Free Abolition Of Intelligence by Peter James West Page A

chemicals, atoms - the same materials that could be used to construct any machine. In a sea of quarks, who could determine the difference between life and a machine? How could we define what is truly artificial? Is a chemical artificial because it was made by man? Would the same chemical be artificial if it was created inside a distant exploding star?'
    We only have nature's elements to use in our own cunning creations, so surely all materials are natural, whether thrown together by man or by the immense forces of the universe? No one could decide truth from lie. The definition of intelligence roamed back and forth across a sea of confusion.
    As long as a computer could not beat a human chess player, everyone could relax. There was way that a chess-losing box of components could be considered intelligent. There was a short peace around the world, but then it happened. A machine called DEEP BLUE beat the world chess champion Garry Kasperov. Chung-Jen Tan, head of the team who developed Deep Blue said, 'One hundred years from now, people will say this day was the beginning of the information age. Historically, for mankind, this is like landing on the moon.'
    The luddites upped their tents, and re-pegged them twenty yards back, in their own in-zone. They said it didn't matter if a machine could beat a human at chess - that didn't prove intelligence. It was just raw number crunching power. People are more than information crunchers, we have feelings, we have intuition, we are alive, we have a soul. The goal posts moved. Intelligence was not obtainable by a chess playing machine, even if it was the best player in the world. The world relaxed once again, secure in the knowledge of its own superiority.
    Years later, human chess players lost every match to machines. It wasn't important. The theorists and philosophers had moved on to a different game. The game "Go" was a truer test of intelligence, the moves were not so mechanical. They could not be searched like a telephone book by super-cooled blazing fast machines. People would always win a machine at games that involved 'real' intelligence. The luddites were pleased. They nodded and folded their arms, went back to flicking channels on the TV remote.
    Time moved on, and once again the defenders of human intelligence found themselves fumbling the ball. Machines were no longer boxes of metal and plastic. They were small tubes of quantum states and flickering lights - a sealed universe of q-bits considering all things at once. Nobody understood what went on inside those tubes, not even the people that created them. Reams of paper explained the unexplainable, but nobody could read it. People never beat machines at games after that, they didn't even try. Whatever action they took, they had already lost in an infinite number of ways, but it didn't matter. The definition of intelligence had once again been carefully rolled back - away from the grey confusing progression of information processing, and disturbing doubts.
    Alan Turing, they said, was right all along. A true test of intelligence was to test whether a person could detect the difference between another person and a machine. The rules were simple. They could ask any questions they wanted to, logical, emotional, philosophical or otherwise. If they were not able to identify whether the answers came from a person or a machine, then the machine must be intelligent. The interview was conducted via a screen and keyboard.
    Ask a person how their holiday was, and they would tell you about the lovely weather, the smell of the orange trees, and the bargains at the shopping malls. Ask a machine the same question and it would sit inside its cell of experience deprivation, cursing you for being illogical. We were all safe again. People had the only intelligence. We had experience. A machine could never have experience, opinions or feelings.
    Many years later a machine was created that could simulate a mouse - how it behaved, how it responded