Hofstadter, Dennett - The Mind's I

A Coffeehouse Conversation 89they’ll be more and more likely to have inaccurate models. To me, mistake making is asign of high intelligence!PAT: Boy – you throw me sometimes.SANDY: I guess I’m a strange sort of advocate for machine intelligence. To some degreeI straddle the fence. I think that machines won’t be really intelligent in a humanlike wayuntil they have something like the biological wetness or slipperiness to them. I don’tmean literally wet – the slipperiness could be in the software. But biologically-seeming ornot, intelligent machines will in any case be machines. We will have designed them, builtthem – or grown them! We will understand how they work – at least in some sense.Possibly no one person will really understand them, but collectively we will know howthey work.PAT: It sounds like you want to have your cake and eat it too.SANDY: You’re probably right. What I’m getting at is that when artificial intelligencecomes, it will be mechanical and yet at the same time organic. It will have that sameastonishing flexibility that we see in life’s mechanisms. And when I say “mechanisms” Imean “mechanisms.” DNA and enzymes and so on really are mechanical and rigid andreliable. Wouldn’t you agree, Pat?PAT: That’s true. But when they work together, a lot of unexpected things happen. Thereare so many complexities and rich modes of behaviour that all that mechanicalness addsup to something very fluid.SANDY: For me it’s an almost unimaginable transition from the mechanical level ofmolecules to the living level of cells. But it’s what convinces me that people aremachines. That thought makes me uncomfortable in some ways, but in other ways it is anexhilarating thought.CHRIS: If people are machines, how come it’s so hard to convince them of the fact?Surely if e are machines, we ought to be able to recognize our own machinehood?SANDY: You have to allow for emotional factors here. To be told you’re a machine is, ina way, to be told that you’re nothing more than your physical parts, and it brings you faceto face with your own mortality. That’s something nobody finds easy to face. But beyondthe emotional objection, to see yourself as a machine you have to jump all the way fromthe bottommost mechanical level to the level where the complex lifelike activities takeplace. If there are many intermediate layers, they act as a shield, and the mechanicalquality becomes89