LAL #042 — Introducing the Augustine Test: Is A.I. Up to the Challenge?

Law and Legitimacy

In 1950, Allan Turing wrote about the imitation game. Place a computer behind a screen and have a human ask it questions by way of a keyboard. If the computer can answer the questions in a manner that makes it impossible for the human to tell whether the author was a human or a computer, the machine "passes" the test, and would be said to be possessed of general human intelligence. It was a narrow vision of intelligence and a purely instrumental view of what it meant to be human.

In our lifetimes, computers have exceeded our capacity at doing many narrow tasks. IBM computers beat the human champions at such games as Jeopardy and chess.

But were the machines any closer to general human intelligence? IBM hoped that Watson, the Jeopardy winner, would signal a brave new era of computing. It announced that Watson would be set loose on medicine, with hopes of finding more efficacious treatments, and maybe even the cure, for cancer.

IBM has since given up those dreams. Watson isn't human, after all; it's not even a thinking thing. It merely crunches vast amounts of data using algorithms that direct its attention at what to look for.

Computers can do limited tasks faster and more reliably than humans, but they cannot replicate what is distinctively human. Computers don't long; they don't desire; they compute. Silicon Valley, it turns out, is having a spiritual crisis of sorts.

I'm relieved frankly. I don't see computers as capable of wrestling with the ordinary questions that haunt the nights of any truly thinking thing: "Where did we come from? What is our purpose? Why is there suffering". Go ahead and ask Siri sometime for something more profound than a recipe. "Hey. Siri, why is there a world rather than not?"

I am an Augustinian. I believe, as did Augustine, that we are in search of the divine, an ineffable sense of completeness in the belief that God is everywhere present but nowhere to be seen. We are creatures of faith, and that faith, I suspect is more than hard-wired neural complexity. Show me the computer that can write, with Augustine, and without prompting, that "our heart is restless until in rests in you," and I'll do a double-take; I'll recognize a kindred spirit.

Show me a computer that confesses its own short-comings, it's sin, it's misplaced desires! So here's a new challenge to the AI community: Build a machine that can write like Augustine and long as Augustine longs, and Ithen will believe that there is such a thing as artificial general intelligence.

We're nowhere near that.

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