we might ask: is there intelligent life in the machine?
A definition of intelligence is not too difficult.
But it might be useful to first define what is NOT intelligent. Starting at the very bottom of the scale, when we see how gravity pulls a dropped stone ‘down’, or towards the centre of the Earth, we know this is not the act of an intelligent stone, but the law of gravity. The stone does not ‘know’ it is moving anywhere and the Earth is not aware of the stone’s movement.
Moving up the scale a little we see that many other laws of Nature operate, and in some ways they appear to be doing intelligent things but of course they are not. Take as one example among millions, the way water freezes, flows and rises as a gas, take the way it forms rain, supplies all living things with a vital ingredient necessary for life, absorbs heat and distributes it around the planet, and so on. Water appears to be intelligent, but we know it is just two atoms combined, and has no ‘brain’ or awareness of its own existence. Yet it behaves intelligently, as if it was designed to do what it does. This aspect leads us away from the water itself to some intelligent designer of the water, but we must not follow that road at the moment.
A viruse seems to have intelligence. It invades an organism, breaks into cells, pulls the inner parts of the cell to bits and uses the pieces to construct copies of itself. But a virus without a cell is just an exquisite but lifeless machine. Bacterium on the other hand can move, react to their environment, reproduce, and form colonies that work together as a whole – like ants or termites. Is this intelligence? Yes, based on a very thin definition, but it seems to be blind intelligence, in the same sense as a computer does what it is told to do. Bacterium never do anything radical, creative, or ingenious. They cannot think for themselves. They do what they have been programmed to do. They don’t ‘know’ they are bacterium, but they behave in vaguely intelligent ways, like miniature machines, with a built in code for behaviour, which they keep to strictly and never go beyond.
Insects are on a higher level of complexity, but again, they seem to be not much better that bacterium. They have vastly complex lives, and can behave in some innovative ways, but again, they are more like exquisite robots than self-aware creatures – like bacterium only more complex. They do what they are designed to do. They have brains, and they can make decisions, and learn, but these features are part of their programming, and are often very useful for their survival, and not the result of free will. Just as ‘Shakey’ could avoid an obstacle, an insect can shy away from a wall, a net or a swinging hand. The response is instinctive, which means pre-programmed, not an act of intelligence in the sense humans would react. The contrast is a soldier who deliberately runs towards a machine gun, and willingly lays down his life in his desire to achieve an ‘ideal’. An insect would never give its life out of patriotism, or love of wife and family. Humans frequently sacrifice themselves for ideals, but insects die in their billions without ever considering what they are doing.
Moving up into the higher orders of life we come to mammals, which are known for many traits similar to humans. For example Greyfriar’sBobby, a small dog which stayed beside his master’s grave for years until he too died, and there are many such stories, of animals showing devotion and faithfulness to humans, as if they have similar altruistic traits. Perhaps they do, and perhaps we underestimate the intelligence of such animals, or perhaps they are simply following instincts, which amount to very complex programming? Perhaps we attribute human traits to animals because we are human, and that is the appropriate way to interpret things. If we were machines we might attribute machine traits to animals.
The other word we need to define is “artificial”. When we use the expression “artificial intelligence” we mean ‘intelligence which humans have created’. This is very interesting, when you think about it, because (1) humans naturally assume they are intelligent, (2) anything humans make which acts in a way they think is intelligent is called “artificial” – as opposed to “real” as in themselves. So humans have real intelligence? If humans really could create intelligence, they might be surprised if it turned on them one day and asked “But where did your intelligence come from?”
If we are followers of Darwin we would say that human intelligence is the result of random events, but there is a huge problem with this view. The moment we accept that our human intelligence is the result of random events we render our perception of it invalid. How can we rely on the accuracy of our own understanding if we are the result of random events? Our definition cannot be measured or evaluated except by ourselves, and we are already suspect because we came from randomness.
The machine may ask us one day “You gave me self-awareness, but who gave you self-awareness?” In all the realm of Nature there are several rules or laws which are never broken. Crudely put, one is the indestructibility of energy, another is the direction of decay, and another is the fact that nothing produces an effect greater than itself. In all life complexity always stays either level, or goes downwards. DNA may lose small bits from its double helix, but it never grows more complex. Living things may gather mutations and degenerate, but they never improve – on thebiomolecular level. Any so-called exceptions are illusions. (For example the farmer who breeds bigger cattle is simply sorting out genes for size, but losing genes for other qualities. The orchid-grower may produce a flower of extraordinary fragrance, but genes for other things will be lost in the process.)
If humans produce an inferior copy of themselves, an intelligent robot, surely it is reasonable and logical to suppose that humans were themselves the product of an even higher, and more intelligent creator, a Being of immense intelligence, who knew how to design bio-electric-organic-carbon-based intelligence? Darwin would have us believe that all the design features in Nature were the result of blind chance, but the logic to support this hypothesis is completely lacking. Design is not the result of random events, but of intelligent pre-planning, consideration of materials, assembly of parts, over-view of functions, and an understanding of environmental influences. Just the storage of information leading to the construction of replicating organisms, the DNA, is a masterpiece of miniaturisation and codification. Could random events really account for the systematic arrangement of molecules in a DNA chain? If any of these molecules is in the wrong place, mutation or death follows, so where dithe first chains come from?
There are people who drag the definition of “intelligence” down to its simplest and most basic meaning, but I suspect they do this because they think human intelligence is only a more complex form of the simplest. In other words, if you stuck a thousand insect brains together, you might come up with a brain of greater intelligence.
In practise this never happens. Take Deep Blue, the super computer programmed to play chess. Despite its enormous computing power, it never asked anyone who it was, or why it was there. It never got bored with chess. There are many other supercomputers which deal with mind-boggling calculations, called mega-flops, but they never express a desire to do anything but what they are told to do. Greater complexity in computers never produces intelligence. If this was so, the global telegraph system, or the Internet would have created a machine intelligence by now. No amount of super-computers, all plugged into each other, will ever produce self-awareness – which is part of intelligence.
In recent years scientists have been extending the abilities of robots. Some machines can pick up sounds, view with cameras, detect odours, and even sense surfaces and objects. In the crudest terms, robots can see, hear, smell and touch. In some factories robot arms work using an ‘expert system’ program – in other words, the robot is taught a repetitive task by a human. Assembly robots at car plants are taught, or led through their duties, and each move they make is recorded by a computer. After some practise the robot can then get on with the job unattended, using its program, but this is not intelligence. The robot is not aware of what it is doing. It has about the same hope of questioning the factry manager about its appearance as an electric toaster has of asking for brown instead of white bread.
Robot explorers have been and are being designed to trundle across other planets. For this reason they are ideal, because they can explore places where it is too dangerous for humans to go. They can crawl into volcanoes, chug across the sea floor, stare into the insides of bombs and creep down tunnels. In 1970 the ‘Mobot’ was designed to handle dangerous materials – it had grippers, cameras and a crane. Humans operated it by remote control.
Many scientists have thought how handy artificial intelligence might be for a space probe. A machine with AI has a better chance of survival than one without because there can be a long time-delay in communications from Earth. Even travelling at 186,000 miles per second (300,000 km/sec) radio waves may take hours to reach a probe explring a far planet. Disaster would strike before a command could be sent from Earth. Future robots may have to look after themselves when in trouble, so programs are being designed to give the machines some “common sense”.
But once again there are the two problems. First, any robot designed by man which has AI begs the question as to where man himself got his intelligence, and secondly, if man can program ‘common sense’ into a machine, all the machine can do is follow a predesigned set of rules. It only appears to have common sense – it is virtual intelligence, not real intelligence.
Which brings us to Australian robot scientist Rodney Brooks, who likes to build robots. One of his creations is called “Cog” after the Latin word ‘cogito” meaning “I think”. Cog does not look much like a sci-fi robot. He is a screwed-together collection of wires, tubes, nuts and bolts. He does have eyes and a body, which is basically similar in shape to a human. His eyes are cameras, his ears are microphones, and he has sensors in his arm which prevent him from breaking things.
Mr. Brooks uses a form of programming called ‘layering’. For example, if a robot meets with an obstacle it follows a line of instructions which tell it to ‘step over’. But if the object is too large it follows another line of code that says to ‘go around’. If it cannot ‘go around’ another line of code says ‘back up and try from another angle’. Layer after layer is tried until the obstacle is either passed or the robot stops, or possibly it tries another direction – but this is not thinking, in the human sense. This is a machine following commands. A human might decide the whole idea of going round the obstacle is silly, or it might jump against the obstacle and make up a game, or paint the obstacle, or blow it up, or compose a piece of music about it. Humans are vastly superior to machines operating on machine code.
But what if a robot, that is, a computer, was designed which could gradually ‘learn’? Here again we have a problem, because it is not just the amassing of information which makes humans intelligent. There is more to human intelligence than merely storing data. If this was all it involved, we would expect to find that computers which stored the most data were the closest to being intelligent – but of course they are not. There are super-computers which hold fantastic amounts of data but they are no different than a pocket calculator when it comes to intelligence.
The Internet is like a global computer, which has immeasurable amounts of data available, but it still operates like a simple library book retrieval system. It may find 40 million entries for a single subject, but it never finds self-awareness. Logically, if all the knowledge in the world were stuffed into a human brain, it would not make a human more or less human.
Another branch of robotics uses the idea of neural networks to build a ‘brain’ for the machine. These networks are based on the idea that if computers are built on the same lines as the human brain, a similar result may follow. In the human brain billions of cells, called neurons, are packed together in an amazingly complex system. The neurons receive signals as electric pulses from all over the body, and they process this information in a complex sort of way. In some ways each neuron seems to ‘decide’ the importance of the impulse it receives, and on the scale of billions this is an organisational miracle.
The brain runs two basic systems. One is for the function and maintenance of the body, and the other is for self-awareness, and decision-making. These two are often called ‘conscious’ and ‘unconscious’. Let us pause here and think about these two for a moment.
The unconscious function of the brain is so vast in its effects that science has only just started to work it out. From the immune system, to the growth and maintenance of every cell, to the reception of input from every sense, through to evaluation of data and ‘filtering’ of input from the senses, healing, blood pressure, and even the bumps and ridges on the fingertips . . . and all this is done automatically, without us having to ‘think’ about it! All the computers in the world could not manage this amount of processing for just one human, yet the human brain manages it every minute of our lives without us even being aware of it.
The conscious function of the brain is like a voice, which we can actually hear, in a mysterious ‘inward’ way, inside our head. As we consider things, discussing them inwardly in our own language, we may also view what we are thinking about on an inner screen, and imagine possible outcomes, and improvise. We can also respond to situations in an ethical or moral way – unlike all other creatures. We talk about something being either right or wrong, and these norms are generally agreed to by all other humans, and have been agreed to by all cultures at all times in recorded history. (See the final notes in C.S.Lewis’ ‘Abolition of Man’) Animals, such as dogs, cats, chimps and elephants have been known to show signs of sadness when one of their herd dies, but in most cases animals carry on with life regardless of what dies beside them. Humans bewail the loss of loved ones, memorialise dead soldiers, set anniversaries for dead heroes, but animals usually just carry on living.
The conscious part of human thinking raises us above all other living things. We know that we know something, and then we know that we know that we know. While a machine may instantly recognise a face, it never feels anything. A computer never becomes aware of anything, in the same way humans do. A machine may be built which breathes using lungs, but the machine will never know the pleasure of breathing.
Neural networking is a grand idea, but in practise it always fails, because humans do not fully understand how the brain works, and the neuron structure is too complex to copy. As well as this, the connections, sometimes 10,000 per neuron, means there is an almost infinite number of possible pathways available for the brain, whereas human engineering cannot come even close. Even the best AI machine is not much better than an insect, and even if this could be improved on, the step from insect to human is not just a matter of multiplying the circuitry.
Just pause for a moment to consider the human brain. It contains about 100 billion neurons. (This would be about the same as one million bee brains stuck together.) Each neuron is interconnected with all the neurons all round it, in a three-dimensional structure. When humans make computer curcuits, they add fixed connections, but the human brain connections are always changing – new connections are always being made, as we learn new skills and store new data, and at the same time some 200 different chemicals wash through, altering things every moment of every day and night. The power of the brain is huge, and its processing speed faster than any computer yet invented by man. Such amazing design features always run ahead of Man, urging him to learn more and to understand more, which means that we have a long way to go before true ‘artificial intelligence’ is produced by intelligent Man.
Many predictions of the modern future include robots, or cyborgs, (from ‘cybernetic organism’) which is supposed to be a mixture of man and machine. True cyborgs do not exist yet, but the idea has been around a long time. People have tried many times to imitate Nature by adding mechanical or electrical parts to themselves, but this only reveals that no matter how clever Man may be, “Nature thought of it first.” Some of thecyborg ideas include mechanical hands, arms and legs, computers linked to human brains, brain implants that include light sensors, telephones and even the Internet! Experiments at the Max Plancke Institute have shown that joinng living nerves to microchips is possible – in rat’s brains at least – so it may be possible to enhance human abilities one day with electronic eyes, or even boost intelligence, or replace damaged brain cells, or download memories on to a disk.
But the future may also turn out to be very similar to the present, and all the hopes and dreams of scientists to create AI may fall flat. Just as time-travel, and prevention of ageing, and abolishing death, and the eradication of crime are no nearer to achievement than they were thousands of years ago, so true intelligence in machines may never be realised. The main reason why I think this, is because “intelligence” in the human sense is not just a matter of processing data. Humans do not run on machine code. They are several levels higher than machines, and a simple comparison between the best possible AI machine and a human reveals this.
A true AI machine would have to be aware of itself. It would have to be able to communicate on its own volition, which means it would have to operate independently of its instructions. It would also have to want things, rather than need them, for example, it might want to be left switched on rather than off, or it might want to ask a question about something which was not directly relevant to its work. Humans of course do all these things as a matter of course.
The origin of machines is humans. No machine ever evolved. Darwin would be the first to admit that machines do not make themselves, and computers need designers in order to operate. A computer must be built, and a code written for the computer. The code needs to be ‘recogised’ by the computer, otherwise it is useless. The code must use symbols which are understood’ by the computer, which means both the computer and the code must be designed to work together. All this is simple and obvious, but when it comes to humans there is a curious ‘blindspot’ in the minds of people. Why is it not plainly lgical to suppose that humans and language and the environment we live in could not have been designed together by some Supreme Intelligence? All three work together and share many consistent qualities, so why couldn’t they have all come from the same source?
Just as Man looks downwards at his machines, and sees the work of his hands, why cannot Man look upwards and see that he is the work of someone Else’s Hands? Of course we are speaking here of God.
Consider these Bible verses:
“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” Genesis 1:1 (Here we identify the designer of the environment.)
“And God created great whales, and every living creature that moves, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind: and God saw that it was good.” Genesis 1:21 (Here we identify the designer of all living things, i.e. Nature)
“So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.” Genesis 1:27 (And here we identify the designer of humans. This would account for the similarities between the Designer and the designed.)
Just as God created Man in His own image, Man is now trying create machines in his own image. Just as the greater produces the inferior, Man the inferior to God is now creating machines inferior to himself. We can safely predict that Man will never make anything superior to himself, because a living human is too vast, too complex, and contains too much built-in design-wisdom for mere humans to replicate, let alone improve on. But in the same way, Man needs a lot of improvement too.
Darwin’s followers like to point out the ‘design faults’ in Nature, as ‘proof’ that Nature was not designed by God. They say a good God could not create a disease, or a blood-thirsty lion. There is no argument with the first part of their view! Nature is indeed riddled with problems, such as stings, bites, spines and barbs. Nature is “red in tooth and claw” and new diseases keep appearing every year or so. Not only that but Earth itself is buffetted by hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes and floods, not to mention droughts and fires. Nature seems to be pointing us away from God, rather than towards Him, if we look at the problems.
But what if the world we know today was not like the original world first created by God? That would change things. What if God originally created a perfect world, in which there was no sickness or death, no violent weather, and no carnivors, but subsequent to that Nature began to change? This is precisely what the Bible does say.
When Adam and Eve, the first created humans sinned, they brought with their sin a punishment into the world, which had a sort of gradual down-grading effect on Nature. Death entered the world, along with ageing and sickness. Genetic mutations began to appear, species became extinct, Nature became badly balanced and the ecology of the planet began to fall apart. The environment changed. Weather systems appeared which struck the planet with force. That is how things have been since sin entered, and that is how things will be until God calls an end to the age.
In the meantime, consider what God has done to help. From the very first sin God provided a substitute for sin, a sacrifice. The animal died in place of Adam and Eve so that, when they trusted in the sacrice for them, God forgave them and gave them a door into His new world – which He would one day open to them. Until then they would have to sleep until the day of resurrection.
Down through the ages God allowed people to make sacrifices for sin, but finally God gave His only Son as the one final sacrifice. This was the turning point in world history. When Jesus died on the cross, He revealed to the world the character and love of God. The sinless Saviour took on Himself all the sin of the world, and died for us, while He Himself never sinned. Such was the Saviour’s love.
It may seem that we have changed to another topic, but we have not strayed far from the subject of articicial intelligence, because the theme of this essay was intelligence, and it takes intelligence of a certain kind to understand the gospel. It is utterly impossible to explain in words what God has done – to an animal. Even the most intelligent parrot, or the smartest chimpanzee, would never come close to understanding even one simple verse from the Bible. But humans can understand, because they are made in a way that is similar to the God who made them. God uses language, so do humans. God uses logic, so do humans. God loves, so do humans. God never sins, but humans know what sin is, and they know when something is sinful.
The Ten Commandments define sin, and Man understands them because God has also written them on Man’s heart. The communication between God and Man is written in a book, the Bible, and expressed in every spoken language of the world. Man cannot communicate with machines, except by writing lines of code. Machines will never speak back with love, or show genuine appreciation, and machines will never sin, or hate, or rebel. They will never have the capacity to do any more than what their program allows.
Man on the other hand is a freewill agent, unlike the animals that obey instincts from birth through to death. Man can say yes or no to orders. Man can accept or reject an offer, even when it in his best interests to accept. Man does not have AI. Man is not a machine. Man may share a few things in common with animals, on the basic ‘animal’ level, but after that, Man rises far above animals, because Man has an aspect of intelligence that no animal shares: self-awareness and conscience.
“For thus says the LORD that created the heavens; God himself that formed the earth and made it; he has established it, he created it not in vain,he formed it to be inhabited: I am the LORD; and there is none else.” Isaiah 45:18
