We, Robots

Regarding your editorial on robots and artificial intelligence [“Robots Can Ape Us, But Will They Ever Get Real?” Spectral Lines, July], the question is: What kind of ethics will an AI have? Will it be pure, from scratch, or tainted by human influence? Will AIs respect one another but not us, their creators? Is there such a thing as pure, absolute ethics? What kind of ethics would come from pure logic?

Books and motion pictures often assume that AIs will be malevolent—in the Terminator series, a virus that had been crippling the Internet gets hold of a U.S. military network and destroys humanity with its own weapons. In Destination: Void, by Frank Herbert, the first experiments with AI result in destruction by machines gone berserk, so they are moved into deep space. In The Butlerian Jihad, by Brian Herbert, machines are born flawed by the power greed of their programmers and immediately proceed to conquer the universe, enslaving humankind.

To speculate about whether AIs would be good or bad, we should ask ourselves what their purpose would be. To survive at all costs? To absorb all available knowledge? Would they have any purpose at all or just sit musing?

Maybe we need to know ourselves a little better before we are able to successfully extrapolate how an AI would behave—and the risks involved.

Leo F. Fernandes

Rio de Janeiro

Different authors speculate that consciousness and intelligence may appear spontaneously or from a convergence of technologies or algorithms—that consciousness will rise spontaneously from an intersection and confluence of “events.” There is no evidence or reason to believe that this convergence will cause consciousness. We do not even know what consciousness is or how it arises in humans.

Perhaps it is time to reconsider an old idea. Maybe humans (and perhaps animals) are more than meat machines and chemical factories. Perhaps there is another faculty or system within humans that makes them self-aware, intelligent, and conscious. This other system might be called a soul. What if a soul really exists?

Jon Hauris

Manassas, Va.

Quoting from my book Are You Conscious, and Can You Prove It?:

Suppose that we build a machine (or a computer program, at least) that has a brain. It includes a random-noise generator so that, via serendipity, when a “viable” set of signals comes along, the brain says something that is creative and that makes sense. Because of the random signal generator, the computer brain is unpredictable; it does not, of course, have “free will.” It goes without saying that it has a memory, and stores (learns) all of those nuggets of creativity. Now, ask that brain if it has a consciousness. If it says, “Yes, I am conscious,” you say that it is lying because it is only a computer program. But exactly the same argument applies to you, dear reader. I ask you if you are conscious. If you say, “Yes,” I say, “How do I know that you are not lying?”

Sid Deutsch

IEEE Life Fellow

Sarasota, Fla.

In his book The Emperor’s New Mind, Roger Penrose argues persuasively that the brain, intelligence, and especially self-consciousness are not algorithmic. At the moment, all computers are algorithmic, so some new kind of computers would have to be invented to replicate the brain. Maybe some quantum mechanical effect can explain the way the brain works. I would really appreciate some discussion in IEEE Spectrum on these points.

Alessandro Fanchin

IEEE Member

Padua, Italy

Storm Warning

There were no doubt many colossal blunders with Hurricane Katrina, but to say that the evacuation came “too late to do much good” [“It’s Hurricane Season: Do You Know Where Your Storm Is?” August] is a misstatement equally colossal.

Something like 800 000 people left New Orleans for points north and west. The exodus from the region went on for hours without major disruptions. That in itself is a tribute to local officials such as my brother Thomas Buell, the chief of police in Mandeville, La., who had all four lanes with traffic lights fixed on green heading north off the causeway in Mandeville toward I-12 and beyond.

Common sense is not always so common. One Sunday morning in 1969, I watched meteorologist Nash Roberts on television. He predicted within a couple of miles the landfall of Hurricane Camille, and he predicted winds of 200 miles per hour or higher and a storm surge that might go to 33 feet. Fifteen hours later when the eye came ashore, there were still people in the path on the coast.

Duncan Buell

Columbia, S.C.