It is no wonder that Apple is using the blinking light of the HAL computer in promoting its line of computers. Borrowed from 2001, HAL is the epitome of smartness, a computer turned intelligent that took control of the ship and refused to be switched off by the humans who designed and used it. The computer has already made the cover of the Time magazine as Machine of the year in place of the Man of the year. As we approach the end of a millennium, people are asking questions about where we are heading in the next one. Is there a fear of our survival with Deep Blue defeating Kasparov and people cloning sheep and rats? The cloning of Frankenstein issue...maybe some other time.
"It is not the answer that is important, it is the question!" whispers Ms. Moss in The Matrix. Straight out of a certain Douglas Adams novel. A new sci-fi thriller with a lot of cliche dialogues including several from the Zen philosophy, Matrix portrays a gray picture of the future. A future in which humans are cultivated as an energy source for the electricity they can generate. Computers rule the world with all humans wrapped in a real cocoon of gooey stuff and a virtual cocoon of a moving and talking 3D world. Not a drastically different view than the idea that Earth is a biological computer built by mice to find out the question to the answer of 42(Hitch Hikers Guide To The Galaxy).
People no longer consider alien attack as a threat. The myriad facets of aliens from cute humanoids(ET) and bacterial infections(Andromeda Strain) to giant saucers(ID-4) and invisible intelligence(Sphere) have been beaten to death in the last several decades. At the risk of annoying some fans, I find X-files more funny than foreboding. Now man wonders whether destruction and colonization would come more from science than from outer space. Rendezvous with Rama(Clarke) is yet to happen, but we already think of automated highways and thought sensitive control systems(Firefox). Aliens are going out of fashion and computers are taking over, especially with the year 2000 coming up.
The fear that technology is overtaking humans manifests itself in several ways. A Y2K consultant recently retired to the Ozarks in the Arkansas mountains(LA Times, April). Complete with propane tanks and a garden hoe. An instinct to survive, just in case the bug really gets everyone else. Maybe I should at least take my cash out of the bank before that day? I was really surprised and pleased to see the guy on a street corner in Los Angeles having a placard, "Computers are the Devil," in addition to the "The End is Coming." Finally my field attains recognition!
Where does this fear originate? The exposure people have to technology is from popular entertainment sources like movies and television shows. Computers have come a long way from moving beads around on the Abacus. We can now press a switch and see a Tomahawk going through a window thousands of miles away. Live!! We saw Kasparov sweating in front of the IBM Deep Blue. A machine out-thought a human in a creative game! On the personal front, we press a few buttons and see things moving on the other side of the earth through the Internet. Microwaves already have dial-in controls and cars already have intelligent navigational systems. They will route you through that Malibu highway in case you want to catch a little ocean breeze.
Are these computers smart and intelligent? Fortunately or unfortunately they are not! Computers are still at a stage where they take commands. When they operate autonomously, they follow the set of rules built into them by humans. However generic the rules might be, they still fail to cover the spectrum of human intelligence. To misuse an often misused cliche, they lack a soul :) Deep blue did not defeat Kasparov by being smart; it followed a set of rules and value assessments and then crunched numbers at an amazing speed. Faster was the key, not smarter! Hey, it is just a glorified slide rule if I can take the liberty. It just takes up larger room, drinks up lot of power and needs a lot of people to slide its rules!
The field of artificial intelligence has been around for some time. Scientists have been trying to capture the process of problem solving and embed that into machines. In the 70's there was a great promise of delivering a machine which can think. Things have simmered down now and research concentrates more on automating non-trivial tasks. Machines which do more than running your washing machine, but still follow control rather than think. "I am hungry," "Why do you feel that way?" "You are a %#%*@^# idiot," "Why do you feel that way?" No points for guessing which of them is the computer in the famous Eliza program for the Turing Test. Asimovian robots are yet to come.
Humans are unique in that they can not only think but can also evaluate their thought processes and change the way they think. (The way my Mom forced me to learn to like Bitter Gourd(Karela :)) Computers can follow only a fixed set of reasoning rules and cannot adapt their rules based on their reasoning processes. They can only "think" the way they are programmed to. They cannot transcend that and reflect upon themselves and their reasoning.
Apple says Think Different! Just in case you are not sure, they are referring to people and not their machines. The machines do not think as yet!