What did you find out about the people who study AI — what makes somebody want to study AI?
What I found out was that there is this big wish to have a unified, coherent world view in which everything fits together, which is a desire you find a lot in science. In AI it's particularly strong because they include human nature, the whole idea that humans are actually illogical — if we just can understand them. That there is a way to deal with our ambiguities and paradoxes and miscommunications, that ultimately those paradoxes and ambiguities can be overcome, which for a Lutheran theologian, for me, is kind of interesting because I define sin not traditionally, [as] guilt, but sin is really the living in ambiguity, the very fact that humans are not logical. I see the whole AI, and the classical AI, endeavour very much as an attempt to overcome sin.
Rod and other people... kind of criticised that classical camp, [which is] concentrated on high intellectual powers, on math and logic as the pinnacle of intelligence. They kind of embrace the whole embodiment stuff. I shared their critique of the classical approach.
I found out that they were much more tolerant toward religion, even though they weren't religious themselves — they were very supportive of me being religious and of me describing them in religious terms because they realise they don't know everything. What I really like about that — there was inherent modesty in them. They didn't think they would solve the world's problems, but they really realise it's so hard to build a humanoid robot and that actually made them appreciate human nature more.
In the book you described AI as a spiritual quest.
Yes, yes. You don't reduce humans to their logic and math capabilities, but really describe them as social mammals. We are so incredibly complex and so good at [handling complexity]. And to rebuild that is just basically impossible. AI really makes us modest.
[There was a notion in] the more traditional approaches, "Oh! It's fun to play God" — that was completely gone in this embodiment camp... We really have undergone, not only in AI but in the general cognitive science in the last five to six, perhaps 10, years — slowly we're undergoing a paradigm shift where the understanding of humans goes toward more modesty because it is so complex, because we have to include the body and social interaction.
So Marvin Minsky's notion of a human as a "meat machine," is that a minority view now in AI?
Basically Marvin Minsky says, "That is what we are, and we are nothing but that," while modern AI research says it makes sense in the context of AI to talk about us as meat machines — it just makes sense, but that doesn't mean we are. If you try to build artificial humans, you have to assume we are nothing but machines, otherwise you can give up your [effort], you can give up your hopes. But it's a pragmatic assumption and I think in the beginning of AI, it was an ontological assumption.
