Over the past few decades, and ever since the invention of the first computer, humans have predicted and claimed that someday the intelligence of computers will surpass that of humans and overtake the human race. Everything from books, magazines, and more recently, movies such as The Matrix, has fantasized artificial intelligence taking over the human race. With all these predictions and probability investigations, is it really possible? Will computers ever take over humans?
Computers are designed to do two things. One is counting, the other is storing data. A computer’s microprocessor is made of millions of microscopic transistors that are gateways for the transmission of electric signals. A transistor can either be on or off. A circuit combination of these transistors enables the computer to do binary calculations, which have been transferred electronically from storage. One thing a computer definitely not designed to do is create ideas of its own. A computer is designed to compute!
The human brain is the most complex and largest organ of the human body. This gray matter, similar to the consistency of soft cheese and about 1.5 kilograms in weight, has a greater capacity than the largest library in the world. Unlike computers, it has the ability to imagine, to create, and to invent. It also has a large set of emotions, something a computer can never really acquire. Our brain has the ability to teach itself. A computer designed by humans must be told everything.
So we can see that the human brain and computers are two completely different things. Simply put, a computer must be told how to learn. I have programmed computers for a few years now and I know how they work – they are designed to serve humans, not the other way around.
How then could a computer overtake the human race? Well, if I was going to build a really sophisticated piece of robotic equipment run by ‘artificial intelligence’, I would start by programming my digital beast to learn. To make something learn, I would have to teach it to read facts and act upon them; for example, I could make my robot read the Internet. Then the robot would have to be programmed to make connections between different facts and learn to put them together, just like the human brain. However, this is where it gets tricky. If your robot learned the World Trade Centre had been destroyed, there is nothing in the robot (no imagination), to make it decide to go look for Osama bin Laden unless it is pre-programmed to do so. Computers must be taught (programmed) exactly how to react to every situation possible in our universe, but in fact this is impossible, because they don’t have something humans do have – common sense; the ability to decide and imagine in undefined situations.
We are not going to see any pure “artificially intelligent” robotic societies any time soon.
What do you think?
