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Authors: Ray Kurzweil
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BOOK: The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence
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CHAPTER EIGHT
1999
The digitization of information in all of its forms will probably be known as the most fascinating development of the twentieth century.
—An Wang
Economics, sociology, geopolitics, art, religion all provide powerful tools that have sufficed for centuries to explain the essential surfaces of life. To many observers, there seems nothing truly new under the sun─no
need for a deep understanding of man’s new tools─no requirement to descend into the microcosm of modern electronics in order to comprehend the world. The world is all too much with us.
If all the computers in 1960 stopped functioning, few people would have noticed. A few thousand scientists would have seen a delay in getting printouts from their last submission of data on punch cards. Some business reports would have been held up. Nothing to worry about.
Circa 1999 is another matter. If all computers stopped functioning, society would grind to a halt. First of all, electric power distribution would fail. Even if electrical power continued (which it wouldn’t), virtually everything would still break down. Most motorized vehicles have embedded microprocessors, so the only cars that would run would be quite old. There would be almost no functioning trucks, buses, railroads, subways, or airplanes. There would be no electronic communication: Telephones, radio, television, fax machines, pagers, e-mail, and of course the Web would all cease functioning. You wouldn’t get your paycheck. You couldn’t cash it if you did. You wouldn’t be able to get your money out of your bank. Business and government would operate at only the most primitive level. And if all the data in all the computers vanished, then we’d really be in trouble.
There has been substantial concern with Y2K (Year 2000 Problem), that at least some computer processes will be disrupted as we approach the year 2000. Y2K primarily concerns software developed one or more decades ago in which date fields used only two digits, which will cause these programs to behave erratically when the year becomes “00.” I am more sanguine than some about this particular issue. Y2K is causing the urgent rewriting of old business programs that needed to be dusted off and redesigned anyway. There will be some disruptions (and a lot of litigation), but in my view Y2K is unlikely to cause the massive economic problems that are feared.
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In less than forty years, we have gone from manual methods of controlling our lives and civilization to becoming totally dependent on the continued operation of our computers. Many people are comforted by the fact that we still have our hand on the “plug,” that we can turn our computers off if they get too uppity. In actuality, it’s the computers that have their figurative hands on our plug. (Give them a couple more decades and their hands won’t be so figurative.)
There is little concern about this today—computers circa 1999 are dependable, docile, and dumb. The dependability (albeit not perfect) is likely to remain. The dumbness will not. It will be the humans, at least the nonupdated ones, who will seem dumb several decades from now. The docility will not remain, either.
For a rapidly increasing array of
specific
tasks, the intelligence of contemporary computers appears impressive, even formidable, but machines today remain narrow-minded and brittle. In contrast, we humans have softer landings when we wander outside our own narrow areas of expertise. Unlike Deep Blue, Gary Kasparov is not incompetent in matters outside of chess.
specific
tasks, the intelligence of contemporary computers appears impressive, even formidable, but machines today remain narrow-minded and brittle. In contrast, we humans have softer landings when we wander outside our own narrow areas of expertise. Unlike Deep Blue, Gary Kasparov is not incompetent in matters outside of chess.
Computers are rapidly moving into increasingly diverse realms. I could fill a dozen books with examples of the intellectual prowess of computers circa end of the twentieth century, but I have only a contract for one, so let’s take a look at a few artful examples.
THE CREATIVE MACHINEAt a time like ours, in which mechanica! skill has attained unsuspected perfection, the most famous works may be heard as easily as one may drink a glass of beer, and it only costs ten centimes, like the automatic weighing machines. Should we not fear this domestication of sound, this magic that anyone can bring from a disk at will? Will it not bring to waste the mysterious force of an art which one might have thought indestructible?
—Claude Debussy
Collaboration with machines! What is the difference between manipulation of the machine and collaboration with it? ... Suddenly, a window would open into a vast field of possibilities; the time limits would vanish, and the machines would seem to become humanized components of the interactive network now consisting of oneself and the machine still obedient but full of suggestions to the master controls of the imagination.
—Vladimir Ussachevsky
Somebody was saying to Picasso that he ought to make pictures of things the way they are─objective pictures. He mumbled he wasn’t quite sure what that would be. The person who was bullying him produced a photograph of his wife from his wallet and said, “There, you see, that is a picture of how she really is. Picasso looked at it and said, ”She is rather small, isn’t she? And flat?”
—Gregory Bateson
The age of the cybernetic artist has begun, although it is at an early stage. As with human artists, you never know what these creative systems are going to do next. To date, however, none of them has cut off an ear or run naked through the streets. They don’t yet have bodies to demonstrate that sort of creativity
The strength of these systems is reflected by an often startling originality in a turn of a phrase, shape, or musical line. Their weakness has to do, again, with context, or the lack thereof. Since these creative computers are deficient in the real-world experience of their human counterparts, they often lose their train of thought and ramble off into incoherence. Perhaps the most successful in terms of maintaining thematic consistency throughout a work of art is Harold Cohen’s robotic painter named Aaron, which I discuss below. The primary reason Aaron is so successful is the thoroughness of its extensive knowledge base, which Cohen has been building, rule by rule, for three decades.
Jamming with Your ComputerThe frequent originality of these systems makes them great collaborators with human artists, and in this manner, computers have already had a transforming effect on the arts. This trend is furthest along in the musical arts. Music has always used the most advanced technologies available; the cabinet-making crafts of the eighteenth century; the metalworking industries of the nineteenth century; and the analog electronics of the 1960s. Today, virtually all commercial music—recordings, movie and television soundtracks—is created on computer music workstations, which synthesize and process the sounds, record and manipulate the note sequences, generate notation, even automatically generate rhythmic patterns, walking bass lines, and melodic progressions and variations.
Up until recently, instrument-playing technique was inextricably linked to the sounds created. If you wanted violin sounds, you had to play the violin. The playing techniques derived from the physical requirements of creating the sounds. Now that link has been broken. If you like flute-playing technique, or just happen to have learned it, you can now use an electronic wind controller that plays just like an acoustic flute yet creates the sounds not only of a variety of flutes, but also of virtually any other instrument, acoustic or electronic. There are now controllers that emulate the playing technique of most popular acoustic instruments, including piano, violin, guitar, drums; and a variety of wind instruments. Since we are no longer limited by the physics of creating sounds acoustically, a new generation of controllers is emerging that bears no resemblance to any conventional acoustic instruments, but instead attempts to optimize the human factors of creating music with our fingers, arms, feet, mouth, and head. All sounds can now be played polyphonically and can be layered (played simultaneously) and sequenced with one another. Also, it is no longer necessary to play music in real time—music can be performed at one speed and played back at another, without changing the pitch or other characteristics of the notes. All sorts of age-old limitations have been overcome, allowing a teenager in her bedroom to sound like a symphony orchestra or rock band.
A Musical Turing TestIn 1997, Steve Larson, a University of Oregon music professor, arranged a musical variation of the Turing Test by having an audience attempt to determine which of three pieces of music had been written by a computer and which one of the three had been written two centuries ago by a human named Johann Sebastian Bach. Larson was only slightly insulted when the audience voted that his own piece was the computer composition, but he felt somewhat vindicated when the audience selected the piece written by a computer program named EMI (Experiments in Musical Intelligence) to be the authentic Bach composition. Douglas Hofstadter, a longtime observer of (and contributor to) the progression of machine intelligence, calls EMI, created by the composer David Cope, “the most thought-provoking project in artificial intelligence that I have ever come across.”
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Perhaps even more successful is a program called Improvisor, written by Paul Hodgson, a British jazz saxophone player. Improvisor can emulate styles ranging from Bach to jazz greats Louis Armstrong and Charlie Parker. The program has attracted its own following. Hodgson himself says, “If I was new in town and heard someone playing like Improvisor, I’d be happy to join in.”
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3
The weakness of today’s computerized composition is, again, a weakness of context. “If I turn on three seconds of EMI and ask myself, ‘What was that?’ I would say Bach,” says Hofstadter. Longer passages are not always so successful. Often “it’s like listening to random lines from a Keats sonnet. You wonder what was happening to Keats that day Was he completely drunk?”
The Literary MachineHere’s a question for you: What kind of murderer has fiber?
The answer: A cereal killer.
I hasten to admit that I did not make up this pun myself. It was written by a computer program called JAPE (Joke Analysis and Production Engine), created by Kim Binsted. JAPE is the state of the art in the automatic writing of bad puns. Unlike EMI, JAPE did not pass a modified Turing Test when it was recently paired with human comedian Steve Martin. The audience preferred Martin.
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The literary arts lag behind the musical arts in the use of technology. This may have to do with the depth and complexity of even routine prose, a quality which Turing recognized when he based his Turing Test on the ability of humans to generate convincing written language. Computers are nonetheless of significant practical benefit to those of us who create written works. Of greatest impact is the simple word processor. Not an artificial technology per se, word processing was derived from the text editors developed during the 1960s at the AI labs at MIT and elsewhere.
This book certainly benefited from the availability of linguistic databases, spell checkers, online dictionaries, not to mention the vast research resources of the World Wide Web. Much of this book was dictated to my personal computer using a continuous speech-recognition program called Voice Xpress Plus from the dictation division of Lernout & Hauspie (formerly Kurzweil Applied Intelligence), which became available in the middle of my writing the book. With regard to automatic grammar and style checkers, I was forced to turn that particular Microsoft Word feature off, as it seemed to dislike most of my sentences. I’ll leave the stylistic criticism of this book to my human readers (at least this time around).
A variety of programs help writers brainstorm. ParaMind, for example, “produces new ideas from your ideas,” according to its own literature.
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Other programs allow writers to track the complex histories, characterizations, and interactions of characters in such extended works of fiction as long novels, series of novels, and television drama series.
5
Other programs allow writers to track the complex histories, characterizations, and interactions of characters in such extended works of fiction as long novels, series of novels, and television drama series.
BOOK: The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence
12.04Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads
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