The Pakistani Spectator

Is the notion of a human mind being entirely replaced with an artificially intelligent machine a scientific reality or just science fiction?

With each passing day, our lives are becoming more and more digitalised — from personal computers to communication of any sort, the 0s and 1s are now more prevalent in our lives than we could have thought. With this now overwhelming digital invasion, more and more advanced hardware and software dictated to these digits are invented and put to work.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is the term coined to describe the phenomenon concerning this advanced version of digitally-driven machinery which is self-dependent in the tasks they are assigned and generally need no external operating. As such, machines are being developed to the most detailed levels, with more and more transistors pushed upon a single, tiny chip. Thus the concept that computers can replace actual human minds gets stronger and firmer.

And this has led to the debate that whether or not can a human mind be entirely replaced with an artificially intelligent machine and can such a feat be achieved by introducing an exaggeratedly large number of transistors on a single chip which may then calculate, feel, think and express like the human mind.

Expressing positive claims to have achieved a human-like intelligence in the near future is common among enthusiastic researchers and one really starts wondering whether it is science they are talk of or science fiction.

We may slide further down the detail about the whole issue by considering few very important factors which may decide the fate of this debate — at least for me and you. It is obvious that the more transistors you push upon a single chip — assuming we can do that to an infinitesimally large number — the more information that very machine can contain and retrieve from its storage when the need be. And treading along this line of thought, it may be proposed that we can store all forms of human emotions, ways to respond to all sorts of diverse and possible situations, store in the machine’s chip the ways a human may think at many different instances endlessly. And once this is accomplished within a machine’s brain, once it contains all the data that a human mind can, it can obviously act quite like a human brain.

All seems obvious and astonishingly true in this proposition of AI enthusiasts — except for a fine, tiny detail that alters the whole course of our opinion of the issue. There is a big difference between a human experiencing a situation and responding to it and a machine, let’s say a robot, experiencing a similar situation and duplicating the same response.

To a novice’s eye, the difference might not be apparent but to one who would actually look into the phenomenon enabling the execution of above-mentioned action of each of them, the difference will be evident immediately. You may feed a robot with the information that it has to shrink from the dark out of fear just like a human, but it cannot be fed with situations where a human, each in his/her own different way, would actually step into that dark despite his/her natural fear of it.

Similarly, the information regarding other different courses of human action can be fed into the digitally-driven machine and it may, apparently only though, act like one but actually it would be merely imitating an action and not having any manipulation or feeling of its own to suggest to its central processing unit what may be the most suitable course of action in that very circumstance.

Furthermore, a machine may be more capable than a human mind when it comes to attaining knowledge. It can be fed with terabytes of data containing books, videos, audios and all sorts of facts and information — something which human mind can but grasp in a limited way and quantity. Yet, the way a human mind can manipulate, ponder, think, generate inspiration, intermingle a certain piece of data with previously attained ones and extract from some idea, a theory or notion of his own is something which a machine is entirely incapable of. No matter how many transistors are added to a chip and no matter what advancement of action and functionality are embed upon it, that chip would still lack all these functions when trying to imitate the working of a human mind.

In consideration of all these facts, it can be conveniently established and maintained that no doubt the efficiency of a task can be increased by having it accomplished by an advanced piece of human-developed, software-driven hardware, it still has its many inhibitions while playing the part of human brain — inhibitions which can never, not so far even theoretically, be compensated by a mere technological development.

Originally published in Dawn Sci-Tech