The Age of Artificial Intelligence

As long as I can remember, artificial intelligence has fascinated me. It is a strange idea, that we, who had no control over our own creation, can replicate the beauty of life (or at least, parts of it) in machines. What really got interested in AI is how similar computers are to us. Many of the chips in our computers are made of silicon, which is right below carbon on the periodic table. And of course, carbon is the magical element that makes life for us and countless other organisms possible. Hard drives store memory, and the central processing unit (CPU), well, processes. That seems awfully reminiscent of the human brain. As much as we know about the brain, however, I would dare to say that there is even more that we don't know.

It is undeniable how far technology has come. Communication across the globe takes seconds. We have supercomputers that can beat masters at chess. Wolfram Alpha, Siri, and Google Translate are simply mind-blowing. We've come a long way since the wheel, but just how much farther can we go? In more recent times, more and more people are debating the issue of whether artificial intelligence is possible. It is a question that only the future can tell, but it seems to me that we shouldn't rule out the possibility quite yet. After all, no one in the Middle Ages would've believed that humans would invent something that could fly.

But before I get into the arguments for the possibility of artificial intelligence, let's define this term. Interestingly enough, much of the debate of AI deals with what we define AI to be. Merriam-webster defines AI as "the capability of a machine to imitate intelligent human behavior." The definition leaves room for a great deal of interpretation. For example, there is no mention as to whether the machine would be autonomous or not. Could it survive by itself, obtaining the resources it requires to survive? Could it reproduce, which would ultimately make it an actual living organism?

Unfortunately, those questions require much more probing (more than we can do on this post), so we'll return to those questions possibly in a later post. For now, we will focus on the central argument of AI, which has always been, "Can computers think?" In other words, can we artificially create intelligence? There are many who believe that such a feat is impossible, that humans are unique because of their intelligene and reason. A book I once read, Ishmael, spoke of how humans perceive themselves as the superior species, similar to how we see ourselves as more beautiful than we actually are.

We tout the human species for having the "reason" that is lacking in other animals. Yet computers have a logic superior to our own. Their only flaw is that they lack the emotions, feelings, or intuition that we supposedly have. But what are these emotions that we feel except a bunch of nerves sending signals to each other in our brain? And as for any arguments for intuition, rather than "feeling," intuition is more like utilizing what we know as data to (perhaps unconsciously) arrive to a reasonable conclusion.

In an attempt to avoid controversy, I will leave this final question unanswered: do humans have souls? If not, what is it about computers that makes them so different from humans? Atoms are atoms, and they compose you, me, and computers.