Illinois Genetic Algorithms Laboratory

Science Daily posts a University of Michigan press release entitled Falling Prey to Machines? in which John Holland discusses the connection between contemporary science fiction such as Michael Crichton’s Prey, genetic algorithms, and the possibility of sentient computation.

“Computer sentience is possible,” said John Holland, professor of electrical engineering and computer science and professor of psychology at the University of Michigan. “But for a number of reasons, I don’t believe that we are anywhere near that stage right now.”

Readers of this blog need no introduction to Holland, but they might be somewhat surprised by his views regarding the possibility of computers rivaling human intelligence.

According to Holland, the problem with developing artificial intelligence through things like genetic algorithms is that researchers don’t yet understand how to define what computer programs should be evolving toward. Human beings did not evolve to be intelligent–they evolved to survive. Intelligence was just one of many traits that human beings exploited to increase their odds of survival, and the test for survival was absolute. Defining an equivalent test of fitness for targeting intelligence as an evolutionary goal for machines, however, has been elusive. Thus, it is difficult to draw comparisons between how human intelligence developed and how artificial intelligence could evolve.

“We don’t understand enough about how our own human software works to come even close to replicating it on a computer,” says Holland.

According to Holland, advances in software have not kept pace with the exponential improvements in hardware processing power, and there are many artificial intelligence problems that cannot be solved by simply performing more calculations. While hardware performance continues to double almost every year and a half, the doubling time for software performance is at least 20 years.

“In the final analysis, hardware is just a way of executing programs,” says Holland. “It’s the software that counts.”

Hat tip to Open Source Protein Structure Prediction for picking up the news release and for republishing Cosma Shalizi’s lovely review of Holland’s Emergence.