Arguments Against AI

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Lady Lovelace's Objection: "Our most detailed information of Babbage's Analytical Engine comes from a memoir by Lady Lovelace. In it she states, 'The Analytical Engine has no pretensions to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform.' [and, by implication, no more than that]
From: Turing, A.M. (1950). Computing machinery and intelligence. Mind, 59, 433-460.

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Philosophy of AI. From Mark Humphrys, Lecturer, School of Computing, Dublin City University. "Philosophy of AI is a history of "big names". The debates are great fun to watch. Here are some big names and my take on them. You don't have to agree with me of course."

A.M. Turing: "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" (1950). In this article, Turing not only proposes the Imitation Game in its original form, but addresses nine different arguments against AI, including Goedel's theorem and consciousness. Several recent arguments against AI are variations on the ones Turing enumerates. (PDF file of the orignal journal article downloadable from Oxford University Press).

Searle's Chinese Room Argument

Chinese Room Argument. Entry by John R. Searle in the MIT Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science. "The Chinese room argument is a refutation of strong artificial intelligence. 'Strong AI' is defined as the view that an appropriately programmed digital computer with the right inputs and outputs, one that satisfies the Turing test, would necessarily have a mind."

• Also see:
  • Chinese room - An argument forwarded by John Searle intended to show that the mind is not a computer and how the Turing Test is inadequate. By Chris Eliasmith. Dictionary of Philosophy of Mind.
  • The Chinese Room Argument. By Larry Hauser. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
  • Two interviews with John Searle and this panel discussion.
  • The question of consciousness. Philosopher's Zone, presented by Alan Saunders. ABC Radio National (May 20, 2006). A transcript and audio downloads are available."Alan Saunders: Hello, I'm Alan Saunders, welcome to The Philosopher's Zone. This week, a virtuoso public performance by one of the most important philosophers in the English-speaking world today: John Searle, Professor of the Philosophy of Mind and Language at the University of California, Berkeley. He's talking at 'Towards a Science of Consciousness', a conference put on last month by the Center for Consciousness Studies at the University of Arizona. His subject is dualism. More than 350 years ago, the great French philosopher, Rene Déscartes, declared that the mind is a thing that thinks and does not occupy space, whereas the body occupies space and does not think. The decisive argument for this, he said, is that body is by its nature divisible: you can cut it up into little pieces, but you can't do that with a mind. This appears to imply that the mind and the body have a different ontological status - in other words, you don't lump them together when you draw up your ontology, that's to say your inventory of what the universe contains. This is dualism, and John Searle's not happy with the idea. John Searle: I have been trying to get out of the consciousness business for a very simple reason: I think once we get it in a kind of shape where it admits of empirical study, it's essentially a problem for a neurobiologist. I mean, there are a lot of other problems for psychology and cognitive science, but the problems that most interest me are things are like, well, how exactly does it work in the brain? That, I see as a neurobiological problem. ... Now people always tell me it was very hard to define consciousness, but I think if you're just looking for the kind of commonsense definition that you get at the beginning of the investigation, and not at the hard-nosed scientific definition that comes at the end, it's not hard to give a commonsense definition of consciousness. Consciousness consists of those states of feeling or sentience or awareness...."

Noel Sharkey argues that "These ideas are based on the assumption that intelligence is computational. It might be, and equally it might not be. My work is on immediate problems in AI, and there is no evidence that machines will ever overtake us or gain sentience."

Why That "Jeopardy!" Computer Isn't That Smart By: Vinoth Ramachandra (January 26, 2012) from EthicsDaily.com, a division of the Baptist Center for Ethics, a Nashville-based 501(c)3 founded in 1991 by Robert Parham. A restatement of Searle's Chinese Room argument for the layman. "There is nothing new in the way scientists take the most advanced machines of their day as models or analogies for human functioning. Steam engines and telegraph systems have served this purpose before. But there is a short (though calamitous) step from modeling to identification. We then imagine that machines that help us perform certain functions have those functions themselves."

Common Fallacies in Arguments Against AI

The Section on the AI Effect describes the common perception that computer programs are "only" programs no matter how intelligent they may seem.

Turing's 1950 classic article Computing Machinery and Intelligence lists and dismisses several objections to artificial intelligence that are still heard today.

Books and Articles Not Available on the Web

Dennett, Daniel C. 1988. When Philosophers Encounter Artificial Intelligence. Daedalus 117 (1): 283-296. *NOTE: All articles in this section listed from the journal Daedalus 117(1) are reprinted in the book The Artificial Intelligence Debate: False Starts, Real Foundations, ed. Stephen R. Graubard. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990.

Dreyfus, Hubert. 1992. What Computers Still Can't Do: A Critique of Artificial Reason. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Dreyfus, Hubert. 1979. What Computers Can't Do: The Limits of Artificial Intelligence. Revised edition. New York: Harper and Row.

Dreyfus, H., S. Dreyfus, and T. Athanasiou. 1986. Mind Over Machine: The Power of Human Intuition and Expertise in the Era of the Computer. Oxford: Blackwell. Ford, Kenneth, Clark Glymour, and Patrick Hayes, editors. 1995. Android Epistemology. Menlo Park, CA: AAAI Press. Approaches artificial intelligence and cognitive psychology as a unified endeavor, with AI focused on possible ways of engineering intelligence and cognitive science on reverse engineering a particular intelligent system. Sixteen essays by computer scientists and philosophers.

Haugeland, John. 1985. Artificial Intelligence: The Very Idea. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Lanier, Jaron, "Confusions of the Hive Mind", CACM, September 2009 (available online by subscription). Opinion piece starts as: "Be cautious about the artificial intelligence approach to computer science. It is impossible to differentiate the actual achievement of AI from the degree to which people change when confronted with what is purported to be intelligent technology. We humans are vulnerable to bending over backward, sometimes making ourselves significantly stupider, in order to make an algorithm seem smart. ....%quot;

Penrose, Roger. 1989. The Emperor's New Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds and the Laws of Physics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

(LaForte, Geoffrey, Patrick J. Hayes, and Kenneth M. Ford. 1998. Why Godel's Theorem Cannot Refute Computationalism. Artificial Intelligence 104 (1/2): 211-264. The authors find flaws in Roger Penrose's claim that Godel's theorem implies that human thought cannot be mechanized..)

Putnam, Hillary. 1988. Much Ado About Not Very Much. Daedalus 117 (1): 269-282. Reprinted in Dennett (1988).

Searle, John R. 1992. The Rediscovery of the Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Sam Williams. 2002. Arguing A.I.: The Battle for Twenty-first-Century Science. Random House. From Publishers Weekly: "In Arguing A.I.: The Battle for Twenty-First Century Science, journalist Sam Williams presents a compact yet detailed approach to the controversial subject of artificial intelligence. Although the notion of A.I. might conjure up images of science fiction movie characters, it's actually a very real science, one that technophiles are consumed in a serious debate over, especially since the threat of technology surpassing human intelligence frightens many. Williams profiles A.I.'s key players: German mathematician David Hilbert, American scientist John McCarthy and hi-tech CEO Ray Kurzweil, among others. Mainly an overview of the A.I. debate, Williams's slim volume is a good introduction to this complicated controversy." Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Winograd, Terry. 1990. Thinking Machines: Can there be? Are we? In Foundations of Artificial Intelligence: A Sourcebook, ed. Partridge, D. and Y. Wilks, 167-189. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.