The Digital Ape: how to live (in peace) with smart machines Nigel Shadbolt & Roger Hampson Manjul Publishing House Rs.354 Pages 90 We are reassuringly told that AI actually is poor at “commonsense reasoning”, and while they are superhuman in completing certain tasks, they are “overall bad at generalising” At the heart of The Digital Ape: How to Live (in Peace) with Smart Machines lies the fundamental question that has been haunting human beings for the last few decades — is Artificial Intelligence (AI) on the cusp of ‘waking up’, with the ruinous consequences of consigning humans to the trash can? If you look at the staggering pace of tech advancements that have taken place in the past 50 years or so, there is enough evidence to suggest that the possibilities of AI are no longer restricted to works of sci-fi — there are good reasons to base our fears on. The authors — Nigel Shadbolt, principal of Jesus College, Oxford and professor of computer science at Oxford University and Roger Hampson, an academic and public servant — do well to put these fears to rest in this very readable book. “Machines at this stage simply have nothing to compare…,” they write. “They have no selves. Nor do we yet have, except for isolated and narrow capabilities, a sufficiently good picture of what is happening inside our heads to begin to model it with machines, let alone to ask a machine to imitate or do it.” In fact, we are quite reassuringly told that while AI researchers intended to build systems which would be able to solve abstract problems in computational reasoning for maths and science, they are actually poor at “common sense reasoning”. So while they are superhuman in completing certain tasks, they are overall “bad at generalising”. Perhaps the first instance when AI fears really hit us was in the 1990s when IBM’s Deep Blue supercomputer programme beat then world chess champion Garry Kasparov in a six-game play-off. Deep Blue was capable of evaluating 100-200 million chess positions per second, and its win had a chilling effect on Kasparov. Later in an article, he described the experience as sensing a “new kind of intelligence” on the other side of the table. These questions about sentience in robots, the authors remind us, are (as mentioned before) deeply rooted in whether humans will be able to fully understand what makes up our “consciousness”. “Sentience is one end product of hundreds of millions of years of descent with modification from prior living things. We have no certainty about how it is constituted, but it seems at the least to include both perception and activity,” they write. The book also probes the larger existential concerns about AI. For instance, while taking the example of the 2014 sci-fi movie Ex Machina, the authors examine whether an android of the future will be able to fool us into thinking it is a human. Can it trick us into believing that it is conscious? And…
