VAPC - Week 6 Kurzweil and Turing (Computation II)

Kurzweil's text on the work of John von Neumann investigates an essential equivalence between the human brain and a computer and delves into five key ideas underlying the information age. One of the five core ideas Kurzweil discusses is Turing's concept of the universality of computation, which gets applied to the human brain; essentially, the information-processing capability of a human brain can be matched by that of a machine but can never exceed that of a machine. Or, as is expounded on later in the text, a computer is theoretically capable of simulating the workings of the human brain, but not the other way around. Turing himself discusses the challenges this might present to a machine playing the imitation game, needing to potentially hide it's superior mathematical processing power.

According to Kurzweil, von Neumann was ahead of his time not only as a pioneer in computation, but in terms of his understanding of the field of neuroscience. A central message in Kurzweil's text is the success of applying biologically inspired methods to computation. We discussed the ways this related to both Turing and last week's Penny text. Turing’s text theorizes that a computer can learn and grow “organically” if it were programmed to be raised like a child. The fact that machines can make errors when processing information also adds to their “organic nature”, as it shows that they are imperfect and require improvement. Penny discussed the need to move away from dualist cognitive models towards more embodied understandings of intelligence, highlighting the benefits of modeling machines after humans while warning of the dangers of the reverse. However, in order to model machines biologically, to what degree to we require a computational understanding of biological processes? Is there a way to preserve human experience as the starting point in how we define our relationship to machines, or will attempts to produce artificial intelligence necessarily result in an understanding of ourselves that is more machine-like?

Kurzweil himself believes that the project of artificial intelligence will not displace humans but 'expand the reach of what is already a human-machine civilization'. We wondered what Kurzweil's optimistic view of an expanded civilization might look like, in a context where artificial intelligence can can be assumed to not only match, but exceed the capacities of biological beings?