Today in 1996, The U.S. Postal Service issued a new stamp commemorating the 50th birthday of the ENIAC and 50 years of computer technology.
This was the first U.S. Stamp dedication to be broadcast live over the Internet's Mbone. Stamp collectors in 6 countries were able to watch and listen in real time.
The stamp shows an image of a brain partially covered by small blocs that contain parts of circuit boards and binary code. The image encapsulates well the conviction that computers are giant brains, articulated in 1949 by Edmund Berkeley in his book, Giant Brains or Machines that Think:
Recently there have been a good deal of news about strange giant machines that can handle information with vast speed and skill…. These machines are similar to what a brain would be if it were made of hardware and wire instead of flesh and nerves… A machine can handle information; it can calculate, conclude, and choose; it can perform reasonable operations with information. A machine, therefore, can think.
Thirty years later, Marvin Minsky famously stated: “The human brain is just a computer that happens to be made out of meat.” To which Joseph Weizenbaum replied:
What do these people actually mean when they shout that man is a machine (and a brain a “meat machine”)? It is… that human beings are “computable,” that they are not distinct from other objects in the world… all this is not the fault of the computer. Guilt cannot be attributed to computers. But computers enable fantasies, many of them wonderful, but also those of people whose compulsion to play God overwhelms their ability to fathom the consequences of their attempt to turn their nightmares into reality. I recall, in this connection, a debate I once had with Herbert Simon. Perhaps frustrated by my attitudes, he shouted: “Knowledge is better than ignorance!” (I think he thought he had me there). I replied: “Yes! But not at any price.”
But Weizenbaum was in a small and ever-decreasing minority. In his 2005 book, The Singularity is Near, Ray Kurzweil predicted that by 2045, machine intelligence may equal or surpass the collective intelligence of all human beings on Earth.
Today, the idea that computers and brains are the same thing, leads people with very developed brains to conclude that if computers can win in Go or engage in a “conversation” (as Weizenbaum’s computer program Eliza did in the 1960s), they can think, and that with just a few more short steps up the artificial neural networks evolution ladder, computers will reason that it’s in their best interests to destroy humanity (or to keep us as pets, as Minsky also said many years ago).
This is what Yehoshua Bar-Hillel called in the early 1950s “the fallacy of the first step.”
The distance from the inability to do something to doing it badly is usually much shorter than the distance from doing something badly and doing it correctly. Many people think, argued Bar-Hillel, that if someone demonstrates a computer doing something that until very recently no one thought it could perform, even if it’s doing it badly, it is only a matter of some further technological developments before it will perform flawlessly. You only need to be patient, so goes the widespread assertion, and eventually you will get it there. But reality proves otherwise, time and time again, cautioned Bar-Hillel.