The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence (45 page)
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Authors: Ray Kurzweil
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BOOK: The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence
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HOW TO BUILD AN INTELLIGENT MACHINE IN THREE EASY PARADIGMS
As Deep Blue goes deeper and deeper, it displays elements of strategic understanding.
Somewhere out there, mere tactics are translating into strategy. This is the closest thing
I’ve seen to computer intelligence.
It’s a weird form of intelligence, the beginning of intelligence.
But you can feel it. You can smell it.
—Frederick Friedel, assistant to Gary Kasparov, commenting on the computer that beat his boss
The whole point of this sentence is to make clear what the whole point of this sentence is.
—Dougtas Hofstadter
“Would you tell me please which way I ought to go from here?” asked Alice. “That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat. “I don’t much care where ... ,” said Alice. “Then it doesn’t much matter which way you go,” said the Cat. “... so long as I get somewhere,” Alice added as an explanation. “Oh, you’re sure to do that,” said the Cat, “if you only walk long enough.”
—Lewis Carroll
A professor has just finished lecturing at some august university about the origin and structure of the universe, and an old woman in tennis shoes walks up to the lectern. “Excuse me, sir, but you’ve got it all wrong,” she says. “The truth is that the universe is sitting on the back of a huge turtle.” The professor decides to humor her. “Oh really?” he asks. “Well, tell me, what is the turtle standing on?” The lady has a ready reply: “Oh, it’s standing on another turtle.” The professor asks, “And what is that turtle standing on?” Without hesitation, she says, “Another turtle.” The professor, still game, repeats his question. A look of impatience comes across the woman’s face. She holds up her hand, stopping him in mid-sentence. “Save your breath, sonny, she says. ”It’s turtles all the way down.“
—Rolf Landauer
As I mentioned in chapter 6, “Building New Brains,” understanding intelligence is a bit like peeling an onion—penetrating each layer reveals yet another onion. At the end of the process, we have a lot of onion peels, but no onion. In other words, intelligence—particularly human intelligence—operates at many levels. We can penetrate and understand each level, but the whole process requires all the levels working together in just the right way.
Presented here are some further perspectives on the three paradigms I discussed in chapter 4, “A New Form of Intelligence on Earth.” Each of these methods can provide “intelligent” solutions to carefully defined problems. But to create systems that can respond flexibly in the complex environments that intelligent entities often find themselves, these approaches need to be combined in appropriate ways. This is particularly true when interacting with phenomena that.incorporate multiple levels of understanding. For example, if we build a single grand neural network and attempt to train it to understand all the complexities of speech and language, the results will be limited at best. More encouraging results are obtained if we break down the problem in a way that corresponds to the multiple levels of meaning that we find in this uniquely human form of communication.
The human brain is organized the same way: as an intricate assemblage of specialized regions. And as we learn the brain’s parallel algorithms, we will have the means to vastly extend them. As just one example, the brain region responsible for logical and recursive thinking—the cerebral cortex—has a mere 8 million neurons.
1
We are already building neural nets thousands of times larger and that operate millions of times faster. The key issue in designing intelligent machines (until they take over that chore from us) will be designing clever architectures to combine the relatively simple methods that comprise the building blocks of intelligence.
1
We are already building neural nets thousands of times larger and that operate millions of times faster. The key issue in designing intelligent machines (until they take over that chore from us) will be designing clever architectures to combine the relatively simple methods that comprise the building blocks of intelligence.
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