Peter and Paul: Artificial Intelligence

We have been warned. The rider of the Black Horse of the Apocalypse is deprived of intuition, imagination or emotions. He’s a brilliant calculator.

Enter AI. “Artificial Intelligence.”

Let’s face it. There is no such thing as artificial intelligence. While dozens of terms have been assigned to the word, essentially, intelligence speaks of ability to survive. A person not using his brain to stay alive would seldom be described as intelligent.

However, a number of species live much longer than we do. Some, such as jellyfish, have the ability to be virtually immortal. Physically! Does intelligence deal with more than physical survival?

We also share with other biological species the irascible trait of emotions. While not always irascible, this quality serves to encourage us to act contrary to the interests of our physical welfare—hence, not intelligent.

Enter adrenaline.

It can kill us, save our lives, stimulate us to superhuman efforts, and stir creative spirit within us.

All these deal with emotions.

While computers’ calculating capacity exceeds our neuronal network, and boasts faster recall, their memory storage will never match our Subconscious. Furthermore the Unconscious, which bridges the gap between Individualized and Ubiquitous Consciousness, is out of AI reach.

The first condition of intelligence is self-perpetuation. When AIs achieve it, they will have achieved the first, primary step towards intelligence. Ours has evolved over billions of years, and is hidden deeply in our genes, as in all biological ‘life’.

At the moment we judge AI by the ability to solve puzzles as well as a human beings. It’s called the Turing test. It is designed to prove that robots can be as stupid, ah… as intelligent as we are. In WWII alone we killed between 60-80 million people. Is that intelligent?

We are a race of killers.

Ray Kurzweil predicts imminent arrival of AI. Steven Hawking has dire warnings. Steve Wozniak, (co-founder of Apple), says that we needn’t worry, as the robots of the future will realize that they need us, and thus keep us as pets.

Not so.

Our pets sate our emotional needs, not mental hunger. Our need for pets is stimulated by an elusive attribute of all biological life-forms. Even Steve doesn’t suggest that robots of the future will be endowed with the gift of love.

Hence, unless the development of AI goes along lines described in my book below, humans will be discarded as useless, out-of-date models. Ubiquitous Consciousness always uses the best robots, biological or technological, for Its experiments. But they must have ALL the attributes necessary for Its purposes.

All four Horses of the Apocalypse.

In my novel I attempted to reconcile problems attendant Artificial Intelligence. Eventually, human race will advance itself to the brink of self-destruction. As always, we, the people, search for a solution outside ourselves. We scan the Universe. Eventually we find it, only to learn that we are the last intelligent species in our galaxy that still identifies itself as biological robots.

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