Artificial Intelligence? – I
What fools are human beings that want to make
Computers into God! Humans, awake!
It seems that there is currently more and more talk of AI, or Artificial Intelligence. In other words, so many people are so impressed by the extraordinary progress made over the last few years in the development of computers and of machines directed by computers, that they seriously consider the taking over of more and more normally human and even divine tasks by computer robots. Anybody with a grain of common sense knows that there are strict limits to what machines are capable of, but any such person also knows how common sense is being eroded today by the nєω ωσrℓ∂ σr∂єr, which has a major vested interest in using its media, politics, education, etcetera, to detach people more and more from reality so that they can be the more easily controlled. It is time to repeat a few very simple basics.
All beings whatsoever fall into one of six categories: beneath God the Creator there are five ordered ranks of His creatures: angels, human beings, animal, vegetable and mineral. These five ranks are clearly distinct from one another, even though television programmes do their best to blur the distinctions, especially between men and animals. But the distinctions are clear in reality. Starting from below,
Mineral merely exists, because it has within it no principle or origin of life or movement.
Vegetable both exists and lives, because from within, it ingests (eg water), grows and reproduces itself.
Animal has all these three abilities within it, but it also senses, in other words by some or all of the five sense faculties (sight, hearing, smell, touch and taste) it has sense knowledge of things outside it.
Man has all of these material abilities or faculties of animal and vegetable, but he also shares with the angels the spiritual faculties of mind and will, in other words he has sensation and reason, meaning the ability of the mind to read within particular sensations their universal essences, and the ability of will to desire in accordance with what his mind has read. These two faculties no animal has (when an animal behaves with apparent intelligence, like a bee for instance, that is thanks only to the animal instincts implanted in it by its supremely intelligent Creator).
Angels have mind and will, but no material faculties of the animals, because angels are purely spiritual. (The animal faculties of sense-knowledge and sense-desire all involve matter, absent in the angels.)
Now whatever is truly human, or human as such, is what men have that neither animals, vegetable nor mineral have. But all machines are purely mineral and essentially, by their essence, inanimate. At their most complicated they still have no principle or origin of life or movement from within them. Any movement of them by electricity for instance, is from without. It follows that computers have no inner grasp whatsoever of any truly human activity, which, as human, completely escapes them. All they can do is register from outside what is observable and computable in people’s behaviour, and churn out statistics and spread-sheets, i.e. numbers, which they are good at. But Churchill said – he was no Saint but he was a human politician – “there are lies, damned lies, and statistics.” And why do statistics lie, if not because the essentially human essentially escapes them?
Here is an example. In New York maybe 15 years back, a group of computer experts set up a computer, Deep Blue, to play chess against Kasparov, the world chess champion. Now if there is a game suited to computers, it is chess, because if only one can process billions of alternative moves in a few minutes, or seconds, one can come up with the best move that leaves nothing to chance. Guess what? After a few games the experts had to reset the computer to respond to how Kasparov was playing! Computers have no inner life or initiative, they cannot think outside of the box programmed into them, they cannot possibly respond to any eventuality outside of their box. Game, set and match to human beings!
Kyrie eleison. |
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Topic: Eleison Comments - Artificial Intelligence? Part 1 (no. 574) (Read 3937 times)