Artificial intelligence

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And such a brain that shall think accurately,
Will henceforth also make a thinker

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust II, Laboratory
Statue of Alan Turing (1912-1954) at the University of Surrey
Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679)
Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709-1751)
Samuel Butler (1835-1902)
Norbert Wiener (1894-1964)
John McCarthy (1927-2011)
Marvin Minsky (1927-2016)
Portrait of Herbert A. Simon (1916-2001) by Richard Rappaport
Raymond "Ray" Kurzweil (2006)

Artificial intelligence (AI) is a branch of computer science that aims to automate intelligence by means of computers. Particularly in the field of cognitive intelligence (e.g. speech and text recognition, object recognition, autonomous driving), great progress has been made in recent years.

History

The term "algorithm" is named after the polymath al-Khwarizmi ("the native of Khwarazm", Latin: Algorismi; * around 780; † between 835 (?) and 850), who came from Khwarazm in Iran and worked and taught in the House of Wisdom in Baghdad during the heyday of the Abbasids. An algorithm is a "systematic, logical rule or procedure consisting of a finite number of well-defined individual steps that leads to the solution of a given problem"[1]. These can be rules of all kinds, for example rules of calculation, recipes (including cooking recipes), laws and regulations, etc. They can be formulated unambiguously in human language and implemented in computer programs in a strictly formalised way. In the early phase of AI, attempts were made to emulate human intelligence by means of corresponding algorithms.

Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) already advocated an early version of computationalism, according to which man's rational mind is based on computational processes:

„By RATIOCINATION, I mean computation. Now to compute, is either to collect the sum of many things that are added together, or to know what remains when one thing ist taken out of anaother. Ratiocination, therefore, is the same with addition and subtraction; and if any man add multiplication and division, I will not be against it, seeing multiplication is nothing but addition of equals one to another, and division nothing but a subtraction of equals one from another, as often as is possible. So that all ratiocination is comprehended in these two operations of the mind, addition and subtraction.“

– The English works of Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury Vol. I, p. 3 archive.org

The possibility of automating or mechanically reproducing human intelligence had already been considered by Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709-1751) in his major work L'Homme Machine, published anonymously in 1748.

„In de la Mettrie's Man, a Machine, a world conception appears that is so overwhelmed by the picture of nature that it can admit only nature as valid. What occurs in the self-consciousness must, therefore, be thought of in about the same way as a mirror picture that we compare with the mirror. The physical organism would be compared with the mirror, the self-consciousness with the picture. The latter has, apart from the former, no independent significance. In Man, a Machine, we read:

'If, however, all qualities of the soul depend so much on the specific organization of the brain and the body as a whole that they obviously are only this organization itself, then, in this case, we have to deal with a very enlightened machine. . . . ‘Soul,’ therefore, is only a meaningless expression of which one has no idea (thought picture), and that a clear head may only use in order to indicate by it the part in us that thinks. Just assume the simplest principle of motion and the animated bodies have everything they need in order to move, feel, repeat, in short, everything necessary to find their way in the physical and moral world. . . . If whatever thinks in my brain is not a part of this inner organ, why should my blood become heated when I make the plan for my works or pursue an abstract line of thought, calmly resting on my bed?' (Compare de la Mettrie, Der Mensch eine Maschine, Philosophische Bibliothek, Vol. 68.)“ (Lit.:GA 18, p. 121f)

Laplace's demon, which Pierre-Simon Laplace designed as a thought model and was later named after him, and which is based on the idea that the entire universe, including human intelligence, resembles a giant clockwork, also points in this direction.

As early as 1948, Norbert Wiener (1894-1964), who coined the term cybernetics, had already suggested:

„The mechanical brain does not secrete thought "as the liver does bile," as the earlier materialists claimed, nor does it put it out in the form of energy, as the muscle puts out its activity. Information is information, not matter or energy. No materialism which does not admit this can survive at the present day.“

– Norbert Wiener: Cybernetics (1948), p. 132[2]

The term "artificial intelligence" was first used in 1955 by the logician and computer scientist John McCarthy (1927-2011) in his grant proposal[3] for the six-week Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence, which he organised and began on 13 July 1956 at Dartmouth College in Hanover. Marvin Minsky, Nathan Rochester and Claude Shannon, among others, also took part in this conference. The Dartmouth Conference has since been regarded as the founding event of research in the field of AI.

Based on the work of Alan Turing (1912-1954), including the essay "Computing machinery and intelligence", Allen Newell (1927-1992) and Herbert A. Simon (1916-2001) from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh formulated the "Physical Symbol System Hypothesis", according to which thinking is information processing, and information processing is a computing process, a manipulation of symbols. Thinking does not depend on the brain as such: "Intelligence is mind implemented by any patternable kind of matter."

This view that intelligence is independent of the carrier substance is shared by the proponents of the strong AI thesis. For Marvin Minsky (1927-2016) of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), one of the pioneers of AI, "the goal of AI is to overcome death". In his book Mind Children, the robotics specialist Hans Moravec (* 1948) from Carnegie Mellon University describes the scenario of the evolution of post-biological life: a robot transfers the knowledge stored in the human brain to a computer, so that the biomass of the brain becomes superfluous and a posthuman age begins in which the stored knowledge remains accessible for as long as desired. With the detailed memory of everything humans have ever thought, our "brainchildren" with their superior intelligence would then face greater challenges in the vastness of the universe:

„What awaits is not oblivion but rather a future which, from our present vantage point, is best described by the words "postbiological" or even "supernatural." It is a world in which the human race has been swept away by the tide of cultural change, usurped by its own artificial progeny. The ultimate consequences are unknown, though many intermediate steps are not only predictable but have alread been taken. Today, our machines are still simple creations, requiring the parental care and hovering attention of any newborn, hardly worthy of the word "intelligent." But within the next century they will mature into entities as complex as ourselves, and eventually into something transcending everything we know - in whom we can take pride when they refer to themselves as our descendants. Unleashed from the plodding pace of biological evolution, the children of our minds will be free to grow to confront immense and fundamental challenges in the larger universe. We humans will benefit for a time from their labors, but sooner or later, like natural children, they will seek their own fortunes while we, their aged parents, silently fade away. Very little need be lost in this passing of the torch - it will be in our artificial offspring's power, and to their benefit, to remember almost everything about us, even, perhaps, the detailed working of individual human minds.“

– Hans Moravec: Mind Children. The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence, p. 1

The AI pioneer Raymond Kurzweil (* 1948), head of technical development at Google since 2012, expects that in 2029 a computer will pass the so-called Turing Test for the first time and that artificial intelligence will reach human levels and soon surpass them. The possibility of such a superintelligence and an associated "intelligence explosion" was first speculated about in 1965 by the British mathematician and cryptologist Irving John Good (1916-2009), who had worked under the direction of Alan Turing on decoding the radio traffic of the German navy:

„Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an „intelligence explosion“, and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make, provided that the machine is docile enough to tell us how to keep it under control.“

– Irving John Good: Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine online

Distributed artificial intelligence

Many information theorists assume that swarm intelligence, which far surpasses human intelligence, will also result in the near future from the worldwide interconnection of purely technical information-processing systems ("computers") via the internet (or comparable structures). AI researchers refer to this as distributed artificial intelligence (DCI). However, this will be a purely ahrimanic intelligence, which will require an appropriate spiritual counterbalance. Information theorist Tom Stonier wrote about this in his book Beyond Information (1992):

„The emergence of machine intelligence during the second half of the twentieth century is the most important development in the evolution of this planet since the origin of life two to three thousand million years ago. The emergence of machine intelligence within the matrix of human society is analogous to the emergence, three billion years ago, of complex, self-replicating molecules within the matrix of an energy-rich molecular soup - the first step in the evolution of life. The emergence of machine intelligence within a human social context has set into motion irreversible processes which will lead to an evolutionary discontinuity. Just as the emergence of "Life" represented a qualitatively different form of organisation of matter and energy, so will pure "Intelligence" represent a qualitatively different form of organisation of matter, energy and life.

The emergence of machine intelligence presages the progression of the human species as we know it, into a form which, at present, we would not recognise as "human". As Forsyth and Naylor (1985) have pointed out: "Humanity has opened two Pandora's boxes at the same time, one labelled genetic engineering, the other labelled knowledge engineering. What we have let out is not entirely clear, but it is reasonable to hazard a guess that it contains the seeds of our successors". The question is not whether intelligence will supersede life, but how fast?“

– Tom Stonier: Beyond Information (1992), p. 1

Stonier does not fear that this (inevitable) development will come, but very much that we will go blindly towards it.

Artificial intelligence and consciousness

The question of whether machines with artificial intelligence will also be able to develop consciousness in the future is the subject of heated debate. Samuel Butler (1835-1902) had already pointed to this possibility in his utopian novel Erewhon (an anagram of the English word nowhere), published in 1872:

„There is no security ... against the ultimate development of mechanical consciousness, in the fact of machines possessing little consciousness now. A mollusc has not much consciousness. Reflect upon the extraordinary advance which machines have made during the last few hundred years, and note how slowly the animal and vegetable kingdoms are advancing. The more highly organised machines are creatures not so much of yesterday, as of the last five minutes, so to speak, in comparison with past time. Assume for the sake of argument that conscious beings have existed for some twenty million years: see what strides machines have made in the last thousand! May not the world last twenty million years longer? If so, what will they not in the end become?“

Suppression of thinking

According to Rudolf Steiner, the further development of medicine and mechanical "thinking" will lead to a suppression of thinking, especially in America, from about the year 2200. A corresponding counterbalance against these tendencies can - and will - only be found through spiritual science.

„It will not be long before the year 2000 is written, when not a direct, but a kind of ban on all thinking will emanate from America, a law which will have the purpose of suppressing all individual thinking. On the one hand, a beginning has been made in what purely materialistic medicine is doing today, where the soul is no longer allowed to work, where man is treated like a machine only on the basis of external experimentation....

One must know that there is spirituality in everything material and that only the material can be healed through the knowledge of the spirit. But that, the spiritual, is to be eliminated from the whole world. That is one of the beginnings.

One of the other beginnings is that today we already have machines for adding and subtracting: isn't it true that it's very convenient, you don't need to calculate any more. And that's how it will be done with everything. It won't take long, a few centuries - then everything will be ready; then you won't need to think, you won't need to consider, you'll just push. For example, it says: "330 bales of cotton Liverpool", so today you still think about something, don't you? But then you just push, and the story is settled. And so that the firm structure of the social context of the future is not disturbed, laws will be passed which will not directly say: Thinking is forbidden, but which will have the effect of eliminating all individual thinking. That is the other pole we are working against. In contrast, life today is not so unpleasant. Because if you don't go beyond a certain limit, you are still allowed to think today, aren't you? Of course, you can't go beyond a certain limit, but at least you can still think within certain limits. But what I have described is part of the development of the West, and it will come through the development of the West.

So spiritual-scientific development must also place itself in this whole development. It must see through this clearly and objectively. It must be clear to itself that what today seems like a paradox will happen: approximately in the year 2200 and a few years there will be a suppression of thought on the largest scale in the world, on the widest scale. And into this perspective we must work through spiritual science. So much must be found - and it will be found - that a corresponding counterbalance against these tendencies can be there in the world's development.“ (Lit.:GA 167, p. 97ff)

It is striking that practically all highly complex tasks that can be solved today by means of artificial intelligence, primarily the most diverse forms of pattern recognition, for example in the optical and acoustic fields, are also carried out by humans largely unconsciously. In tasks that require an alert consciousness, free decisions or genuine creativity, AI has so far failed miserably, even if it is sometimes made to appear to succeed. For example, AI can be used to analyse typical patterns in the works of great painters or composers and to construct seemingly completely new works in the style of these masters according to these patterns so perfectly that they appear deceptively genuine at first glance, but are in fact without any soul-spiritual content, which often only manifests itself in the tiny, but by no means accidental deviations from the "perfect" rule. The fact that this is often not recognised even by experts, because they judge more according to rules than from direct emotional feeling, speaks less for the performance of AI than for the narrow perspective of these experts.

Ahrimanic influence

Ahrimanic powers are clearly behind this development. Ahriman wants to transform the whole earth into a planet filled with machines, into a kind of new Saturn, and from here begin a new series of developments. Today the time has come when we must consciously confront these forces in order to ultimately be able to overcome them.

„These are the ahrimanic entities. These ahrimanic entities, they want to erase all the past and want to leave the human being only that as a result which he has thus directly achieved on earth....

A new evolution shall begin with the earth, it shall be a new Saturn, then the sun shall come and so on. That is the ideal of these other entities. They rush into the unconscious of man, into the life of the will, the life of the metabolism, the life of the limbs, they rush in. They are the kind of spiritual beings who want to teach man a special interest in all things mineral-material, who want to teach man an interest in all things that are, for example, external-machine, mechanical. They would like to destroy everything that the earth has brought with it from the Old Moon, they would like the animal world to disappear, the physical human world to disappear, the plant world to disappear, that only the physical laws remain of the mineral kingdom, but especially that men should be taken away from the earth; and they would like to form a new Saturn of machines, a new world of nothing but machines. That is how the world should go on. That is really their ideal. In the external scientific field they have the ideal of making everything matter, of mechanising it.“ (Lit.:GA 203, p. 261)

Transhumanism

→ Main article: Transhumanism

Transhumanism, a philosophical-ideological current that is predominantly widespread in the Anglo-Saxon world, aims to expand the physical and intellectual capabilities of humans by means of state-of-the-art technology. In short, it is about the technological transformation of man into a posthuman being, the development of a humanity 2.0, as it were[8]. Artificial intelligence and robotics play a central role in this. The aim is to achieve an ever closer connection between man and machine. This represents a real danger.

Rudolf Steiner has now pointed out that such a "forging together of the human being with the machine being" will not only come, but must actually come in the sense of earth development.

„In such places the will is there to harness human power together with machine power. These things must not be treated as if they had to be fought. That is quite a wrong view. These things will not be absent, they will come. It is only a question of whether, in the course of world history, they will be staged by men who are selflessly familiar with the great aims of earthly development and who shape these things for the salvation of men, or whether they will be staged by those groups of men who exploit these things only in an egoistic or group-egoistic sense. That is what it is all about. It is not the what that matters in this case, the what certainly comes; it is the how that matters, how things are done. For the what is simply in the sense of the development of the earth. The forging together of the human being with the machine being will be a great and important problem for the rest of the evolution of the earth.

I have often pointed out, also in public lectures, that the consciousness of man is connected with degrading forces. Twice I have said in public lectures in Basel that we are dying into our nervous system. - These forces, these dying forces, will become more and more powerful. And the connection will be established between the forces dying in man, which are related to electrical and magnetic forces and the external machine forces. Man will, so to speak, be able to conduct his intentions, his thoughts, into the machine forces. Yet undiscovered forces in human nature will be discovered, such forces that act on the external electric and magnetic forces.

That is one problem: the merging of the human being with the mechanism, which must become more and more widespread in the future. The other problem lies in that which will call the spiritual conditions to our aid. But this can only be done when the time is ripe, and when a sufficient number of people are prepared for it in the right way.“ (Lit.:GA 178, p. 218f)

This development can only be salutary if the human being, as a counterbalance to this connection with the technical sub-nature, strives for a corresponding spiritual-moral development, as Rudolf Steiner succinctly described it in the 184th Anthroposophical Leading Thought. Only in this way can he stand against the ahrimanic beings associated with technology:

„This requires that the human being find a spirit-realisation through experience, in which he rises just as high into the super-nature as he sinks below nature with the sub-natural technical activity. He thereby creates in his inner being the power not to sink below.“ (Lit.:GA 26, p. 259)

See also

Literature
References to the work of Rudolf Steiner follow Rudolf Steiner's Collected Works (CW or GA), Rudolf Steiner Verlag, Dornach/Switzerland, unless otherwise stated.
Email: verlag@steinerverlag.com URL: www.steinerverlag.com.
Index to the Complete Works of Rudolf Steiner - Aelzina Books
A complete list by Volume Number and a full list of known English translations you may also find at Rudolf Steiner's Collected Works
Rudolf Steiner Archive - The largest online collection of Rudolf Steiner's books, lectures and articles in English.
Rudolf Steiner Audio - Recorded and Read by Dale Brunsvold
steinerbooks.org - Anthroposophic Press Inc. (USA)
Rudolf Steiner Handbook - Christian Karl's proven standard work for orientation in Rudolf Steiner's Collected Works for free download as PDF.

References

  1. ↑ Werner Stangl: Algorithmus. In: lexikon.stangl.eu. Retrieved 4 December 2017.
  2. ↑ Norbert Wiener: Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, MIT Press 1948, p. 132
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