Ray Kurzweil’s The Age of Spiritual Machines depicts the author’s assumptions about the future of computer technology after evolving in the next few decades. According to Kurzweil, just as computers finally defeated humans in a game of chess, they will one day become more powerful that the human brain (16). Artificial intelligence (AI) will surpass the human mind through two possible ways: through self-replicating nanobots or human minds that are downloadable just as software and the infiltration of the human body by computer systems. Eventually, humanity would witness the dawn of “spiritual machines” that would have legal rights as a species and have a consciousness that might surpass that of human beings. However, while Kurzweil claims that machines would be superior to humans, he seems to deny that there are qualities a human brain possesses and machines cannot achieve them for quite a while, if ever.
The issues that spiritual machines raise revolve around the types of thinking that the human brain can perform through heuristic and algorithmic activity (Dreyfus and Dreyfus 19). Algorithmic activity encompasses what computers can do and with the right programming, the machines can perform such tasks faster than humans can while claiming superiority in the same. For instance, progress in AI allows systems to perform logical operations and rapid calculations that the human brain might not be able to carry out within the same time limit. However, the human brain carries out a different form of thinking or the heuristic activity that draws information from multiple phenomena to execute an action. A perfect explanation is available in Stefano Franchi & Güven Güzeldere’s Mechanical Bodies, Computational Minds where the authors present a philosophical analysis of AI research. Apparently, an individual’s ability to cope with the world is not subject to intelligence but rather “implicit [and] non-verbalizable set of social practices” originating from his or her interactions with the environment (Franchi and Güzeldere).
In other words, there are observations, “corporal dispositions, [and] acquired skills” that come into play when the human mind makes a decision. For the AI machines, such social interactions are impossible to achieve while the psychological processes involved are nonexistent. Concurrently, Allen Newell and Herbert A. Simon quote Plato’s views on learning and discovering from a philosophical perspective. In the philosopher’s assertions, when people think that they are “learning something new” they recall that which they knew from a previous existence (Newell and Simon 121). After all, there is no way for someone to realize that he or she did know something without prior information to make the new details a discovery. Machines are incapable of such ideologies and as a result, AI can never reach the proportions of a human brain.
Works Cited
Dreyfus, Stuart E. and Dreyfus Hubert L. "Making a mind versus modelling the brain: artificial intelligence back at a branch point." Daedalus 117.1 (1988): 15-43. Print.
Franchi, Stefano and Güzeldere Güven. Mechanical Bodies, Computational Minds. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005. Print.
Kurzweil, Ray. The Age of Spiritual Machines. New York: Penguin, 1999. Print.
Newell, Allen and Simon Herbert A. "Computer Science as Empirical Inquiry: Symbols and Search." Communications of the ACM 19.3 (1976): 113-126. Print.
