Speculation: Probably the differences between AI programs and people
will be larger than the differences between most people. It is almost
impossible to imagine that the "body" in which an AI program is
housed would not affect it deeply. So unless it had an amazingly
faithful replica of a human body-and why should it?-it would prob-
ably have enormously different perspectives on what is important.
what is interesting, etc. Wittgenstein once made the amusing comment,
"If a lion could speak, we would not understand him." It makes me
think of Rousseau's painting of the gentle lion and the sleeping gypsy
on the moonlit desert. But how does Wittgenstein know? My guess is
that any AI program would, if comprehensible to us, seem pretty alien.
For that reason, we will have a very hard time deciding when and if we
really are dealing with an Al program, or just a "weird" program.Question: Will we understand what intelligence and consciousness and free
will and "I" are when we have made an intelligent program?
Speculation: Sort of-it all depends on what you mean by "understand".680
On a gut level, each of us probably has about as good an understand-
ing as is possible of those things, to start with. It is like listening to
music. Do you really understand Bach because you have taken him
apart? Or did you understand it that time you felt the exhilaration in
every nerve in your body? Do we understand how the speed of light is
constant in every inertial reference frame? We can do the math, but no
one in the world has a truly relativistic intuition. And probably no one
will ever understand the mystenes of intelligence and consciousness in
an intuitive way. Each of us can understand people, and that is probably
about as close as you can come.Artificial Intelligence: Prospects