Dembski: Does the Squawk Around AI Sound Like the Tower of Babel? – Walter Bradley Center for Natural and Artificial Intelligence

Recently, design theorist William Dembski wrote a long essay on artificial general intelligence at his site, billdembski.com, The article is also available as a series of shorter pieces at Evolution News.

Dembski sees the breathless and implausible claims for computers that think like people as the modern equivalent of ancient idols. Here are highlights from the first two segments:

The closest thing to AGI in the Bible is the Tower of Babel. The conceit of those building the tower was that its top may reach unto heaven. (Genesis 11:4) Seriously?! Shouldnt it have been obvious to all concerned that however high the tower might be built, there would always be higher to go? Even with primitive cosmologies describing the vault or arch of heaven, it should have been clear that heaven would continually elude these builders best efforts. Indeed, there was no way the tower would ever reach heaven. And yet the builders deluded themselves into thinking that this was possible. Interestingly, Gods answer to the tower was not to destroy it but to confuse its builders by disrupting their communications so that they simply discontinued building it. AGIs ultimate fate, whatever its precise form, is to run aground on the hubris of its builders.

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In science fiction, themes appear that fly in the face of known, well-established physics. When we see such themes acted out in science fiction, we suspend disbelief. The underlying science may be nonsensical, but we go along with it because of the storyline. Yet when the theme of artificial intelligence appears in science fiction, we tend not to suspend disbelief. A full-orbed artificial intelligence that achieves consciousness and outstrips human intelligence in other words, AGI is now taken seriously as science and not just as science fiction. Is artificial intelligence at a tipping point, with AGI ready to appear in real time? Or is AGI more like many other themes of science fiction that make for a good story but nothing more? Ill be arguing in this series that AGI will now and ever remain in the realm of science fiction and outside the realm of real science. Yet to grasp this limitation on artificial intelligence requires looking beyond physics

Interestingly, whenever the original Star Trek treated the theme of artificial intelligence, the humans always outwitted the machines by looking to their ingenuity and intuition. For instance, in the episode I, Mudd, the humans confused the chief robot by using a variant of the liar paradox. Unlike dystopian visions in which machines best humanity, Star Trek always maintained a healthy humanism that refused to worship technology

In this series, Im going to argue that there are indeed fundamental limits to artificial intelligence standing in the way of its matching and then exceeding human intelligence, and thus that AGI will never achieve full-fledged scientific status.

Dembski has also just published the second edition of The Design Inference, (Discovery Institute Press, November 16, 2023) with Winston Ewert as co-author. As of 30 January, 2024, it was still #32 at Amazon in Information Theory.

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Dembski: Does the Squawk Around AI Sound Like the Tower of Babel? - Walter Bradley Center for Natural and Artificial Intelligence