THE RANDLE REPORT

SUPERFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Dave Randle

Putting a lower case ‘i’ in front of something or labelling it as ‘smart’ doesn’t really denote the presence of actual intelligence.

That commodity isn’t limited to the shuffling of figures and data of which the contraption might be capable. It involves perception, consciousness, evaluation and understanding.

No machine is capable of any of these human attributes. If it ever seems to be, it is because we are endowing it with our own characteristics.

It is generally easier to recognise this in the written word than in voice synthesisers, satnavs, automated telephone messages and the frightful Alexa, in which we anthropomorphise anything that speaks our language.

I was on a car launch on which the route had been fed into satnavs. Although ours was triggered by the various road going stimuli which would normally cause it to say useful satnavvy things such as ‘turn half left,’ ‘follow the road,’ or ‘leave by the exit’, it said total non-sequiturs such as ‘The Quartermaster’s sergeant will accept delivery.’

Our own satnav has been updated a number of times since a new estate was built, but still doesn’t ‘know’ it’s there. A self driving, so called autonomous, car would have to be overridden by anyone living there who wanted to go home.

Such cars are not autonomous of course. The proprietor has merely abandoned his own autonomy to a programmer who has never driven in that place at that specific time.

The nearest analogy would be a headless cockroach, which continues to obey the last command given before it lost its head until it finally runs out of fuel.

In the course of a day’s real world driving, a person can spot when a child, a dog or a deer might run into the road. He or she can make allowances for foreign registered left hand drive lorries and cars, can make way for ambulances and other emergency vehicles, negotiate cyclists and motorcyclists, funeral cortèges, tractors, buggies, hedge-cutters and roadworks. His or her modern car might be bristling with sensors and processors, but the only awareness or intelligence present resides with the person.

He or she is able to perceive a problem right then in the present and conceive a solution to it. The machine can only respond to exigencies already programmed into it.

The same goes for ‘diagnostic’ machines, which electronically ‘pick a card’ from an available menu, where once a skilled doctor would use his or her experience.

Computers are great at a lot of things. Their main advantage is their variability. Where once Henry Ford had lines of identical black Model Ts coming off the production line, now different models can be programmed to come off the same line, one after the other, left or right hand drive, petrol or diesel, with just-in-time supply chains and stock control all communicating with each other. Robots can be trained by technicians to repeat certain tasks ad infinitum, until the last skilled trainers are gone.

But a lot of the impetus to do away with intelligence and humanity has to do with self-appointed people playing god. All around us are comic books, movies and TV shows showing weakly humans being terrorised by idiot machines, yet we seem to bow down before them and consent to being dumbed further down and made increasingly irrelevant in our own scheme of things.

The size of a brain is not a measure of intelligence. The brain is a router that passes stuff one way or the other, but it doesn’t need to know what it is.

People say things like ‘my brain is telling me’ this, that or the other. What they mean is they are telling themselves what they already know but going around the houses to do it.

So called ‘artificial intelligence’ is nothing more than sleight of hand. There is no intelligence in the true sense of the word. Just a superficial illusion of some other ‘entity’ than can be blamed.