Chapter 4: Thinking
68 - Save the Robots
While parallel distributed processing made dramatic advances, another aspect of natural intelligence was taking hold on a different front. It sought to address a problem that many had with AI from the start. As Terry Winograd has described it, “The main problem area is one that you can label in different ways: commonsense reasoning, background, context. It is the way in which thinking and language are shaped and affected by the sort of broader, imprecise context of what you know, what is going on, and what is relevant…This is not modeled in a straightforward way by rules or algorithms.” Addressing the same concern, John Searle has pointed out, “Just as one cannot take a molecule of water and say, ‘This one is wet,’ so we cannot pick out a single neuron and say, ‘This one is thinking about tomorrow’s lecture.’”
Where does conscious awareness come from? How do we know if something’s relevant? What is it that gives meaning to the obscure sparking of neurons in our brains—that accounts for the pleasure of pleasure, the blueness of blue? Those qualities somehow emerge from underlying structures that seem almost disconnected from the wonders they produce. If we still have no clear fix on how those occur, we do know they arise from the interactions between figure and ground, between individual life forms and the worlds they inhabit. We act on the world while the world acts on us. Without that, words like “relevance” and “awareness” have no meaning. As Searle has pointed out, such things as “a nice day for a picnic” are not inherent features of reality. What we call “a nice day for a picnic,” he says, “exists only relative to observers and users.”
“The world is its own best model,” says Rodney Brooks, the reigning intelligence at MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Lab. “Explicit representations in models of the world simply get in the way.” By that he means that just programming things in misses the point. Real minds are programmed by engagement with the world. Or, as Brooks put it in a statement that shook up the world of computerized intelligence:
I wish to build completely autonomous mobile agents that co-exist in the world with humans, and are seen by those humans as intelligent beings in their own right. I will call such agents Creatures…I have no particular interest in demonstrating how human beings work, although humans, like other animals, are interesting objects of study in this endeavor as they are successful autonomous agents. I have no particular interest in applications…if my goals can be met then the range of applications for such Creatures will be limited only by our own (or their) imaginations. I have no particular interest in the philosophical implications of Creatures, although clearly there will be significant implications.
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