Contents Cover Copyright Acknowledgements 1. Computers in Social Life and the Danger of the Surrender Language, intelligence and embedding in society Two principles of AI: rules, patterns and precedents Artifictional intelligence Notes 2. Expertise and Writing about AI: Some Reflections on the Project What do I mean by ‘cannot’? Expertises and academics Artificial intelligence belief AI expertise The future and points of principle Notes 3. Language and ‘Repair’ How misspellings and the like are dealt with by humans The centrality of language Getting language into computers and the Chinese Room Have the problems been solved? The Turing Test and its complexities Notes 4. Humans, Social Contexts and Bodies How do humans come to understand context? The problem of a non-embedded sociology The Imitation Game and interactional expertise Mimeomorphic and polimorphic actions The body and artificial intelligence Notes 5. Six Levels of Artificial Intelligence Level I of artificial intelligence: Engineered intelligence Level II of artificial intelligence: Asymmetrical prostheses Level III of artificial intelligence: Symmetrical culture-consumers Level IV of artificial intelligence: Humanity-challenging culture- consumers Level V of artificial intelligence: Autonomous human-like societies Level VI of artificial intelligence: Autonomous alien societies Concluding remarks Notes 6. Deep Learning: Precedent-Based, Pattern-Recognizing Computers Extended Moore’s Law Neural nets and their successors Pattern recognition: Bottom-up, top-down and the sociology of knowledge Elements of pattern recognition More on bottom-up and top-down Notes 7. Kurzweil’s Brain and the Sociology of Knowledge Notes 8. How Humans Learn What Computers Can’t A human learns from human culture Interim conclusion: What this study of human interaction means for AI The stubborn but strangely overlooked problem of AI Small groups, trust and the body Notes 9. Two Models of Artificial Intelligence and the Way Forward The body revisited The internet and human culture formation The new artificial intelligence and a new relationship Notes 10. The Editing Test and Other New Versions of the Turing Test The editing test and its advantages Notes Appendix 1: How the Internet Works Today Notes Appendix 2: Little Dogs References Index End User License Agreement Figures 3.1 The Chinese Rooms 6.1 Four ways to represent a house 7.1 Sam’s brain as a hierarchically arranged series of pattern recognizers 7.2 The big neural net and Social Sam 8.1 The fractal model of society 10.1 Three-dimensional model of expertise Tables 2.1 Some types and examples of impossibility claim 2.2 The peculiar range of expertises that contribute to the AI belief question 4.1 Back-translations of sports terms using Google Translate (February 2017) 5.1 Six levels of artificial intelligence 5.2 Phrases from the ‘Cmabrigde Uinervtisy’ passage 8.1 How humans learn from each other and develop new knowledge Artifictional Intelligence Against Humanity’s Surrender to Computers Harry Collins polity Copyright © Harry Collins 2018 The right of Harry Collins to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published in 2018 by Polity Press Polity Press 65 Bridge Street Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK Polity Press 101 Station Landing Suite 300 Medford, MA 02155, USA All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. ISBN-13: 978-1-50950415-2 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Collins, H. M. (Harry M.), 1943-author. Title: Artifictional intelligence : against humanity’s surrender to computers / Harry Collins. Description: Medford, MA : Polity Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017059139 (print) | LCCN 2018002923 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509504152 (Epub) | ISBN 9781509504114 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509504121 (pbk.) Subjects: LCSH: Artificial intelligence--Philosophy. | Artificial intelligence--Social aspects. | Artificial intelligence--Moral and ethical aspects. Classification: LCC Q334.7 (ebook) | LCC Q334.7 .C65 2018 (print) | DDC 006.301--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017059139 The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate. Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition. For further information on Polity, visit our website:politybooks.com Acknowledgements I thank my wife, Susan, for inventing the main title – Artifictional Intelligence – and for drawing my attention to ‘computer says no’. Tammy Boyce helped with locating relevant films. I thank those who were willing to spend time on talking with me about the current state of artificial intelligence research. Steven Schockaert, who works at the frontiers of the science and engineering of AI at Cardiff University, was a generous conversational partner over a series of lunches, and also read the first draft of the manuscript and provided many valuable comments. I thank the members of the Cardiff University computing department’s ‘Deep Learning Reading Group’ for allowing me to sit in on and occasionally mess up their weekly meetings. Michael Bolton, Arthur Reber, Edgar Whitley and various of my colleagues in Cardiff University also read the text and offered me valuable advice. Readers from the frontiers of the AI or computing research community included three anonymous readers recruited by Polity Press and, as a result of my approaches, Ernest Davis, Hector Levesque and Alan Blackwell, who also engaged in generous discussions, mostly by email but in one case face-to-face. They each also made extensive and sometimes critical comments on the text, which have been invaluable in helping me to eliminate some mistakes and add various subtleties. Crucially, they encouraged me in respect of the question of whether my technical abilities were sufficient for the task I had set myself. All remaining lacunae, mistakes and infelicities remain entirely my responsibility. I also thank those cited in the book, such as Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio, for invaluable discussions about the frontiers of deep learning. From Polity Press, Emma Longstaff read an early version of the draft, while Jonathan Skerrett read a penultimate draft; both provided enormously helpful feedback which resulted in significant improvements. I also thank Polity Press for encouraging me to write the book, and thank Neil de Cort for handling all aspects of its production in a speedy and stressfree way, with special thanks to Helen Gray for sympathetic and imaginative copy-editing which places her in the top 0.1 per cent of copy- editors. The work on gravitational-wave detection reported here was supported by a series of grants over many years: 1975, SSRC £893 ‘Further Exploration of the Sociology of Scientific Phenomena’; 1995–96, ESRC (R000235603) £39,927 ‘The Life After Death of Scientific Ideas: Gravity Waves and Networks’; 1996– 2001, ESRC (R000236826) £140,000 ‘Physics in Transition’; 2002–06, ESRC (R000239414) £177,718 ‘Founding a New Astronomy’; 2007–09, ESRC (RES- 000-22-2384) £48,698 ‘The Sociology of Discovery’; 2010–ongoing, US National Science Foundation grant PHY-0854812 to Syracuse University ‘Toward Detection of Gravitational Waves with Enhanced LIGO and Advanced LIGO’, P.I.: Peter Saulson, Open-ended, ‘To complete the sociological history of gravitational wave detection’. Work on the Imitation Game relevant to this book was supported by, 2011–16, European Research Council Advanced Grant (269463 IMGAME) €2,260,083 ‘A new method for cross-cultural and cross- temporal comparison of societies’. Work on the relationship between fringe and mainstream science was supported by 2014–16, ESRC (RES/K006401/1) £277,184 ‘What Is Scientific Consensus for Policy? Heartlands and Hinterlands of Physics’.
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