The March 29, 2007
PinFeed Almanack
Extinction

      Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
          - Arthur C Clarke
  
  Ever since Ada programmed Babbage's calculator, we've been trying to get 
  machines to think like humans, and they're getting pretty good at it.  You 
  might think that because so many of us are trying so hard to make machines 
  think, that everyone wants machines to think; or that machines thinking is an 
  inevitability.  Not necessarily, on either count.  A lot of people are bothered
  by the concept of 'artificial intelligence', and savor the citations of its 
  failures.  For the record, The Almanack believes in the inevitability of a 
  machine passing a Turing test:  in the foreseeable future, it will be possible 
  for a machine to convince at least a casual interrogator that a human is 
  responding.  But that still doesn't mean that a machine will think 'like a 
  human'.  There's no percentage in building a machine that's silly, whimsical, 
  and irrational - that would take away the fun from humans, and make the machine
  untrustworthy.
  
  Ray Kurzweil has a lot more to say on the subject of machine intelligence, with 
  a lot more erudition than I can bring to it, although he doesn't waste a lot of
  ink on machine irrationality.  Click on the 'Singularitarian' link, at right.
  
  If artificial intelligence eschews whimsy, does natural intelligence embrace it?
  
  Of what possible evolutionary utility might silliness have been?
  
  The Times today reports that the Mass Extinction didn't result in the immediate
  ascendence of modern mammals.  Some species rushed to fill the gap created by
  the death of the dinosaurs, but were superceded by the 'long fuse' of others
  which evolved more slowly.
  
  PBS ran a show called Boomer Century last evening.  Boomers, of course, were
  the children of the 50s, an era of unprecedented growth and prosperity for
  US industry.  We grew up with the assumption that our technology and expertise
  were just naturally superior and more evolved than the rest of the world's.
  It came as a huge shock to find in the 70s that German and Japanese 
  companies were developing, and they could make steel and cars, the staples of 
  our economy, as good as ours.  No, better.  The reason American industry was 
  so effortlessly superior in the 50s was that the competition had been bombed
  into oblivion.  
  
  Now, call it whimsy if you like, but there's an analogy in these two stories. 
  Consider that pre-war American industry was like some dinosaur-era mammalia.
  When the competition went extinct, it leapt into the breach.  Other 'species',
  if you will, took longer to evolve - it required 40 years of rebuilding
  and the Marshall plan to seed the genes, but competition has cast Toyota in
  the role of dominant mammal of the post-extinction era.
  
  The imperfections in the analogy are enormous, which makes it highly unlikely 
  that a machine would ever come up with such a non-rational idea.  On the
  other hand, a machine might be very useful for analyzing the idea to find both
  the imperfections, and the potential applications.
  
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