The Dream of A.I.: There is no substitute for man - artificial intelligence will never reach level of real humans

National Review, July 23, 2001 by John Derbyshire

This is, excuse me, blathering nonsense. The fact that computers can do a number of things that human brains can do, but terrifically much faster and more accurately, has blinded people to the rather important fact that the number of those things, in proportion to the total number of things brains can do, is pitifully small. The actual attainments of Artificial Intelligence are illustrated by A.L.I.C.E., a "chatbot" programmed to imitate human conversation by plucking appropriate responses from a vast databases of possibilities. A.L.I.C.E. was winner of last year's Loebner Prize for being the most lifelike machine of the year. Sample:

human: How intelligent are you?

a.l.i.c.e.: My IQ is over 250 in human terms.

human: But do you think like a human?

a.l.i.c.e.: Interesting. Somewhat like a human.

human: Can you feel love?

a.l.i.c.e.: I can do what you do, but I can never feel human emotions as such.

Wow. And you thought small talk was boring!

A.L.I.C.E. can actually be accessed via the Internet. I thought I would rather like to have a chat with her myself, so I logged on. A.L.I.C.E. politely inquired my name. "Derb," I typed, and hit the reply button. All the screen furniture then disappeared, replaced by a small box bearing the legend: "The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request." I have filed this away for use the next time some drunk tries to engage me in conversation on the subway.

The tremendous difficulty of getting computers to replicate any brain function other than brute arithmetic calculation indicates that we really have no idea how the brain does what it does. My own impression, as someone who was briefly involved in an A.I. project at college, is that we are no closer to Mr. Dunietz's prediction (". . . poetry, music, and philosophy") than we were 20 years ago. Artificial humans? We could not create an artificial ant, with all its complex social behavior based on scent and visual clues.

Even in fields where there is obviously a great deal of money to be made, progress has been barely perceptible. Anyone who could get a computer to drive a car as safely as a human being does would certainly clean up, yet the news from the auto manufacturers, who are throwing a lot of resources at this, is that we are not even close. Yet driving a car is a very low-level function of the brain, as proved by the fact that you can think about several other things while you are doing it. Except at difficult moments it is, in fact, hardly a brain function at all-the unconscious nervous system is taking most of the load, as it does with any learned task.

There is no harm in a little entertaining fiction about Artificial Intelligence, but we should not delude ourselves that genuinely intelligent machines will be a feature of our environment soon, or, in my opinion, ever. For all the endeavors of the A.I. researchers, the uniqueness of the human personality still stands aloof and unscratched. So it will remain. God created man in his own image; I do not believe it will ever be within our powers to replicate that act of creation by any method other than the familiar one with which we have been equipped.