“Artificial intelligence is already here,” says Christopher Coutarna, a political scientist at the Oxford Martin School at Oxford University. - But the curious question is this: where are we on this segment? How talented will the autonomous brains created by us be? This speech was held by Coutarn in a cool tent on a hot summer day in a field in Oxfordshire. At the Wilderness Festival, where all this was happening, the political scientist discussed AI with colleagues Robert Smith, Matthew Taylor, and John Lloyd.
Before we understand what intelligent computers can or will become, we need to understand what we mean by intelligence, reason. When we talk about artificial intelligence, we tend to raise the bar, says Kutarna. You might think that it takes intelligence to win a chess game, but the best grandmaster in the world was beaten by a computer in 1997. And today anyone can download a game to their phone, in which they will also lose chess.
The game started
We've also seen AI beating people in an intellectual game (like Jeopardy!), And in the same way, most recently, it beats a person in the hardest Chinese game in Go.
Does this mean that computers have intelligence? “Don't believe the news,” Smith says. "There have been no breakthroughs in AI." The speed of computers is growing and surpassing our own speed of thinking, but intelligence has been computerized and remains, he says.
To fully understand intelligence, we need to understand how the brain works, and then human consciousness. And we are far from that, says Lloyd. “Don't buy a book called How the Brain Works,” he told an enthusiastic audience, “because we just don't know it. We don't know anything about consciousness."
Smith is not at all sure that consciousness exists. “Perhaps it's a combination of memory and imagination,” he says. "It seems to me that consciousness is an illusion - when we stopped believing in the soul, consciousness came to replace it."
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Sensible machines?
And even if we could create an intelligent machine, could we put it to good use? Our brains are capable of incredible things, but these are the things that make up our boring lives, Lloyd said. “The more complex the device, the more trivial information it processes,” he says. "The phone has more processing power today than the human mind, but we use it to take selfies."
More alarming is the idea that by developing AI, we will expect them to solve all problems like a god. “I think we live in a world where technology has become a religion,” says Taylor. “We are back to the medieval notions that God decides what the world should be like, only today God has become technology.”
This is partly due to the politics that drive technology, Taylor said. “Silicon Valley has its own approach to problems called solutionism [literally: solution-oriented], and it is based on the idea that all problems in the world can be solved with technology,” he says.
Kutarna agrees: "We expect technology to solve problems faster and faster, until finally there are no more problems at all and we live in a techno-utopia."
Technology should serve us
You can say as much as you like that technologies see everything and everyone knows that in 30 years all problems will be solved. But this is the wrong approach. At any rate of development of technology, we will not be able to provide machines with human intelligence if we learn to instill in them artificial empathy.
Empathy (empathy) and emotions are especially important in our brain, Taylor recalls. We begin to form emotional memories long before memories of events are formed, and these memories shape our behavior and interactions with people for the rest of our lives. No computer can interact with humans in a way that seems completely natural to all of us.
Perhaps that makes us special, Taylor says. “We need to fundamentally connect to our humanism and love ourselves. We need to get back to admiring how amazing we are."
ILYA KHEL