The Age of Spiritual Machines
Since its beginning in the work of Alan Turing, the British mathematical genius who conceived of the computer, artificial intelligence has been overly anthropocentric. Its traditional-some would say misguided-aim has been to build machines that are like humans. For example, the Turing test for machine intelligence holds that a computer is a genuine thinker if it resembles a human being to the degree that someone interviewing both the computer and a human by teletype cannot tell which is which. Against this background, it is not surprising that researchers in artificial intelligence often make believe that their inventions possess human qualities. Turing himself described a simple computational mechanism as a “child-machine”, to be “rewarded”, “punished”, and taught by a process intended to produce “discipline” and “initiative”. Turing’s child-machine was a “creature” that was taught by an inspector of schools but could not be sent to school without “the other children making excessive fun of it”.
In a contemporary example, Daniel Dennett states that Cog, a robot under construction at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab, is to have an “infancy and childhood”. Cog has “hips” and a “waist”, and will have skin and a face. Cog is to be “as human as possible in its wants and fears, likes and dislikes”. It will “want to keep its mother’s face in view” and is to “delight in learning, abhor error, strive for novelty, and recognize progress.”
Ray Kurzwell is anther who anthropomorphizes machines: nanomachines (devices built on an atomic scale) have “brains”, “bodies”, “arms”, “hands”, and “little fingers”. His new book The Age of Spiritual Machines, is an excellent example of the blurring of fact and fiction so common in discussions of artificial intelligence. He blends together present day technologies, such as artificial legs and breast implants, with those he foresees, such as computers that store “migrated” human brains.
拜托不要拿个有道翻译就上了= =