Back when I was in law school in the early 1970’s, I spent a lot of time “expanding my consciousness” by smoking great local weed and listening to the “Firesign Theatre” (FT), a satirical comedy group out of San Francisco (two of the four now dead) whose material fit in perfectly with one’s thus-altered mental state. One of FT’s albums entitled “I Think We’re All Bozos On This Bus” purports to follow a bus-load of Bozo clowns into the future while they are honking their “Clarabelle” bulb horns in response to whatever. (That happens to be a jarring mixed “metaphor” of sorts, but it does not matter.) Anyway, they manage to get an audience with the President of the United States, who/which has “evolved” to be a computer with a voice that sounds strangely like Richard Nixon! To show just how smart he/it is, the “computer President” insists on being asked ANY question which he will, of course, answer, so the protagonist in question, “Clem,” steps up and asks the President if he knows “Why does the porridge bird lay its egg in the air?”
Now, I realize that question makes absolutely no sense at all, but it was perfectly appropriate at the time! We howled with laughter at such absurdities. (It helped that we were stoned out of our gourds!) Then, an unexpected thing happens: the “President” has a meltdown! One of those present at the audience with the “President” is angrily yelling in the background that “You broke the President, man!” The Nixonian presidential voice is dragging slower and lower and more garbled, while a voiced-over computerized error message makes it clear that something seriously wrong has happened within the “President.” My classmate, with whom I have gotten VERY stoned, points out to me that computers cannot answer “why” questions, so that explains the meltdown!
To this day it is interesting to see who was listening back then. Way too many of my peers were not doing so, and that is one reason why Donald Trump got so many votes in 2020! They should have known better than to vote for a busted machine! But, I digress.
Fast-forward to 2020, and I am struggling to finish The Emperor’s New Mind, written, published and autographed by Sir Roger Penrose, an emeritus professor of math and physics at Oxford, which I bought when I went to hear him speak at “The Smithsonian” back in 1990. I had tried to read it then, but it is WAY over my head, so I put it on the shelf, where it had stayed ever since. My guilt, however, kept nagging at me, so I pulled the book back down and ground my way through it last winter. (Penrose got half of the 2020 Nobel Prize in physics for his work with “black holes” and Albert Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity, so his is the only “Nobel” autograph I have.)
The premise of the book is Penrose’s assertion that the operations of the intra-connected human mind must reflect sub-atomic quantum mechanics, so he is (as am I) a skeptic when it comes to whether or not computers, even “quantum” computers, will ever truly mimic human intelligence. I vainly slogged through his presentation and analysis of mental function and the physics of quantum behavior, but he never raised the issue of a “why” question, or that computers cannot master the human thought processes of “because.” Computers are very good and very fast at making choices between “Door No. One” and “Door No. Two,” binary decision-making, but they cannot do subjective decision-making. They do not have a “whim” button! (“Because I said so, dammit!”)
I have since watched Penrose in a live interview streamed online. He is famous for fashioning various tiling patterns that are mathematically convoluted (so-called “Penrose Tiles”), and he and his father designed a never-ending “stairway” that was supposedly inspiration for M. C. Escher’s “Waterfall” painting! He will be 90 years old in August. I have failed to understand much of his book, but I can appreciate his skepticism about “Artificial Intelligence.” I’ve been wrong about computers before, such as doubting the eventual reality of digitized voice recognition and dictation but, and notwithstanding the scary memory of “Hal” from the movie 2001, I doubt very seriously that computers will ever manifest true human-level intelligence.
Now, where did I put those FT albums? Time to burn a doobie and reminisce about Bach’s Also Sprach Zarathustra!
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