August
2, 2001.
A STORY ABOUT: AI,
AND THE HINT OF: RI
_____________________
In a secret lab, a man has fulfilled
the dream of many,
and constructed a robot which
meets all the
standard requirements for having
Artificial Intelligence.
It reacts to changes in its
environment as quickly & appropriately
as any human being, and can
recognize threats to its well being,
and take suitable counteraction;
it can remember at will, its
past, and can plan,
via the manipulation of abstract/numerical
data, future actions,
it can furthermore expand and
reprogram itself
with no outside assistance.
Its creator relaxed for a while,
in the joy of his accomplishment,
but soon became restless, and
pondered if any improvements
could therein be made.
He considered in ever increasing
detail what differences still existed between man and his robot,
but truth is, he had done such
an extraordinary job in its construction that he was finally down to but
a single distinction:
humans reflect on their own
existence.
By all definitions -- the
robot could, “Think” --
but it could NOT --
think-about-itself:
this literally was the only
thing it lacked that is a
standard part of being human.
Making the robot capable of thinking
about itself proved to be
a greater challenge than all
that had gone before;
soon the man had spent more
fruitless time on this task
than it had taken to build the
thinking robot to begin with,
and he was close to resignation
on the project;
tempted to conclude that, thinking-about-itself
was the one thing that no machine
could ever be made to do.
Then suddenly one day an unexpected
thought came to the man
in the form of a question:
“What benefit does man derive
from,
thinking-about-himself?”
Almost instantly, the inventor
was so agitated that he fled the lab,
and went for a long, high speed
drive in the cold night air –
all windows open.
Alone in the dark on the highway,
he drove for hour after hour,
rolling this question up &
down; back & forth; left to right,
and every other way possible
in his mind:
”What exactly is the specific
benefit in, thinking-about-yourself?”
Sometimes just the repeating
of the question would excite him so
that he would almost momentarily
lose control of the car.
He did much uproarious laughing
aloud;
he slapped the dash --
he beat on the steering wheel,
and his eyes showed as much
white as biology does allow,
as on and on he drove through
the enlightening desolation,
saying to himself, over &
over:
”What at all is accomplished
by our, thinking-about-our-self?”
As the morning sun began to show
over the horizon,
the man was pulling back into
his hidden location,
and when he stepped through
the door of the lab, the robot said:
“Where have you been, and what
have you been up to?
and why, for the first time
since I began to think,
am I having disturbing suspicions
regarding your plans for me?”
-- a question almost as
good as the one its creator had toyed with
all night long.
J
(Tomorrow a story concerning, AF and its counterpart.)
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