According to Ray
Kurzweil and generations of science fiction writers, the human race is in a
great deal of trouble. In books and
films he has warned of a coming “technological singularity.” That is a hypothetical future point in time
when technological growth becomes uncontrollable and irreversible, resulting in
incomprehensible changes to civilization.
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| Ray Kurzweil |
As the “singularity
hypothesis” is usually explained, some kind of self-programable computer
program will eventually upgrade itself to the point at which a “runaway
reaction” occurs. This will consist of
new generations of increasingly intelligent computers appearing with greater
rapidity until there is an intelligence “explosion” that creates a gigantic
superintelligence that is qualitatively greater than all human intelligence.
The end result is
that computers control human beings instead of human beings using computers as
tools, a rather terrifying instance of “own or be owned.” Yes, as Louis Kelso reminded us in his
article, “Karl
Marx the Almost-Capitalist” (American
Bar Association Journal,
March 1957), “Property
in everyday life, is the right of control.” If the machines or other people control us,
then they to all intents and purposes own us.
Dr. Noriko H. Arai, a Japanese
mathematician and robotics expert, disagrees . . . up to a point. As
she noted in a “Ted Talk,” there’s a crisis, all right. No doubt about that. Computers already far surpass human
capabilities on a scale that few if any people are willing to consider or even
comprehend. And this is leading to a
disaster of unimaginable magnitude.
But it’s not “artificial
intelligence” that is the threat. It’s
not even the increasingly rapid development of computer capabilities.
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| Noriko Arai |
As far as Dr. Arai is
concerned, the real problem is not that computers are advancing, but that human
beings are regressing! Computers aren’t
becoming more human. Human beings are
becoming less so, and it’s all (according to her) the fault of Academia.
As Dr. Arai explained,
computers don’t really think in the sense that they comprehend what is said to
them or what they say. There is no real
thought in simply accumulating information or ways of doing things. That is all rote.
The famous “Jeopardy!
Challenge” a few years back in which a computer, “Watson,” defeated three human
contestants, was simply a test of memorization, which any computer can do far
better and efficiently than a human being ever can. Dr. Arai explained that the Jeopardy! “answers”
(the game format is that contestants are given the “answer” and asked for the “question”)
are all the same type of question: they give key words that contestants relate
to their stored information, which allows them to select the correct response.
This is the way computers “think.” They take key words in a query and come up
with the likeliest response per the information in their memories. The problem is that if the computer selects
the wrong key words or puts the wrong emphasis on them, it can generate an
answer that is grammatically correct, but that makes no sense given the query. Dr. Arai gave a number of examples of this in
a
recent interview on Japanese public television, Direct Talk on NHK
World.
Dr. Arai’s
concerns seem to have begun when she set out to develop Todai Robot, an
Artificial Intelligence project, that could pass the entrance examination for
the University of Tokyo, considered one of the top, if not the top, university
in Japan. As she stated, though, her
robot performed better than 80% of the students taking the exam . . . but it
didn’t understand one word of it!
She then devised
a test to be given to university students in Japan (but noted that she believes
the problem is pervasive throughout the world) that anyone with a minimal level
of reading comprehension could pass with flying colors. We saw some of the questions translated into
English during her NHK World interview, and they were, frankly, “Mickey Mouse”
(i.e., painfully easy) questions.
Only 40% of the
students passed the test.
Dr. Arai
concluded that the main problem is that most students are being “taught” the
same way computers are programmed. Enormous
amounts of information and predetermined paradigms for solving problems the “right”
way are fed into them. As a result, new “solutions”
in business and politics (and everything else) tend to be ways of doing the
same thing, only more so. Generations of students have been carefully trained to be “idiot savants,” regurgitating information and predetermined paradigmatic solutions virtually on demand . . . which cannot compete with computers doing the same thing.
Surprisingly, Dr.
Arai fell into her own trap! She noted
that as computers take over more functions and jobs previously done by human
beings, there won’t be enough jobs for human beings! The Just Third Way paradigm that would result
in her asking the more fundamental question, “Why do human beings need jobs in
the first place?” does not seem to have occurred to her.
She then laid the
groundwork for the Just Third Way response by raising the question of the
future of human education: “How can
we help kids excel at the things that humans will always do better than Artificial
Intelligence?” She specifically mentioned
tasks that require comprehension and understanding as opposed to manipulating
existing information, a task at which computers excel.
This does not, of course,
apply to those people of great ability who manage to overcome the deficiencies
of modern education. Unfortunately,
modern society seems determined to isolate and eliminate such people except in the physical
sciences as fast as they can, with ridicule, alienation, and ostracism.
Conform or die . . .
especially (from a Just Third Way perspective) in economics, which is held in
bondage by the Currency Principle and insists in the face of all the evidence
to the contrary that past savings are essential to finance new capital
formation — and can find reasons to dismiss all the proofs and evidence, even when their reasons
are flat contradictions of other things they just said. Truth ceases to have any meaning in such an
environment. Ironically, even people who agree with
the mainstream paradigm in any area of thought find themselves alienated and
ostracized if they agree . . . but in the wrong way!
Take, for
example, CESJ’s advocacy of the free market.
To many people “free market” and “capitalism” are equivalent terms, even
though most people in capitalist economies have neither the opportunity nor
means to own capital!
And the “unfree
market” supporters? Socialists. If you’re against the alleged free market of
capitalism, even when you know it’s not free, you are ipso facto a
socialist. Period. Capitalism and socialism are your only
choices . . . at least within the past savings paradigm. Economic personalism is not an option, unless reconfigured (reprogrammed) to fit the either/or paradigm of capitalism and socialism.
The future
savings paradigm governed by the Banking Principle? That’s another world altogether . . . but it
is outside of what is taught in Academia these days and thus cannot be comprehended
by anyone who looks at it insisting on applying what he or she learned by rote
about the Currency Principle and past savings.
Future savings are not in the computer, it “does not compute” because
people hearing about it keep insisting that what the Banking Principle really
is, is another application of the Currency Principle, not something beyond it
entirely.
As Dr. Arai said,
lack of reading (or listening) comprehension is seriously hampering not only education,
but civilization itself. The question is
what to do about it, and that is what we will look at when we address this
subject again.
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