If there had been a university course on Technology and Values a hundred years ago, what "technologies" might have been discussed? In the middle and late 19th century, industrial technology seemed to possess the power to transform the life of human societies as well as humanity's self-images.
Consider Karl Marx' 1844 remark:
"The machine accommodates itself to man's weakness, in order to turn weak man into a machine." (from Marx' Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, 3rd Manuscript (1844) [Italics his].
Even 50 years ago we might have been most concerned about the sorts of ominous visions of technology and contemporary life that characterize Chaplin's Modern Times; at least on the surface, such visions may seem out-of-date in the face of computer technologies and the post-industrial workplace, and indeed we're tempted to believe that computer technology has solved many of the problems inherent in industrial technologies. In any case, the contrast between the organization of industrial and "information" work is our society remains striking.
Reading Moravec's Mind Children
In the Prologue, Moravec writes:
"Our biological genes, and the flesh and blood bodies they build, will play a rapidly diminishing role in the new regime. But will our minds, where culture originated, also be lost in the coup? Perhaps not. The coming revolution may liberate human minds as effectively as it liberates human culture." (p. 4)
On page 36, Moravec writes:
"A computer able to do a billion operations per second, with a billion bytes of main memory, would be enough."
Computers, Animals and Humans
From the very beginning of Moravec's book, he mentions non-human forms of life. By the end of "Mind in Motion" he has gone from talking about robots to animals to robots again. What have animals to do with Moravec's claims/arguments/theses? What is your own view about using terms like "learns", "knows", "believes", and "understands" to describe animals like snails, rabbits and cats? How does this view of yours compare to your attitude about ascribing such capacities to robots?
What is Moravec's picture of "learning" (e.g. on p. 49) and how/why is simulation and conditioning involved. Is this a reasonable theory of how humans learn? Can theories of "learning" and "intelligence" be separated, so that it is possible to believe that human learning and robot learning are not comparable, yet human and robot intelligence(s) are?
For Next Time:: 1) Finish Moravec's Mind Children (chapters 3-6); and, 2) Read the "Robopet" exercise and outline a response for Wednesday, when our guest will be AI author and researcher Professor Tom Dean.
