Artificial Life v. Artificial Knees

Ever since the announcement (here) on May 20 that The J. Craig Venter Institute had produced a synthetic genome and inserted it into an already living bacterium to replace its homegrown DNA, news stories have reported this event as the creation of artificial life and then, quite rapidly, without missing a beat, you might say, moved right on to a discussion about the rights and wrongs of letting Venter patent such “life.” Here I simply want to note that replacing some element of a living organism is not exactly news. What Venter and his team have done—and what is news—is to replace a very complex element of a bacterium, namely the coding that defines the chemicals that make up the bacterium’s working parts. The DNA, although synthesized from chemicals, still has the same information as the original code—plus some “watermarks” to show the intervention. DNA is chemically coded information; if it’s missing something the bacterium needs, the bacterium dies.  DNA isn’t life; it is a tool of life. So is a knee. Millions of people go about their business with artificial knees, not least my partner for life. The artificial life issue has everything in common with the artificial intelligence issue; there, as yet, we don’t even have good imitations. I reserve my astonishment and wonder for that time (should it ever actually arrive) when scientists in sealed suits are locked into clean-rooms filled with appropriate inorganic chemicals in thousands and thousands of bottles and proceed to produce an actual living bacterium from scratch—thus from the inorganic chemicals. Sealed suits? Yes. We wouldn’t want them surreptitiously to borrow an actual living cell from their own bodies in the process. Better yet, why not lock artificially intelligent robots into that room instead of humans? That would be the perfect test. We’re getting smart enough to tinker with life. To make it from scratch is something else.

All Understand It Very Forgiving

The other day I discovered that people from other countries sometimes ask Google to translate some of my posts into their own tongues. The most common route is from English to Spanish. Just for fun I asked Google to translate one of my pieces into German. The result produced a good half hour’s laughter and merriment for Brigitte and me. An article today about complexity in the New York Times—it caught Brigitte’s attention, we talked about it, and I’ll comment at some point in the future—reminded me of the application of mechanics to language.

Artificial Intelligence is a kind of bête noire for me—an innocent way to vent frustrations about much deeper errors of the current era. AI’s march is not exactly triumphal, and least so where genuine intelligence is absolutely necessary to make the machine perform. Therefore it delights me to present the translation of Madame de Staël’s rendition of that famous phrase, tout comprendre, c’est tout pardonner. She said: Tout comprendre rend très indulgent. This Google renders as “All understand it very forgiving.”

The child is learning to speak! Oh, what a wonderful, wonderful child…

Ai, Ai, Ai!

The coincident appearance of two accounts recently reminded me again that Artificial Intelligence is supposedly advancing even as Ordinary Intelligence is visibly in decline. Indeed the two may be aspects of each other. The first was a New York Times piece titled “Scientists Worry Machines May Outsmart Man,” June 26. This was on the front page yet! The other was “Droning On,” by William S. Lind, in The American Conservative.

The first story reports without commentary on a conference held by computer scientists, members of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, at Asilomar in California. Nice place, Asilomar: beachside conference center nestled in lovely pine woods, walks on the beach, a great surf, fresh, modern facilities, all wood (except for pristine plumbing) a genuinely Danish atmosphere. And here people sat about thinking about the end of the human era, an intelligence explosion, and machines that can empathize with you one moment and kill you the next. These brainy people, to quote the story, “generally discounted the possibility of highly centralized superintelligences and the idea that intelligence might spring spontaneously from the Internet.” At the same time, however, they wondered: “What could a criminal do with a speech synthesis system that could masquerade as a human being?”

In the second story, politically incorrect William Lind dares to question the current and insane military doctrine that victory belongs to the technologist. He excoriates the military for using drone aircraft as killing machines. His article is well worth reading. Lind, wisely, puts the focus on the people behind the gadgets rather than marveling at machines. But the two stories converge. In the first scientists wring their hands; they let themselves imagine that machines have actual volition; in the second military people are depicted believing that weapons systems win military conflicts rather than people.

The mere fact that such nutty notions can gain traction is literally proof that ordinary intelligence—or, rather, its serious education—has been too long neglected. We are evidently sinking into barbarism in the midst of a vast technological expansion. Reluctantly, over the years, I’ve come to accept that math and engineering can be taught to and applied at very high levels by people who’ve managed, ultimately, to stay very stupid. So also can administration, accounting, and even law. There are hierarchies of knowledge, and the technical is nowhere near the top.

Circumstances so arranged things that I came to master the computer thing—and at a fundamental enough level so that I genuinely understand it. I was over forty when I started. Dante’s launch into the Inferno is not a bad analogy:

Midway this way of life we’re bound upon,
I woke to find myself in a dark wood,
Where the right road was wholly lost and gone.
Ay me! [Inferno, Canto I]

Ai, Ai, indeed. But, like Dante, I too had a skillful inner guide, and so it all worked out. In those days I remember the wonder and amusement with which I plowed my way through Douglas Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach thinking, along the way, that we may have lost God but we’ve certainly discovered magic. We would form the body of an artificial man out of silicon—well, it is a kind of refined sort of dust—and then it would come alive. Or so Hofstadter hoped and believed. But breathing the breath of life into this artificial beast is proving a bit difficult it seems. Huff, puff, huff, puff. It’s not working yet, but faith, surely, conquers all.