1.1.2. Will machines be able to have the same, or more intelligence than humans?
“...even if these artifacts (machines) perform certain acts better than us, they would do it without
the conscience of them......it is morally impossible that a machine will work in all the
circumstances of life in the same way as our reason makes us work”.
—Descartes.
One of the main objectives of classical AI was to develop machines with the same, and
superior intellectual capabilities as the ones we have. After more than forty years, this still
seems not near, and some people believe it will never be.
One of the strongest arguments against this was the so called “Chinese room problem”
(Searle, 1980): We set an Englishman which does not know Chinese, in a closed room, with
many symbols of the Chinese language, and a book of instructions in English of how to
manipulate the symbols when a set of symbols (instructions) is given. So, Chinese scientists will
give him instructions in Chinese, and the Englishman will manipulate symbols in Chinese, and
he will give a correct answer in Chinese. But he is not conscious of what he did. We suppose
that a machine behaves in a similar way: it might give correct answers, but it is not conscious
of what it is doing.
Well, according to what we stated about intelligence in the previous section, we could
judge that the consciousless answer was an intelligent one. But let us discuss about
consciousness. We can drive a car without being conscious of how the engine works. We can
use a computer without knowing anything about electronics or microprocessors. We can live,
without knowing what life is. We can love, without knowing what love is. And, we can think
without knowing how our minds work. So let us apply the Chinese room problem to ourselves.
How can we think if we do not know how we think? We think without the conscious of how we
do it. We are conscious of what we understand and we are able to explain and predict. A
machine has no reason for not being able to do the same thing. We, and machines, cannot be
completely conscious because we would have to know everything. So, we can say that men and
machines have certain degrees of consciousness. At this point, men have higher degrees of
consciousness than the ones of machines (even to play chess?).
Many people think that a machine cannot be more intelligent than the one who created
it. How can a student be better than his teacher, then? Well, many people thought that it was
impossible for men to fly, or to go to the moon, or that a machine will ever play chess better
than men. It is possible, indeed, to create machines more intellectually capable than a single
man. And, there are several ways to achieve this. For example, a multi expert system can
contain knowledge of many experts of different areas (e.g. Gonzalez, 1995). Perhaps it will not
know more about a speciality than each expert which knowledge was used to create the system,
but it will have a much more general vision of a problem because of the knowledge of the other
experts. So, by aggregation of knowledge, a machine might be more intelligent (and more
conscious) than a single human.
If we “teach” (program) a machine to learn, it could learn its way to be more intelligent
than the ones who “taught” it to learn, the same way as a child learns his way to (perhaps) be
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