Page 78 - An Evening with Maxwell's Daemons

The Machine in the Ghost

neutralize our ecocide and genocide—almost as unemotionally as
we have committed them. So this gets the hackles up of the
libertarian crowd, but pleases the environmentalists in a half-
hearted sort of way: the naughty children need a strong parent to
control them. We have already had some presentations related to
this potentially crucial phenomenon.”
“The idea I am playing with here has to do with the conceptual
basis of creating these artificially-intelligent machines. I have not
seen or heard about two things considered with respect to their
creation. First is the replicability of minds, or brain patterns, or
algorithms—take your pick—in the context of mass production.
Often the story is about one super-brain running the world,
effectively recapitulating the justification—or condemnation—of
autocracy, the need for one central source of policy and sanctions.
But today we have dozens of competing laboratories, corporate and
governmental, each trying to produce the game-changing
technology that will triumph over all others. Just as we have super-
computers vying for dominance today, so might we have artificial
intelligences put into contests against each other, in some
gladiatorial sense. That would presume human control, of course!
Perhaps this resembles another biological phenomenon, runaway
selection. Our assumption has always been that greater
intelligence—and, concomitantly—knowledge leads to innovation
and development of practical applications; that is why ‘pure’
research is supported economically. So here we encounter the
proverb of being too smart for our own good: that the creator will
be destroyed by the hubris he has built into his creation. Thus the
cautionary tales of the golem and Frankenstein’s monster. But this
is a sidelight—or not, if you think the main point should always be
the foolhardy construction of our nemesis.”
“Anyway, the thing I want to get back to is the way intelligence
is manifest, at least in humans, and how that can be duplicated.
Certainly, other means are conceivable, although not by me. I think
that since silicon is the basic material of these unnatural brains,
crystallography should show us the way to grow them; in other
words, the lattice represented by neural connections in our brains is

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