Making up the Mind by Chris Frith

Author:Chris Frith
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Published: 2013-05-09T16:00:00+00:00

What Can Clever Machines Really Do?

In 1956 the science of making machines do clever things was named Artificial Intelligence. In this, as in any research program, the easy problems were the first to be addressed. Perception seemed easy. Since almost everyone can read handwriting and recognize faces, it should be easy to build machines that can read handwriting and recognize faces. Playing chess, on the other hand, is very difficult. Very few people can play chess at the level of a Grand Master. Building machines that could play chess would be left for later.

Fifty years have passed and a chess computer has beaten the world champion.8 It is perception that turns out to be the hard problem. Humans are still far better than machines at recognizing faces and reading handwriting. Why is perception so hard?

Even my ability to see that the garden below my window is full of different objects turns out to be very hard for machines. There are many reasons why this problem is hard. For example, objects overlap each other and some of them move about. How do I know whether this patch of brown is part of a fence or a tree or a bird? My brain solves all these surprisingly hard problems and makes me think that I can perceive the world effortlessly. How does my brain do this?

The development of information theory and the digital computer revealed that perception is a hard problem to solve. But our brains have solved this problem. Does this mean that the digital computer is not a good metaphor for the brain? Or do we need to find new kinds of computations for the computers to carry out?

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