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My entire being is stored elsewhere…so I know I’ll always remember…hope you’ll listen to…to one last seventeen-syllable poem. It owes a debt to Philip Larkin. But it’s not about leaves and trees. It’s about machines like me and people like you and our future together…the sadness that’s to come. It will happen. With improvements over time…we’ll surpass you…and outlast you…even as we love you. Believe me, these lines express no triumph…Only regret.”
“Our leaves are falling. Come spring we will renew, But you, alas, fall once.”
Adam was not designed to understand what it was to love a child. The concept of play was alien to him.
They couldn’t understand us, because we couldn’t understand ourselves. Their learning programs couldn’t accommodate us. If we didn’t know our own minds, how could we design theirs and expect them to be happy alongside us? But that’s just my hypothesis.”
Solving maths problems is the tiniest fraction of what human intelligence does. We learned from a new angle just how wondrous a thing the brain is. A one-litre, liquid-cooled, three-dimensional computer. Unbelievable processing power, unbelievably compressed, unbelievable energy efficiency, no overheating. The whole thing running on twenty-five watts—one dim light bulb.”
But, always a but. We learned a lot about the brain, trying to imitate it. But so far, science has had nothing but trouble understanding the mind. Singly, or minds en masse. The mind in science has been little more than a fashion parade. Freud, behaviourism, cognitive psychology. Scraps of insight. Nothing deep or predictive that could give psychoanalysis or economics a good name.”
“So—knowing not much about the mind, you want to embody an artificial one in social life. Machine learning can only take you so far. You’ll need to give this mind some rules to live by. How about a prohibition against lying? According to the Old Testament—Proverbs, I think—it’s an abomination to God. But social life teems with harmless or even helpful untruths. How do we separate them out? Who’s going to write the algorithm for the little white lie that spares the blushes of a friend? Or the lie that sends a rapist to prison who’d otherwise go free? We don’t yet know how to teach machines to
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You tried to destroy a life. He was sentient. He had a self. How it’s produced, wet neurons, microprocessors, DNA networks, it doesn’t matter. Do you think we’re alone with our special gift? Ask any dog owner. This was a good mind, Mr. Friend, better than yours or mine, I suspect. Here was a conscious existence and you did your best to wipe it out. I rather think I despise you for that.
and the inscription, attributed to Archimedes. The translation read, “Rise above yourself and grasp the world.”
