Gödel, Escher, Bach An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas R. Hofstadter

seriously. But in some ways, those AI workers are right: it is a little
premature to think about computers crying; we must first think about rules
for computers to deal with language and other things; in time, we'll find
ourselves face to face with the deeper issues.

AI Has Far to Go

Sometimes it seems that there is such a complete absence of rule-governed

behavior that human beings just aren't rule-governed. But this is an

illusion-a little like thinking that crystals and metals emerge from rigid

underlying laws, but that fluids or flowers don't. We'll come back to this

question in the next Chapter.

The process of logic itself working internally in the brain may be more

analogous to a succession of operations with symbolic pictures, a sort of

abstract analogue of the Chinese alphabet or some Mayan description of

events-except that the elements are not merely words but more like sen-

tences or whole stories with linkages between them forming a sort of meta-or

super-logic with its own rules.^5

It is hard for most specialists to express vividly-perhaps even to

remember-what originally sparked them to enter their field. Conversely,

someone on the outside may understand a field's special romance and may

be able to articulate it precisely. I think that is why this quote from Ulam

has appeal for me, because it poetically conveys the strangeness of the

enterprise of AI, and yet shows faith in it. And one must run on faith at this

point, for there is so far to go!

Ten Questions and Speculations

To conclude this Chapter, I would like to present ten "Questions and
Speculations" about AI. I would not make so bold as to call them
"Answers"-these are my personal opinions. They may well change in
some ways, as I learn more and as AI develops more. (In what follows, the
term "AI program" means a program which is far ahead of today's pro-
grams; it means an "Actually Intelligent" program. Also, the words "pro-
gram" and "computer" probably carr} overly mechanistic connotations, but
let us stick with them anyway.)

Question: Will a computer program ever write beautiful music?
Speculation: Yes, but not soon. Music is a language of emotions, and
until programs have emotions as complex as ours, there is no way a
program will write anything beautiful. There can be "forgeries"-
shallow imitations of the syntax of earlier music-but despite what one
might think at first, there is much more to musical expression than can
be captured in syntactical rules. There will be no new kinds of beauty
turned up for a long time by computer music-composing programs.
Let me carry this thought a little further. To think-and I have heard

(^676) Artificial Intelligence: Prospects