Peter Cochrane's Hard Drive 1996
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Machines with minds? Peter Cochrane asks why not?
I KNOW what I know and you know what you know. Ask any human a question on any subject and they will be almost instantly conscious of their range and level of understanding. A few moments' thought will see them expousing all they know. Searching out more detail by any mechanism takes no prompting - only opportunity. In stark contrast, machines just sit there oblivious to the knowledge they store, networks they can access and others of their species that may be able to help. They lack a consciousness and understand nothing, they are mere blocks of silicon, gold and copper, computing engines devoid of true intelligence. It is as if they are sleeping - waiting to be woken.

So what is this consciousness we possess? Theologians, philosophers and scientists have pondered this question for aeons, often relating it to some soul or higher level of inner being. From an engineering perspective, it appears to be a combination of sensory experience, memory and an overlay of search, find and correlate software. An ability to take a word, phrase or concept and retrieve all related memories, pull together the core features and then deliver them appropriately finessed for the occasion. Quite a trick. Of course, the key question is: how? And a key objective is to recreate this kind of facility, and more, in machines so they can aid and assist us further.

The hard wiring or firing of the human brain (wet ware) gives us little or no clues as to our conscious being, the way we function or operate. We appear supreme, more or less, in the animal kingdom in our mental abilities. But we also see competition on the horizon - increasingly intelligent machines are coming. So there are two basic choices: to try to engineer a conscious thought process into machines, or just wait for it to evolve naturally.

To do the latter will see us still ignorant of the process, while attempting the former would give us a transitory understanding of the starting point. It might also offer a few pointers toward our own sophistication and functionality. But it can be assumed that once conscious, machines will evolve more rapidly than carbon life and may just leave us behind. The determinism of mathematics has already been used to predict that machines will never be truly intelligent and conscious. But this is more likely to be a limitation of the mathematics, mathematicians and their models than anything fundamental. With our central processor (brain) of more than one billion neurons, the analysis of other life forms, such as worms and ants, with far less than 1,000 has so far defied our innate intelligence. Further, we should recollect how our limited, and largely linear, mathematical abilities recently precluded flight, breaking the sound barrier and space travel.

True machine intelligence is most likely to emerge from noisy and highly non-linear entities, rather than today's deterministic systems. The very essence of biological minds is their variability, uncertainty, fuzzy processing and memory decay with time. In short, we are much more random than we first appear. Machines, on the other hand, will have the advantage of combining all these attributes - at will. Once they know, they will know forever.

Peter Cochrane holds the Collier Chair for the Public Understanding of Science & Technology at the University of Bristol. His home page is:
http://cochrane.org.uk

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