Delirium wrote:
Ray Saintonge wrote:
I would call Sabine's comment realistic
rather than pedantic. I
realize that technophiles dream of these artificial solutions, but
the best they can realistically hope for is competent interpretation
of technical material. When it comes to metaphor technophiles are
playing in the right field of dreams. (I wonder how a machine would
translate that into the language of people who know nothing about
baseball.)
Off-list since this is getting off-topic, but I was implying that my
comment was pedantic---I agree with Sabine as a practical matter, but
she was arguing that in principle it is *impossible* for machine
translation to meet the quality of human translation, which I think is
incorrect. It is, however, correct that it will not do so in the near
future.
I don't know about it being off-topic. It does have a bearing on how we
approach Africa. If machine translation were effective it would make
the task of going into Africa a lot easier. I simply do not share your
unbounded optimism about the future of technology. Of course, in the
nightmare scenario there will always be the HAL who will need to be
reminded that he should stick to "A Bicycle Build for Two."
The essential observation is that humans are,
according to one line of
thinking, themselves nothing more than biological machines.
Therefore, by definition, anything a human can do is something a
machine can do, because we already have an example of a machine that
can do it. All that's left is the engineering problem of how to build
such a machine ourselves. It could either be a workalike (e.g. wait
for neuroscientists to document the exact functioning of the brain,
and simulate that in a computer), or else it could be something
radically different that still does things we'd consider as requiring
intelligence.
The premise that humans are biological machines does not have unanimous
support. What you say may very well follow logically from that premise,
but others will see it as a kind of GIGO argument
The "proof" for this as in principle
possible is by contradiction: If
we assume it's impossible, that means that humans must be something
other than a glob of matter that obeys the laws of physics. Thus,
there must be something magical about humans. That's an assumption
many people aren't willing to make, which means that they must then
therefore accept that humans are in essence machines, albeit
fantastically complex ones.
The glob of matter as matter may very well obey the laws of physics, but
which physics? Does that necessarily exclude obeying additional laws?
The leap to magic, like the leap to faith, involves jumping to
conclusions. I'm just as unwilling as you to make that leap, but that
still does not lead me to the conclusion that you derive. Rather it
leads me to a lot of unanswered questions. What, for example, is the
role of intuition? I'm not prepared either to accept my own speculative
theories as an answer, or to confuse that speculation with objective
truth. That would be engaging in pseudoscience. I am, however,
prepared to live with the uncertainty that some questions may not be
answerable. I think that a proof by contradiction can only work if ALL
the contradictory possibilities are known and have been explored.
Ec