My Problems With AI By S Sudhakaran
INTRODUCTION
Before I dive deep into my allergy to the term “Artificial Intelligence”, I must take you on a brief tour into my childhood days to understand where and how it all began. The pathological hatred to this term stemmed out of an intense romance I had with the phenomena of Intelligence in organic beings and my quest to foolishly believe as a teenager that Intelligence can be mimicked with some elementary tools of the 90’s. From then on till now I have more or less imagined myself as an alchemist who one day would crack this enigmatic code of life or least contribute a penny or two to the treasure trove of Intelligence of future beings.
FLASHBACK & HOW IT ALL STARTED
My life as a computer programmer started very early as compared to most in my peer groups. I was barely in class 8 when I had already developed my first program in GW Basic at the high school lab. My teacher was the first beneficiary of my program to automate the task of collating and printing the Rank list of my class. The Reports would get ready in a jiffy and she was always the first of the block to submit the results, all thanks to my little piece of work. But to be honest I did extract my pound of flesh for that little favour I bestowed on my teacher. I used to digitally doctor the marks of some borderline failure cases and be a hero to my helpless friends who always found it difficult to touch the passing grades. From that humble beginning with that interpreter language, I could make animations of the Indian space program, visually depicted in a mono chrome screen. There was no internet those days, nor was any github repository, the codes were all written and executed line by line. It was for a district level software competition in the summer of 1990, that we ended up completing this work and Boy !! we were the eventual winners and the judges scrutinized me by breaking the code execution mid-way and asking about the definition of each variable and what was the purpose and function of each one of them.
THE FIRST INTELLIGENT PROGRAM ATTEMPT
When I look back at that trophy I won, I do feel a sense of pride today as I type this story on an AMD Ryzen eight core machine with 64 GB RAM and 3 TB of HD with an SSD Slot. Compute has indeed come a long way from the x186 processors with a few hundred KB Ram and 51/4 amkette floppy drives of the 90’s that was in my school lab. The Next attempt was an Intelligent program. Yes, you heard it right. Without knowing anything more than some bit of advanced knowledge of GW Basic and the basic architecture of a personal computer, I ventured into the ocean of Intelligence. I still vividly remember those stretch of endless nights till the dawn, that I would spend at the school computer lab. The First AI or so I can call definitely today was a program made to identify the sex of a person from the name of a person. Nopes! It was not an identification by comparison. It was about splitting the phonetics of the word and matching it with a certain type of gender. Did it work? It was a colossal failure. Every time it would adjust and by fluke it did get right when most of my crushes stopped by to check on me and my system!! But that is where my real journey began. Why did I fail? and I already had a hundred answers and those answers like a swarm of flies after a monsoon rain, multiplied by the thousands in my head. This actually ended up screwing my results in less interesting subjects like biology and chemistry. But Maths and Physics did benefit out of it as, I realized that I had to use a lot of the algebraic equations to get some part of the system right. The Physics part was mostly to do with how can I fasten it even more. The bias towards Maths, Physics and Computer Science did reflect in my results and with 99% I did comfortably manage to get into engineering. It’s there I realized I was exposed to a world far ahead of time than my peer groups.
THE BEST TEACHER : FAILURE
At the college, it was all again elementary learning and I was terribly bored learning something I already knew. In every crisis comes an opportunity and so did for me. I got back in pursuit of my questions that failed me a good four years back. The fundamental question I was grappling with was why can’t programs be more intelligent and efficient. Why are they so dumb and black and white? These questions took me to various paper presentations at various colleges and my favorite subject still was Intelligence. To be very honest I was deeply disappointed when I came across the term “Artificial Intelligence” for the first time. I almost thought it was so stupid and foolish to have coined such a term for such an important aspect of human evolution. Yes!! You heard it right. Human evolution.
EVOLUTION OF INFORMATION & INTELLIGENCE
Computers are not mere by products of the Industrial revolution. They are part of our evolutionary process and shall redefine he way our future generations might be. To make it clearer if we look at life and living beings, they have two major things. A set of Instructions or Software to ensure life goes on, reproduces by itself and a body or hardware to execute these set of instructions. Genes and Metabolism are the two biological definitions that explain this phenomenon, but a virus in a digital world with no life pretty much does the same thing. Biologically DNA molecule holds cryptic information about life as a whole. The birth of this mechanism to transmit information from one being to another has sped up the whole evolutionary process. It took billions of years for life to reach this stage of human evolution to begin with. But the invention of languages to transmit information has in a few thousand years taken us to a stage where we have begun to unravel the whole cosmic mystery.
The onset of the information era fueled by the computing power has now brought as to the brink of redesign of the human information processing system. We have started using augmented reality and a whole suite of information processing devices and applications to do most things in our life at the mere click of a button. Modern devices respond to gestures and voice commands. While technology has made our lives easy and lazy at the same time it has now presented us with the opportunity of doing more in less time. This information onslaught will end up tinkering our genes naturally, but more so due to advances in technology. Invasion of the genetic code which is tweaked by a digital device for better performance can produce a significantly different being. That shall be our next stage of evolution, before the being starts self-designing itself towards immortality unless it finds it hard to junk the organic regime due to the bondage with pleasure associated.
PROBLEM WITH THE DEFINITION
For the time being this is not the problem I have with Artificial Intelligence. It’s the basic definition of it. Artificial means that which is not real or natural or copy of something natural. The association of the word Artificial with the word is itself incorrect. The whole aim and purpose of AI is to replicate or copy natural intelligence. The Intelligence could be very elementary of a fish or an animal or a human being. But it’s the intelligence that we are trying to replicate. The word artificial associates an unnatural or unreal aspect to intelligence. While we aim to replicate intelligence in its entirety, the method or the vehicle used to deliver such a result is not organic. Intelligence is a phenomenon exhibited by organic beings and if and inorganic element is used to replicate such a phenomenon the definition can at best be called “Synthetic Intelligence” than being called as Artificial Intelligence. Many would wonder as to what is in a name? Often names set course the journey towards the end goal.
AI is the most misused terminology in todays times. Everything from a shoe to a washing machine has intelligence embedded in it or so people claim. What exactly is intelligence or its nature. Is intelligence about comparing something in the memory and delivering a right answer? Cats, Dogs for that matter most animals have better characteristics than human being. Can we really call them intelligent? Is Intelligence about computation. If I know the values of certain parameters and arrive at a certain result using a standard algebraic formula would that qualify as an intelligent behavior? certainly not. Both these aspects are at best skills and competencies. Intelligence is about abstract reasoning and arriving at solutions in novel situations. Its about an intuitive ability to reason and arrive at the most optimal solution while accessing all the data, information at the disposal. It is far too complex phenomenon to describe, but the one simple aspect of intelligence is that it always displays patterns of method and logic retrospectively. So with this being the broad meaning of intelligence, the term Artificial Intelligence erodes away the characteristics of intelligence and lays greater stress on the methods used to achieve such replications.
WHY SYNTHETIC INTELLIGENCE
The word Synthetic on the other hand just would amplify the sheer innate nature of such intelligence, while being composed of the same fundamental element carbon which is even basic to the existence of organic beings. While the end results of harvesting Intelligence shall be materialized without any prejudice, the paths may be different (Organic and Inorganic) but the basic composition of the paths essentially shall remain the same. In true sense the beginning and the end shall all be the same. Let it be Synthetic and not Artificial.