Artificial Intelligence

In Our Time: Science

BBC

History

4.5 • 1.4K Ratings

🗓️ 8 December 2005

⏱️ 40 minutes

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Summary

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss artificial intelligence. Can we create a machine that creates? Some argue so. And is consciousness, as we are, with headaches and tiffs and moods and small pleasures and sore feet - often all at the same time - capable of taking place in a machine? Artificial intelligence machines have been growing much more intelligent since Alan Turing’s pioneering days at Bletchley in World War Two. Its claims are now very grand indeed. It is 31 years since Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C Clarke gave us HAL - the archetypal thinking computer of the film 2001: A Space Odyssey. But are we any nearer to achieving the thinking, feeling computer? Or is it just a dream - and should it remain as one?With Igor Aleksander, Professor, Imperial College London and inventor of Magnus - a neural computer which he says is an artificially conscious machine; John Searle, Professor of Philosophy, University of California and one of only two people in the world to invent an argument, the Chinese Room Argument, which destroys the plausibility of the idea of conscious machines.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Thanks for down learning the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.uk.
0:09.0	I hope you enjoy the program.
0:12.0	Hello, Can machines think?
0:14.7	It was the question posed by the mathematicians at Bletchley Park and especially by the
0:19.3	code breaker Alan Turing.
0:21.4	And it's a question that's still being asked today.
0:23.4	What's the difference between men and machines and what does it mean to be human?
0:27.1	And if you can answer that question, is it possible to build a computer that can imitate the human mind. In 1949 the eminent neurosurgeon
0:35.4	Professor Jeffrey Jefferson argued that the mechanical mind could never
0:38.8	rival a human intelligence because it could never be conscious of what it did.
0:42.2	He said, not until a machine can write a solace. because it could never be conscious of what it did.
0:43.0	He said, not until a machine can write a sonnet or compose a concerto because of thoughts and
0:47.4	emotions felt, and not by the chance fall of symbols could you agree that the machine equals brain, that is not only write it, but know
0:55.0	that it's written it.
0:56.0	Unquote.
0:57.0	Yet the quest rolls on for machines that are bigger and better at processing symbols and
1:01.3	calculating infinite permutations.
1:04.2	Who were the early pioneers of artificial intelligence and what drove them to imitate the
1:07.8	operations of the human mind?
1:09.7	Is intelligence the defining characteristic of humanity? And how has the quest for artificial
1:14.2	intelligence been driven by warfare and conflict in the 20th century. With me to
1:18.6	discuss artificial intelligence is Igor Alexander, professor of Neural Systems Engineering at Imperial College University
	...

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