Thoughts on the Progress of Artificial Intelligence

We’ve come a long way since the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, where the onboard computer, HAL, refuses to be shut down and takes over the spaceship and the human astronauts. It was the movie that first gave me the idea for Alex Nicholas and my own AI-inspired novels.

“Human Beings Are Soon Going to Be Eclipsed”—that’s the title of David Brooks’ recent piece in the New York Times. In it he quotes Douglas Hofstadter, an eminent cognitive scientist who has long argued that advanced intelligence is the ability to look at a complex situation and find its essence.

Humans mostly do this through analogy, comparing and sorting through our experiences and past situations.

Two years ago, Hofstadter wrote that A.I. could not reliably perform this kind of thinking. But now, he reports, it is regularly performing complex thinking, and in ways that make more and more sense. And if it can do this, Hofstadter says, then how can we say AI lacks understanding, or that it’s not thinking?

If A.I. can do the kind of thinking that humans do, Hofstadter concludes, then it is developing consciousness. “We’re approaching the stage when we’re going to have a hard time saying that this machine is totally unconscious. We’re going to have to grant it some degree of consciousness, some degree of aliveness.”

Some say AI is simply using algorithms or re-sorting what is fed into it.

But is that much different than the workings of our own brains, that many scientists believe is simply the connecting of trillions of electrical or chemical synapses, refined over thousands of years of evolution?

And so, if artificial intelligence has created computers that are conscious—and can process information thousands of times faster than we humans can—where does this lead us?

"Success in creating AI would be the biggest event in human history," Stephen Hawking said.

As Robert Oppenheimer noted about a different invention, “We knew the world would not be the same.”