Will Computers Be Able To Have Children?

Dr. Stephen Hawking says that we should be afraid of creating Artificial Intelligence that can become a threat to man.  My contention, is that we are already on that path. That Pandora's Box or Can of Worms is already opened. The only way to close a can of worms is with a bigger can, and nobody has one when it comes to the progress of technology.

When Ray Kurzweil's book, "The Age of Spiritual Machine's" came out, I thought that it was a bunch of bosh -- until I got to a seminal part of the book for me.  It was a small appendix of a few pages about building an intelligent machine in three easy paradigms.  That book changed my life. One of my daughter's gave the book for Christmas, and it was the book that started me on the path to programming artificial intelligence and playing with machine learning.  I never once thought that I would use Machine Learning in my job, and I was wrong.

Machine Learning has a long way to go, as does Artificial Intelligence, but we are making great headway.  In previous blog entries, I make the case for every Operating System, or OS to have an artificial neural network embedded in it. I also make the case for standardized neural network notation so that I can transfer, or sell what my machine has learned to your machine.  And I make the case in this blog post, that we can evolve smarter and smarter machines, if every time that we need to load a new operating system, we let an existing operating system impart its neural nets to the new machine.  One of the differences between humans and other animals, is that knowledge is not passed from generation to generation.  If we do that with computers, we are well on the way to make scary intelligent machines.

So if a computer can pass on knowledge to a new generation of computers, by passing down knowledge embedded in Artificial Neural Networks, can one say that the new computer is a child of the old computer?

I have opined on how to create Artificial Consciousness (more in a later blog topic on how I can make a computer have the worry emotion). I also have talked about Computational Creativity and Dr. Stephen Thaler's work.  So if we evolve computer intelligence to the point that it can seed other computer's with that intelligence, then we are on the way to computers having virtual children.

The way that I see Artificial Intelligence evolving, is that no computer can be an expert on everything. As computers become more and more intelligent, there will be specialization among the ranks of computers, as there is in human endeavor. Some computers will trade securities. Some will diagnose illness. Others will run power plants.  There will be a hierarchy of computer intelligence as there is in humans now.  And the progeny of each computer will be a mirror of its parents.  It's hard to imagine, but if computers do acquire consciousness, intelligence, personality and creativity, then the internet will become a computer society mirroring human society.  And that is when we will have to fear it.

Alan Turing never knew what he was getting into when he proposed his machines and the capability of passing a Turing Test.  We are on the cusp of something mind boggling, but at the moment, I would be content on creating an Artificial Neural Network that makes money for me while I ruminate about Artificial Intelligence.