Members with This Book
Most Helpful Reviews
see all reviews
Liked It “EXCEEDS EXPECTATIONS CREATED BY ITS TITLE With high praise from such giants as Sir Arthur C. Clarke and Doctor David Brin on the dust jacket, I asked myself where I, unlettered and relative to those men barely conscious, think I'm going trying to write a review. I have a friend who likes to...” see full review » see other reviews » |
Newest Reviews
see all reviews-
“EXCEEDS EXPECTATIONS CREATED BY ITS TITLE With high praise from such giants as Sir Arthur C. Clarke and Doctor David Brin on the dust jacket, I asked myself where I, unlettered and relative to those men barely conscious, think I'm going trying to write a review. I have a friend who likes to say he never lets ignorance stop him from expressing his opinion on a subject. Guess I remember that one `cause it fits me so well, so here goes. In his 1950 paper "Computing Machinery and Intelligence", Alan Turing grouped the arguments opposing the possibility of machine intelligence into the following nine categories: 1- The Theological Objection - thinking is a function of the soul. Machines have no souls, so cannot think. 2 - The "Heads in the Sand" Objection - Thinking machines cannot be possible because the consequences would be too dreadful. 3 - The Mathematical Objection - Mechanical reasoning has certain provable limitations that human thought may not share. 4 - The Argument from Consciousness - Machines have no inner experiences to give meaning to their utterances, actions, or internal operations. 5 - Arguments from Various Disabilities - Machines will never be kind, moral, joyous, perceptive, original, etc. 6 - Lady Lovelace's Objection - Computers do only what we program them to do. 7 - The Argument from Continuity in the Nervous System - Nerves respond to arbitrarily tiny signal differences, while computers work in fixed-size steps. 8 - The Argument from Informality of Behavior - It is not possible to specify for a machine what to do in every possible circumstance a human might encounter. 9 - The Argument from Extrasensory Perception - Humans sometimes sense remote or future information unavailable to deterministic processes in computers. Moravec provides current arguments countering each item above, but central to all seems to be this: the principle difference between human and machine is we are conscious. This state, however, is so complex we are unable to explain it. Neither do we understand how or from where it arises in our brains. The author offers a compelling posit; If as of Robot's publication (1999), the most powerful computers could process a million MIPS (million instructions per second), computers capable of a billion MIPS should be just over the horizon. It will be then, Moravec projects, that the mysterious and exclusively human state we call "consciousness" will be revealed to be not exclusive at all, but merely the capacity to accumulate, process, and interpret sufficient amounts of data in the span of each instant of time - and that when this is achieved, computers will sense the state of their surroundings and thus become "conscious" in the same way we are. He lays the groundwork for this leap carefully, detailing his personal experiences in robotics and the pace of advances in the field. Arriving at the present day situation, he then takes us step by careful step into the future. It's all completely understandable and reasonable. Eventually though, his vision of the future exceeds my ability to absorb. I confess to less than a complete understanding of his universe of the future. One thing I did get loud and clear: there were no humans there. Consider robots an intellectual mutation. These creatures we make will first surpass and then replace us, become us, probably in very much the same way we ourselves replaced the less capable lifeforms we arose from in the distant past. It's not a grim future the author envisions for humanity; it's a comfortable even spiritual retirement. Refuse to accept this, and you'll need to deny Darwin's theories too. Think about it. Art Tirrell is the author of the underwater adventure novel "The Secret Ever Keeps" which does not contain robotics but does contain "...Simply put, the best underwater scenes I've ever read..." Meg W, reviewer. See the full review on amazon at /product/1601640048”
Art T wrote this review Sunday, October 28 2007. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No
Displaying 1-1 of 1
