Ceilidh

Michael Zey
futurist3000@aol.com

WHILE I RECALL once hearing something about not judging a book by its cover, I couldn't help but be bothered by some of the suppliers of blurbs on the back of the new Ray Kurzweil book, "The Singularity Is Near."

Mr. Kurzweil is well-known in technology circles as a flag waver for the "strong" school of artificial intelligence, or AI. This is the belief that future computers won't just become increasingly powerful but also increasingly like people.

The theme has been an enduring one for Mr. Kurzweil, who claims street cred on the topic because of his prior work as a computer scientist and inventor. An earlier Kurzweil book talked about "spiritual" machines. This new one promises fully human-like computers in 20 or so years.

But that's just the warm-up, the amuse bouche. By 2045, predicts Mr. Kurzweil, human and computer intelligence will merge -- the "singularity" of the title -- and become some grand new form of life, one that will then venture out into the universe.

It will be like the end of "2001," I suppose, though without the Richard Strauss soundtrack.

The first of the off-putting book blurbs comes from Marvin Minsky, the godfather of strong AI. As a consultant during the filming of "2001" during the 1960s, Prof. Minsky made predictions about how common HAL-like machines would be in 30 years. You know how this story ends: Computers can still barely open a printer port, much less the pod bay doors.

MINSKY'S BLURB was a reminder of how we have been reading predictions for ascending computer intelligence for decades. I can't help but ask: "Where is the ox?" (That, by the way, is "Where's the beef?" translated -- first into French and then back into English -- by the artificially intelligent computers at Babel Fish.)

Mr. Kurzweil, it must be said, admits that strong AI hasn't yet delivered the goods. But he maintains that's because it has gone about it the wrong way. The new approach will be to first "reverse engineer" the brain, using all the tools of modern neuroscience.

But that's a variation on the same dodge that strong AI types have been using for ages. First, they concede that things haven't quite worked out as planned. But then they say not to worry, because some new research direction will bring home the still-missing bacon. The notion that the entire strong AI project may have a flimsy intellectual foundation is never seriously addressed.

For his reverse-engineering approach to work, Mr. Kurzweil needs to be right twice. First, the brain must indeed give up its secrets -- including some big ones, like consciousness -- to scanners and probes. Second, all of those secrets must then be duplicated (and not just simulated or modeled) inside a computer.

That second step may seem trivial, but I fret that we have hopelessly confused a computer simulation of something with the duplication of it. We have, for example, increasingly powerful computer models of the weather. But you can run one of them in your backyard until the cows come home and you're not going to make any rain.

ANOTHER PROBLEMATIC blurb supplier was Bill Joy, the former Sun Microsystems engineer who has lately gotten much attention for making predictions similar to Mr. Kurzweil's, albeit with a negative spin. Mr. Joy is worried about what these super-smart machines will do to us, their human makers.

Many people find writing like Mr. Joy's, coming, as it does, from someone in the computer field, to be humble and cautionary. But I find it enormously self-aggrandizing. After all, how many people get to say that what they do is so important that it may rend the very fabric of life on Earth? And this over-the-top dystopia diverts attention from what may be the real downsides of computers, which are more prosaic: alienation, short attention spans and the like.

My modest proposal is for the whole Kurzweil-Minksy-Joy lot to be locked up somewhere -- under humane conditions, of course, with plenty of sunlight and good Internet access -- and forced to actually build the computers that they keep insisting are just around the corner. Until that happens, no more books or articles or hectoring.

In a phrase: "Put to the top or closes it," which is Babel Fish franglais for "Put up or shut up."

My own prediction is that in 20 years, computers will be about as different from today's machines as today's are from those of two decades ago. Which is to say, not a whole lot. More powerful, obviously; putatively more useful; more insinuated into our lives, no doubt. But still not your roommate or spouse.

Mr. Kurzweil objects to this as "linear thinking," and says that the pace of change in coming years will be vastly faster than what we have heretofore experienced. But beware of folks who are forced by the facts of their case to play down the extent to which the past is a guide to the future. A smart computer would never make that mistake.

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