David Peat

46 From Certainty to Uncertaintybuilt limitations and can never achieve the degree of conscious intelligencepossessed by humans.Penrose has come under criticism from some sections of the artificialintelligence (or AI) community, yet his arguments are helpful andcorrective. Again the issue is that silicon-based “intelligence” remainstied to the use of algorithms. By carrying out billions of simple repetitivetasks at very high speed, computers are able to play chess, simulatevision, recognize faces, “understand” written texts, and so on. As computersbecome faster, draw upon larger and larger memories, work inparallel, and employ “neural nets” that learn new tasks, they will movebeyond the skills of a human being in several fields, and we may nolonger understand how their “thinking processes” operate. Yet Penrose’sessential point is that such devices will always be limited by Gödel’stheorem, and that, by contrast, the human mind is able to make leapsand discover “truths” that can never be arrived at by stepwise logic.In the past some quite extravagant claims have been made for thefuture of AI. Science fiction stories portray a world dominated by computersthat outthink and outperform humans to the point where thecomputers finally rid the world of inefficient organic life, leaving itclean and free for machines. A more positive and more truthful visionof the future would involve a symbiosis between humans and computers.This vision acknowledges the many things computers are able todo more efficiently than humans. Their memory banks are larger. Theyperform calculations much faster. They don’t get bored, and, providedthey have been programmed correctly, they don’t make mistakes.On the other hand, these computers will be interacting with thewider society of human beings, and humans have obligations and responsibilities.We experience love, joy, heartache, and despair. We havephysical bodies that interact with the world, and we possess subtletiesof feeling and emotion. Human intelligence can tolerate ambiguity,make clever guesses, improvise, and patch over gaps in knowledge orlogic. Human intuition can operate in highly creative ways. Humanscan make leaps of logic to see patterns in disparate things. We sensewhat is valuable in a pattern, what is meaningful in life, and what canbe safely neglected or ignored. It is in these areas that computers willencounter their limits.