The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn

by Richard Hamming

The hard ai people claim man is only a machine and nothing else, and hence anything humans can do in the intellectual area can be copied by a machine. As noted above, most readers, when shown some result from a machine, automatically believe it cannot be the human trait that was claimed. Two questions immediately arise. One, is this fair? Two, how sure are you that you are not just a collection of molecules in a radiant energy field, and hence the whole world is merely molecule bouncing against molecule? If you believe in other (unnamed, mysterious) forces, how do they affect the motion of the molecules, and if they cannot affect the motion, then how can they affect the real world? Is physics complete in its description of the universe, or are there unknown (to them) forces? It is a hard choice to have to make. (Aside: at the moment [1994] it is believed that 90% to 99% of the universe is so-called dark matter, of which physics knows nothing except its gravitational attraction.)