AI is Not to be Feared, You Are!
As an AI / Computational Cognitive Scientist since college in the late 1960s, it is nice to see a reporter and some fellow travellers getting it approximately right for a change. My book on a theory of human privacy and the second volume on human lying, and a few medium articles and responses assert that those of us who have spent a lifetime chasing how the brain computes still draw the comment: we do not know.
We are still waiting for that brilliant breakthrough. That said, you can be in awe of what we do know and the fact that our progress is pretty amazing. If I were to draw a parallel from science, we are pre-Newtonian… We have had the telescope to give us the sky and we have the data and lots of interesting theories of what is holding together what we see above us, but it took the method of calculus and Newton’s genius to give us the correct explanation.
To date, we have the computer but it is not the calculus to describe the neocortical brain, and we have lots of interesting and useful proto theories but not one good scientific theory.
I am confident we will have such a theory. Read about Descartes: the first true cognitive scientist who also happened to have given Newton the cartesian coordinate system for his calculus:
People who fear AI should be fearing fiat lies. We should be fearing people, not the technology. Let me explain.
How would I, one of them AI guys with a scientific bent, view the majesty of the human, nay, the neocortical, mind? Here you go: It is an awe inspiringly fast and precise predication engine. We have known subjects and predicates for hundreds of years, if not thousands, and now we know the brain is computing their value, their truth or relevance, to our tactical survival at awe inspiring rates and precision by the millions a second (or two, or so). We know we pull hierarchies of predications, sentences, and stories, our movies, and our motor actions out of the goo of heterarchies of potential hierarchies that is the information content of our brains.
In my post-docs in AI at Yale and Rutgers in 1977–8, I used to say, with some sadness, AI is not a science, it is engineering. AI is trickery, and it still is. But the two complement each other in driving forward our knowledge and our destiny. We should be thankful for AI and Cognitive Science because of the beauty we see when we get these glimpses of the nature that God has wrought.
