Tech Watch | InfoWorld Staff » Will machines do our thinking?

December 04, 2006 | Comments: (0)

Will machines do our thinking?

TAGS: Future tech

Two pieces of news about human versus computer intelligence is certainly highlighting the fact that computers are getting smarter. But the question is not how smart they get but how much decision making we are willing to give up to a machine.

First news report, ala "Minority Report," the futuristic crime stopping movie starring Tom Cruise, it seems Philadelphia, the City of Brotherly Love, is actually working on a similar system.

If you recall in the movie a world government could predict who was going to commit a crime before they did it. Following the prediction the police were sent out to arrest the future perpetrator prior to the commission of the crime.

Reported by Micahel Matza, staff writer for the Philadelphia Inquirer, the article states that a University of Pennsylvania criminologist, Richard Beck, a statistician by trade, believes he can build a statistical model using data on parolees from Philadelphia probation department to determine who is most like to attempt or to commit a murder.

Matza reports that the system can be used by case workers to predict with 40 percent higher accuracy than current methods who will likely commit such violent crimes.

Like all statistical programs, the system plugs as many relevant data points as possible into a computerized checklist which comes up with a score of most likely parolees to commit "future lethality," reports Matza.

Statistical analysis is indeed scary, balancing as it does free will against predictability of human behavior.

While no one can predict what a single person will do under any circumstance, statistics that track behavior of large groups of people is used today, for example, by retailers to predict shopper behavior, so I suppose it stands to reason that the same models could be used by criminologists.

But what if it is expanded to include who is most like to commit a robbery, steal a car, snatch a purse? And what if this system is used as a tool before someone is given parole? Would they be denied parole if the computer decided they were likely to commit one of these crimes?

Sound crazy? Did you know that companies already use computerized tests to decide if a person is likely to make a good employee.

And there is no appeal from these tests. If you fail the test you will not be hired, no matter how good you might have looked during an HR interview.

When organizations rely on systems to do their thinking without an appeal to real people I think we have gone too far in our reliance on machines.

Second piece of news reports covered by InfoWorld reports on a debate on "Will a 'conscious' machine ever be built?" between Inventor Ray Kurzweil and Yale University professor David Gelernter.

The big question they debated as reported by Nancy Weil of the IDG News Service was on "are we limited to building super-intelligent, robotic 'zombies,' or will it be possible for us to build conscious, creative, even 'spiritual' machines?"

The debate and a lecture that followed were part of MIT's celebration of the 70th anniversary of Alan Turing's paper "On Computable Numbers," which was published in 1936 and is widely held to be the theoretical foundation for the development of computers.

Posted by Ephraim Schwartz on December 4, 2006 03:19 PM

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