Monday, August 09, 2004

Is the artificial intelligence dangerous?

Almost every movie that talks about the future, mentions the artificial intelligence as part (or the entire) of the problem, they are talking about. They paint a world in where the machines with artificial intelligence are trying to destruct us. Therefore, almost every body thinks that the artificial intelligence is something dangerous, even though they do not know what it is. But is that the truth?

The following essay is talking about that theme and I think it is enough interesting because of the point of view it gives.

While giving one suck more to the aromatic Chinese tea, doctor Eugenio Huissan waits that his secretary, Natasha, finishes subtracting the information of the mind from his patient in turn. Doctor Huissan is the best psychiatrist of the time and the most remarkable prove that human intelligence lacks of limits, and, probably for that reason, he is one of the more enigmatic human beings. Admirer of thinkers “out of fashion” like C. Jung, S. Freud, and F. Nietzsche, this researcher has developed the most novel and accepted of the time theories about the operation of the brain and the cognitive processes relative to it, obtaining with this enormous advances in the treatment of the mental diseases. In the old times, having a mental disease meant to have an incurable disease, depending on a “drug” in order to continue living in the most reasonably way that one could, and (this was the worst in most of the cases, since the ignorance usually takes to commit serious stupidities) to not have any reason about the origin of the damage. Nowadays the situation is very different, science has been developed as much as now they are knowing the source of almost every mental disease, and this, combined to the fact that the detection of these diseases has advanced in such a way that there are required only a few minutes to diagnose them correctly, even before the patient can have at least the minimum symptom of them, allows that the origin of the problem can be eliminated before it causes problems...

Tuesday, August 03, 2004

I know there are a lot of people who think that a machine will never be as "intelligent" as the human beings, but for some others there is no reason for thinking that, since the other way imply that human beings have some "misterious" thing that makes them special in front the rest of the animals. And that thought sounds as ridiculous as the arguments given by the oppositors to the Darwin´s evolution theory.

For those scientist that do not believe in the artificial intelligence I leave a phrase attibuted to Edsger Dijkstra:

"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim."