Can a computer be smarter than us? This seems to be a question straight from a sc-fi movie. You know, the ones where humans build a computer (machine) and try to make it “ the most sophisticated thing man-kind has ever seen!” Then by the end of the movie the computer has taken over and we are all dead. It’s cheesy, stupid and unrealistic. Or is it? It is possible for a machine to be smarter than humans? According to Minsky, it is.
Forever scientists, mechanics, brainiacs, and computer geeks have been experimenting with machines. They all want to make a “robot” that can think and reason on it’s own. They have already come up with Wisard, which is the “first large-scale neural network” (Davidson 117). Wisard learned how to recognize face is less than 20 seconds. Does this make Wisard smarter than humans? Computers have also been made to understand language. Minsky argues tat his design is able to comprehend semantics. This is a key development for humans. Does this make his design smarter than humans?
The answer to all of these questions is no. Even though a computer may understand semantics and even though it can do jobs faster than same of us doesn’t make it smarter than humans. Computers are built by us, set up by us, trained by us, and used by us. This makes human beings more advanced, and smarter, than the machines we build. Computers are built to help make some of our jobs easier. Whether it is recognizing cheating in casinos, fighting wars in Iraq, or giving us tasty beverages, we use machines to help us. This means that we are the ones who have to train the computer. We have to know what we want the computer to do before we can even build it. This means that no, the computer is not smarter than us. We are smarter than it because we are using it to help us.
Computers can’t think on their own. They may be able to learn, but they can only learn what is taught to them. If we teacher a computer to pick out faces, that is what it will be good at. If we try to throw a baseball at the computer, it’s not going to catch it, and I doubt it will ever learn to catch it. Computers are not like the computers we see in Smart House, they don’t just learn by watching and can outsmart us. There isn’t one mega machine that will dominate the world because by watching humans it can talk, think, reason, drive a car, shoot a gun, and build a bomb. There is no way this will ever happen. In the end we will always outsmart the computers.
Aleksander even says “AI people have taken theses linguistic strings and tried to present them in a computer in an unambiguous way, and have run into trouble. Very small changes in a sentence represent things that are completely different in the real world. They are unable to deal with this.” (Davidson 119) This just proves that a computer may be able to understand semantics, but even just changing around a sentence a tiny bit can confuse the computer. We are obviously the move-advanced species, and we always will be. I can’t ever see a world where computers are the alpha males, while we are running around doing what computers tell us to do. It just won’t happen.
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