Beyond Information

The emergence of machine intelligence during the second half of the twentieth century is the most important development in the evolution of this planet since the origin of life two to three thousand million years ago. The emergence of machine intelligence within the matrix of human society is analogous to the emergence, three billion years ago, of complex, self-replicating molecules within the matrix of an energy-rich molecular soup — the first step in the evolution of life. The emergence of machine intelligence within a human social context has set into motion irreversible processes which will lead to an evolutionary discontinuity. Just as the emergence of “Life” represented a qualitatively different form of organisation of matter and energy, so will pure “Intelligence” represent a qualitatively different form of organisation of matter, energy and life.

The first chapter introduced several cardinal principles which comprise the intellectual foundation of the present work. The first of these is that any system which exhibits organisation contains information. This conceptualisation of information — that information is a basic property of the universe and is as “real” as are matter and energy — from here on in will be taken for granted.

The phenomenon of life — that is, the origin and evolution of living organisms on this planet — represents the best example of the origin and early evolution of the phenomenon of true intelligence known to us. Until recently it represented the only example. This has changed with the advent of machine intelligence—a matter to be discussed in later chapters. In this chapter we will explore the origin of proto-intelligent systems into pre-biotic ones, then look at certain aspects of simpler forms of intelligence as exemplified by plants and micro-organisms.

One of the best ways of demonstrating the existence and importance of collective intelligence in humans is to contrast the announcement of the discovery of the X-ray in the 1890s with a corresponding event in the 1980s — the announcement of the discovery of the W-boson (as reviewed by Pais 1986). Conrad Roentgen performed the experiment by himself, and his first publication announcing the discovery of X-rays carried only his name as sole author. In contrast, the report providing clear evidence for the existence of the W-boson was signed by 135 authors coming from twelve European and two North American institutions. Furthermore, while the nineteenth-century scientists tended to work in makeshift laboratories of their own making, their late-twentieth-century counterparts tend to work in government- or institution-supported laboratories of great sophistication. The group which announced the discovery of the W-boson working underground at CERN, the European Nuclear Research Centre, required not only the ingenuity and expertise of many hundreds of minds at CERN working on the administrative, technical and scientific aspects, but thousands more working across the world to provide the scientific, technical, administrative, political and financial back-up necessary for so large an enterprise expending hundred of millions of dollars of public funds.

The idea that machines may possess intelligence reflects our collective historical experience with computers. Both the term “machine intelligence” and the term “artificial intelligence” are derived from work with computers. The contemporary conception is that computers show the possibility of engaging in intelligent behaviour, and when they do, we will have created an artificial intelligence — an intelligence based on information processing carried out by machines. Thus Marvin Minsky (1968) defines “artificial intelligence” as: “the science of making machines do things that would require intelligence if done by men”.

Human intelligence, for the most part, does not operate like a von Neumann type of logic machine. It does not, for the most part, engage in precise reasoning, manipulating abstract symbols. The great fallacy — perhaps based in a kind of technological arrogance — is that the human brain works like a logic machine, and that, therefore, the computers created by the collective genius of men like Atanasoff, Babbage, Bush, Turing, von Neumann, and Zuse — upon perfection — would act like human brains.

It should become apparent from the following sections that computers will become ever more powerful thinking machines. We must therefore consider not whether the intelligence of computer systems will exceed that of individual human beings, but when.

During the course of the twentieth century, we have come to accept the idea that the Universe is evolving. Furthermore, we now accept as reasonable the idea that given the four basic forces of nature, stars should be born, evolve through various stages, and die.