August 29th, 2011 
Admin Within the next few decades having a robot psychologist will become well-known predicts futurist James Canton (2007). Computers will be capable of making diagnoses of mental troubles and problems of wellbeing. Others have predicted that robots will eventually be better at this than trained psychologists.
Canton is probably correct that computers will be able to diagnose quite a few psychological problems, and even prescribe courses of treatment and medication. They will possibly assume a particular segment of the work of psychologists. Even so they will not assume it all. How several men and women will want to sit in front of a machine for fifty minutes pouring their heart out? And how may that exact same machine detect the depths of the human psyche?
My conviction is that it basically will not be able to, since the robot shrink will be intelligent, but not conscious; at least not in the foreseeable future. Here lies the key distinction that I wish to make, and the one that many thinkers in the Artificial Intelligence (AI) field crucially fail to recognise.
It is one thing to say that computers are like brains, but are brains like computers?
A lot of modern cognitive science is dominated by the computer metaphor. Brains can calculate and simulate and modulate. But just how significantly like a human mind is a personal computer? Could a computer ever really be said to be intelligent in the way that a individual is? Could we ever empathise with such a “mind”? And if not, does it actually matter?
The whole field of artificial intelligence is centered on this goal, this belief. Several, like futurists Ray Kurzweil, James Canton, and James Martin are convinced that not only will computers be intelligent like humans, they will soon be a hell of a lot much more intelligent, which includes in non-human-like ways. The moment when computers surpass human intelligence and turn out to be the smartest thing on the planet is what Kurzweil calls “the Singularity”. If it occurs, it will be a defining moment in ‘evolution’ on this planet.
Artificial intelligence is not some thing to be dismissed lightly, merely because it seems incredible. The limits of computing technology are unknown, but undoubtedly vast, perhaps incomprehensible. AI optimist Ray Kuzweil points out the following staggering comparison between the human brain and an equivalent sized personal computer.
..an optimally organized 2.2-pound personal computer using reversible logic gates has about 10-25 atoms and can store about 10-27 bits. Just considering electromagnetic interactions between the particles, there are at least 1015 state changes per bit per second that can be harnessed for computation, resulting in about 10-42 calculations per second in the ultimate “cold” 2.2-pound pc. This is about 10-16 times far more powerful than all biological brains right now. If we permit our ultimate pc to get hot, we can improve this further by as much as 10-8fold. And we obviously won’t restrict our computational resources to one kilogram of matter but will ultimately deploy a substantial fraction of the matter and energy on the Earth and in the solar system and then spread out from there (Kurzweil 2005 p 434).
And just in case you are not feeling threatened, futurist James Martin believes that the intelligence of computers will barely resemble that of humans. And they will be vastly far more intelligent. He writes:
…the true pc revolution is yet to come – with ubiquitous censors, nanotechnology, global data warehouses and completely pervasive access to networks of extreme bandwidth. The principal reason the true personal computer revolution is ahead of us is that machines will turn out to be intelligent. …Computers can be immensely more powerful than the human brain due to the fact their circuits are millions of times faster than the neurons and axons of the brain, and they can be designed to perform specific sorts of “thought” with great efficiency. Such computing will turn into an infrastructure that is everywhere, like the air we breathe, affecting almost each and every activity of humankind.” (Martin 2007: 207).
Martin’s conclusion that computers will be everywhere is a logical extrapolation drawn from current trends in computing. There is undoubtedly strong demand from the general populace, modest businesses, corporations, education, institutions and governments to use them, so he is very likely correct.
Yet this does not change the reality that quite a few of the arguments of AI proponents are deeply flawed. Consciousness and intelligence are fundamentally various concepts, as I shall argue in the second part of this article.
References
Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity is Near. Penguin 2005
James Canton, The Extreme Future. Plume, 2007
James Martin, The Meaning of the Twenty-very first Century. Riverhead 2007
You can read the second part of this write-up, and comment on it, on Dr. Marcus T. Anthony’s blog about the future, www.22cplusblogspot.com .
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