No, Computers Are Not About To Rule The World

In previous blogs I've alerted you to the thinking of some scientists like Kevin Kelly and Ray Kurzweil who suggest that in the next 35 years computer or artificial intelligence will surpass human intelligence and that by the end of this century humans will evolve into something currently unimaginable. The majority of scientists and engineers in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) scoff at this.

Here's what Dr. Mark Humphrys of the University of Edinburgh writes in an article, The Future of Artificial Intelligence.

". . . I, and many like me in new AI, imagine that this is still Physics before Newton, that the field might have a good one or two hundred years left to run. The reason is that there is no obvious way of getting from here to there—to human-level intelligence from the rather useless robots and brittle software programs that we have nowadays. A long series of conceptual breakthroughs are needed, and this kind of thinking is very difficult to timetable . . .

"In the coming decades, we shouldn't expect that the human race will become extinct and be replaced by robots. We can expect that classical AI will go on producing more and more sophisticated applications in restricted domains—expert systems, chess programs, Internet agents—but any time we expect common sense we will continue to be disappointed as we have been in the past . . . In conclusion, we won't see full AI in our lives, but we should live to get a good feel for whether or not it is possible, and how it could be achieved by our descendants."

 I share this because I want you to rest easy. We are not about to see the world taken over by machines, be they computers or any others. All this despite the many movies, books, etc. around.

I'll get back to what the Scriptures have to say about us humans and our relationship to our God in the next blog.