Salon's Joanna Rothkopf wrote this about Stephen Hawking: Stephen Hawking is still terrified of artificial intelligence
"Computers will overtake humans with AI at some point within the next 100 years"
Having been involved with the comparison between "machine intelligence" (wrongly dubbed "Artificial Intelligence") and human intelligence for most of my career, I find this both disappointing and amusing.
Hawking has a great mind. That may be why he gets away with making statements that have little or nothing to do with his field of cosmology and getting away with it. I would not challenge him on subjects like cosmology for he knows far more. He is also a lot smarter than I am. Nevertheless, when it comes to comparing machine intelligence to human intelligence he is no better than so many of the advocates of AI that I have debated over the years. Read on below if you are interested in my take on this as a complexity scientist evolved from neuroscience.
To set the stage I'll tell you right up front why machine intelligence is never going to be like human intelligence. We can do the meaningless comparison of which will be more powerful later.
Physics is a construct. It studies a surrogate world that has to meet its internal restrictions. It clearly is a huge success in this context. The context has some severe limits and when a question can not be reduced to the context in which physics operates it is deemed an "unscientific question". There are two very famous questions that so far are outside this context.
The first is the origin of life question. We have proved that knowing everything there is to know about the physiology of organisms will never open the door to synthesis. This, by the way, is one of the major reasons why genetic engineering is so important. Genetic engineering operates within the confines of the cell theory: All cells come from other cells. Creating a cell from its constituent material parts has been,and I assert will be, beyond our grasp because we do not know how to use reductionist science to go outside the context of physics into the realm of impredicativity. We do not know how to create complex systems that are based on closed loops of efficient causation. For more on this I recommend A louie's book: More Than Life Itself: A Synthetic Continuation in Relational Biology (Categories)
It is the second famous question that hawking assumes he knows the answer to but clearly does not: What is the relationship between mind and body?
Machine intelligence has often been offered as a model for human intelligence but it has consistently been shown to be totally different in very important ways. Once again it is the existence of closed causal loops that makes the difference. In the comparison between brain and machine we are confronted with a hierarchy of function that defies reduction in the case of the brain. There is no real distinction, as far as we know, between hardware and software and the functioning brain recreates its substance as it functions. I'll leave it at that and you can see if you understand it.
What is really the issue with Hawking's pronouncement is that he misplaces the reason for this:
In December, Hawking said in an interview with the BBC that “the development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.”
For a guy this smart to miss the reason that we may be seeing the beginning of the end for the human race is a clear demonstration of the kind of selective blindness science can produce in the human mind.
We are seeing more and more scientists and others coming out of that prison to recognize that we indeed are destroying the species. They also see the real reason. Need I say it? We have fouled our nest beyond hope and we will go down with all the other life forms we have condemned.
I have written a lot about the limits of reductionist science but this certainly demonstrates what I've been talking about. Hawking is worried about events that can not happen and ignoring the melt down going on right before his eyes. Meanwhile you do not need a cosmologist to tell you which way the wind is blowing.