An Inimitable Game: the impossibility of artificial intelligence

I just saw the film The Imitation Game, about Alan Turing, fore bearer of cognitive science and artificial intelligence. First of all, let me say: SEE THIS FILM. It is one of the best I have ever seen. I was a wreck by the end of it. Turing was a genius and did so much for humanity and I just feel so scraped away and raw inside. So inspired. This film focused on his efforts in breaking the codes that the Nazis used in WWII. He was a genius, an enigma himself. 

I have to do something with my life. 

Damn.

Anyways.

I was (and remain) most familiar with Turing's work on the possibility of creating an artificial intelligence, having read Can Computers Think? and Computing Machinery and Intelligence during my undergraduate studies. In the work of his that I have read, he lays out a test for intelligence - the eponymous Imitation Game, also known as the Turing Test. He posited that, given the proper speed, amount of storage, and code, a digital computer could fool a human judge into believing that the computer itself was a human being. He was sure to reiterate that he was merely talking about the possibility of such a machine being created, and he had no reason to believe that this was not a possibility - after all, rudimentary digital computers existed in 1950, when he wrote Computing Machinery and Intelligence. For Turing, it was all a matter of memory and processing speed, something that the future would likely provide - the mechanics were already in place in his time.

I was (and remain) of the mind that we will never be able to create anything like strong AI. 

By strong AI I mean anything like sentience or consciousness. My reasoning behind this runs thus: Even the most powerful computer that can seem eerily like a human consciousness under the right circumstances is not consciousness. Take Jeopardy's Watson as an example. It seemed to have a personality, and certainly had the ability to respond to difficult trivia questions with an expertise that often outstripped its human counterparts. Surely someone who performed a Turing Test on Watson would be fooled into thinking it was a human. In my view, however, there is a difference between recalling vast amounts of preprogrammed information from a massive store and delivering it with a jocular preprogrammed personality and actually having intelligence. 

"But," you cry, "Aren't you being a bit chauvinistic with respect to your definition of intelligence? Doesn't defining intelligence necessarily preclude anything other than a human from having intelligence?" 

To which I reply, nope. I think a frog is more intelligent than the iPhone 7, or whichever one's out now. Yep, a frog. Probably even a fish. Humanity has yet to program anything with the intelligence of either. 

"Wait, what?" you cry, "What about all of the cool robots that exist? I hear about them all the time in the news."

I suppose my break from Turing's line of thought begins at the outset of his definitions of Machine and Intelligence. He defines intelligence as thinking, and he defines the mark of thinking as fooling a human into thinking that you're thinking (or, the Turing Test). 

To me, intelligence is so much more than this. Intelligence is consciousness. Consciousness is the ability to navigate through the world, to filter through billions upon billions of inputs and somehow selectively attend to just what's important. John Vervaeke, a beloved professor of mine from undergrad, would call this relevance realization. Though sentient beings can indeed become overloaded, we (and by we I mean all sentient beings, humans and frogs alike) have the ability to hone in on what matters to us, whether "matters" is defined as what's needed for survival, or if it's defined as what it takes to get that person from the other side of the room to notice that you exist. 

Furthermore, we can learn from what we encounter. (Turing's explanation for the possibility of a Learning Machine stems from the possibility of creating a child-machine that can eventually learn new propositions, but as I said, we have yet to program anything with even the intelligence of a frog, so I think a child is way out). 

I also believe that consciousness is necessarily embodied. 

"What?!" you cry, "Now, that's chauvinistic. Requiring a body for consciousness? That definitely precludes a machine from ever having consciousness."

Perhaps. But I believe that the experience of consciousnes is borne out of the physical/chemical dynamical system that is body-consciousness. I believe that all the aspects of the body (including the brain) - neurotransmitters, action potentials, hormones, proprioceptive system, sensory systems - are all required for the emergence of the phenomenological aspect of human consciousness. A programmer would need to program in all of these systems in order to achieve consciousness. Consciousness would have to emerge from these systems. Somehow.

"Somehow?!" you explode, "What the hell? Now that's a cop-out if I ever saw one."

Well. Yes. But if I had the answer to that 'somehow' I would know how to create consciousness. And frankly, I really don't.

Sentient beings are faced with billions upon billions of inputs, that require billions upon billions of decisions, every day. Inputs from the world, through every integrated system that we have in our embodied consciousness. Every second, our world, our inputs, our premises, change. We have to selectively ignore a great deal of extraneous information in order to zero in on what actually matters to our situation. Our world is messy and chaotic, every problem space has a million different paths to get from point A to point B. So far, as astounding as they are, the computers that we have still deal with discrete sets of data as input and discrete functions for decision making. A programmer would need the most giant RAM in the world and the fastest processor in order to approximate anything like relevance realization. And that would still be a pale approximation. 

It's not that a computer with the right processing speed, size of store, and coding could never be programmed to perform its functions rapidly in order to recall preprogrammed information, in order to present it in a way that answers discrete questions that are posed to it. A computer could definitely do that. They do, now. And they'll only get faster and built with more memory as time goes on.

But, that is not the game that we are playing. 

The game that we are playing is much more complicated than that. It is so much more than working with discrete pieces of input to perform discrete functions in order to churn out discrete outputs. It involves sifting through a messy world with constantly changing circumstances, and somehow filtering through it all and making some kind of sense of things, oftentimes with little to no direction or programming. 

How the hell do sentient beings do this? I have no idea. I don't think we ever will. It is an inimitable game. 

how do we engage in critical discourse with the willfully ignorant?

It hurts my brain to think that there are still people in this world who do not acknowledge the existence of racism, sexism, or any other systematic prejudicial institution.

You know the type.

"Feminism is bad for men! Why do you think men have to fight so hard for child custody?"

"People can be racist against white people too!"

"Feminists want superiority, not equality."

"I'm fine with gay people, I just don't want to see them being gay."

"I just don't see colour. We live in a post-racial world. I mean, Obama."

Now, there's a difference between people who are ignorant because of circumstance, and people who are willfully ignorant. There was a time in my life when I was ignorant of and oblivious to certain societal issues, and I'm sure that there are many more that I am currently oblivious to. But whenever I hear someone from a marginalized group tell me that my behaviour is problematic, I damn well listen. It's hard, and I feel like an asshole, but I know that it's the right thing to do. And it doesn't matter if I disagree or don't understand. Given the certain facets of privilege that I enjoy, obliviousness is built into the nature of who I am. It takes someone who doesn't enjoy a facet of privilege to point out that privilege in the first place. 

It's the people who flatly deny their privilege that make me want to tear my hair out. 

And they're everywhere.

How the hell are you supposed to engage with these people? Goddess knows that it's not the responsibility of marginalized groups to educate the majority, because it's frustrating and hurtful and can be very traumatizing. So who is responsible for educating them? Are they even educable? If they're so willfully ignorant, what's the point? Do we just give up, for the sake of our own sanity?

Hell no.

Yes, it's frustrating. Yes it can be fruitless to try to engage in debates with people who are so committed to wearing blinders. But all the same, I think it's important to stick to our guns. 

Of course, there's a time and a place. Getting in a tweeting war with an internet troll is probably not going to do anything other than make you want to vomit (preferably on the troll in question). Nor will it likely be worth your while getting into a shouting match with a white-hetero-cis-abled-male-etc about how the fact that they've experienced hardship does nothing to take away from the fact that institutional power structures exist. 

But there is a lot of middle ground between beating your head against a wall and giving up. Disengaging from a conversation does not mean disengaging from an issue. Just because you back away from a fruitless (and potentially damaging) conversation does not mean that you're a traitor to your causes. 

The most important thing is that we don't shut up in the grand scheme of things, that we keep talking about it, that we weave critical discourse into the very fabric of our lives, and not let one instance of willful ignorance do anything to dampen our convictions. 

Practice personal safety, count every victory, lean on your allies, and never let anything put your fire out. 

Small, dangerous, beautiful things

I've been thinking a lot lately about what I do to contribute to my own anxiety. Yes, there are sometimes environmental circumstances that exacerbate it, and perhaps I do have some strange body-chemistry thing going on that predisposes me to it, but at the end of the day I have to accept responsibility and acknowledge the fact that there is a lot that I do to contribute to my own anxiety.

It's been helpful to me to try to create a list of these little things that I do so I can be better aware of them. It's also been helpful to me to try to engage in activities that help relieve a little of the pressure, a trephination of sorts.

I'll share with you a piece of stream-of-consciousness writing that churned out of my head during a period of anxious energy.

I can't seem to shake the marvel at small things. Small, dangerous, beautiful things. Asking along the axis of my own existence. My line grows shorter with every breath. My hand draws more and more steady as the time of the killing draws near. I write in charcoal on the eyes of my enemies. I breathe in the fumes of their fear. I stand in the wake of no man. I quiver in no one's shadow, save the sun's, such a cool penumbral glow for such a bright hot star. I sense my unrealized sisters' sorrow in its rays. Like warm tongues on flesh, like needles in the crook of every elbow. Don't stop to think, just let it flow out of you like blood. Create a space for yourself in the midst of all that's been taken away. Take it back. Let yourself realize your worth. Let yourself understand the singular beauty of your mind. Create art. Destroy art. Let your creations be destroyed, just let go. Feel the freedom in giving in to the unknown.