Some time ago our Netflix subscription brought us the DVD of Artificial Intelligence. I have always been fascinated by the concept of intelligence of any kind, artificial or otherwise. I have studied the kind of intelligence that produces very young geniuses in the three pattern perceiving realms of mathematics, music and chess. In these realms a nine year old can be more capable than people who have spent years studying these subjects.
In others, such as history, chemistry, geology and so on, there are no young geniuses. A great deal of data, acquired over years of work is needed for proficiency in these subjects. But the rules of mathematics, chess and music are relatively simple, and the genius can pick them up immediately and run with them.
Intelligence is in the ability to perceive patterns. I remember my professor in the honours mathematics course at London University pointing out how many different ways there were of making the first ten moves in chess and how it was impossible that any machine could deal with that number of variables, and weigh the advantages and disadvantages of a move in the manner of a human.
Well, years later I played some of those impossible machines at their top level, when they were available to the public and was soundly beaten several times. A human intelligence had worked out a system that the machine could run through at great speed every time and produce legal and sometimes extraordinarily good moves. Today’s chess machines are very hard to beat at their top levels, even the ones you buy in toy stores or WalMart. And it gets harder every year.
It’s always dodgy to prophecy about the limitations of technology. I remember when the Astronomer Royal said that space flight was bunk. A few months later Sputnik went round the world and started the space race to the Moon.Look at what is packed into the latest cell phones.
But at the moment the goal of making a robot that looks and behaves like a human being is some way down the pike. It was the pornography business that invented the method of paying for merchandise over a secure circuit on the Web. It is not widely known how that business has been responsible for many of the innovations we now enjoy in cyberspace. And the nearest thing so far to a human facsimile has come from the sex toy business, wherein it is now possible to have a full sized female doll custom produced with a poseable solid silicon compound body and a PVC skeleton, choice of hair, choice of eyes, measurements of choice, one that gives the feel of human skin and that wealthy men can have as companions, and movie people can use as relatively inexpensive extras, human scenery. Check www.realdoll.com for current progress in producing a facsimile of a human form, male or female.
But having these amazing products walk, talk, think and maybe even feel is a long way off. But like the impossible electronic chess player it’s probably on its way. And the movie is about that time in history when the perfectly programmed, just like human toys, have been pushed through the final barrier and programmed to feel emotion.
The movie was a compilation of the work of two very prestigious directors, Spielberg and Kubrick. These two names ensured that the sci fi aspect was amazingly well done. In the opening scene where a scientist is talking to a group about the next step of making a perfect human boy robot who can be programmed to love a woman as his mother, he goes up to an attractive lady sitting in the audience. He tells her to open her mouth and reaches in with a finger. The face splits apart horizontally and opens up and down to reveal the metal skull from which he retrieves a circuit board. After a little more conversation he replaces everything, the skin folds down again without a seam anywhere, and the lady casually begins to renew her lipstick applications. It was a visually stunning thing to watch.
The first eleven year old boy robot in the new top class of robots is named David, and is adopted by a couple whose own son is in a state of suspended animation, waiting for the cure to be found of the disease that afflicts him. The robot boy does very well, though his appreciation of the emotional content of human situations is nil.
Then the real son is cured of the disease and comes to live in the household and begins baiting the mechanical son to make him show behaviour that will get him sent back to the lab. The surrogate mother performs the bonding activity that will ensure that the robot boy loves her. After that, he cannot be altered if anything goes wrong with his behaviour, he has to be destroyed.
The mechanical boy hears his ‘mother’ reading the story of Pinocchio to the real son and gets the idea that if he can find the blue fairy he too can become a real boy and be loved by his mother.
The rest of the story is about how his behaviour is misunderstood by the suspicious father and how the mother, rather than have him destroyed, deserts him in a forest, where he is accompanied by a mechanical teddy bear that looks after him.
Eventually the boy finds his blue fairy after amazing adventures, under the sea in the now submerged Coney Island playpark. She is a statue. He sits there in his submersible machine asking her to make him a real boy.
Some two thousand years later, when all humans are gone from Earth we see what are either aliens or ultra advanced robots looking for him, because his memory holds all the knowledge they need to know about the now extinct human race. They re-energize the boy and the bear and from his memory build an exact facsimile of the house he lived in when he was David.
The end of the movie is a typical piece of Spielberg sentimentality but it was the making of the facsimile of the house that interested me more than I realized at the time.
When I went to sleep that night I had a very vivid dream. For many years after we were bombed out for the second time I lived in a row house in a London suburb. It had been built in the early 1900’s for artisans. When we went to live in it the roof had been blown off by a near miss from a flying bomb.
There was a large tarpaulin over the house. The lighting was Sherlock Holmes vintage gas lighting. There was no hot water or bathroom. The toilet was outside the house. That house held many memories for me. The day I paid to have electricity installed the landlord put up the rent, for example. When I tried to cut through the top of the wallpaper in the living room, to put up new the whole wall opened inwards like a door. It was made of over a dozen layers of Victorian wall paper, stiff and strong like wallboard.It may have held the bricks together during the bombing.
I have often dreamed of that place, which I didn’t like at all. Sometimes the furniture was different. Occasionally the whole place was redecorated and looked almost passable. But the night of AI I dreamt of it very vividly. Everything in it was exactly as it used to be, but brand new. All our secondhand furniture was as it must have been when new. The rugs, wallpaper, bookcases, stove, everything was like straight out of the store.
And I walked around in the rooms thinking lucidly, “This has been created for me from my memories, by the beings who made me and programmed me in the first place.” This was a clear thought in my dream. When I woke up I began to consider how I would know that I was not like David, a facsimile human with a lot of special programs for social interaction with the other humanoid toys. While somewhere, maybe in space, the cosmic engineers watched their little zoo as we watch ours.
The ultimate enlightenment of a human being is to be free from programs. Neither the past nor the future has any effect of someone living totally in the now. And in that state the human toy can contact his maker. We can look upon ourselves as complex computers, each with different circuit boards but all with the same mother board. And the ones who have become aware of the programs, and therefore able to shake loose from them, can contact the energy of the mother board, and its source, the mind of the designer.
This week I had some very insightful things said to me about my astrology chart. I don’t do astrology for reasons I have gone into in various postings, but I do honour those who have taken it beyond the fortune telling stage. The person who talked to me had gone way beyond that point. She was a student of mine in other areas.
I looked again at my chart with my dream in mind. Maybe this chart is the blueprint of the many circuit boards in my carbon based brain. The different charts can describe the programmed behaviour of the different human robots we encounter in our daily lives. No wonder a good astrologer can tell you a lot about what has gone on in your life and how. They may be picking up some of your original blueprint. I signed my letter of thanks to the astrologer as Mentor Mark VIII, Cryogenics Inc, Patent number 99999999.
There’s a totally free gift for you. Contemplate the possibility. You will get many insights about your current life and its fortunes and misfortunes, and most of the self help books treat you as a machine that can be re-programmed by affirmations and positive thinking don’t they. It’s a thought. What would a refurbished and still under warranty human be like?
