9. Can a machine know?

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In science fiction movies like, ‘Terminator’, ‘A.I.’, ‘I, robot’, and ‘The Matrix’, human beings are living in a world together with some kind of artificial intelligence, either in peace or war. What all these films have in common is that somewhere in a distant future machines, artificial intelligence, have developed what I would call an own mind. Then the question arises whether a machine can know anything. This is what I will try to find out in my essay and in order to do so I will have to define what a ‘machine’ is and also the meaning of ‘knowledge’. First, as I see it a machine could be two things either it is a piece of equipment that is designed for a particular pupose, for example, cars, lawnmowers, calculators, and other apparatuses that makes life easier for man. The other thing would be some kind of artificial intelligence or robot that are very rare or even highly fictious, and examples will almost only be found in movies such as the four mentioned above. However, the machine you closest can relate to both definitions and mostly common, I would say, would be a computer. As computers are designed to help us and probably the machine today that most developed to ‘thinking’. It is possibly the best definitions to define in context what the subject of this imminent question of this essay is: can a machine know? I will mostly refer to a computer when I use the word machine. The other question rising is: what is to know something? Knowledge is a wide subject and through gaining information, understanding and skill from education or experience you can gain knowledge. There are, however, different ways of knowing, for example, a person can know that in order to drive a car you need to step on the gas in order to move, step on the clutch to change gear, step on the brake to stop, and turn the steering wheel in order to turn. But this does not in any way mean that the person in reality and practically know how to to drive the car, if never used a car before. Even though computers have not gone through any education they contain and process amounts of information and they know that on the question 1+1 the answer is two. But do they really understand what they are doing, for example, if a human was sad and crying, could a machine ever understand that the person was sad and why the person was unhappy, or would its reaction be only to give the person a handkerchief because tears were flowing down the cheeks and soaking the persons shirt? Does it therefore mean that a machine can know only because they possess the information and know what answer to give to a certain question?

Now, if we look at what a machine actually can do we notice that most machines are in fact very limited. In other words, they can only do what they are programmed to do. A calculator cannot tell morally right from wrong. If we take the different areas of knowledge a machine would face problems in, for example, the area of art or morality, in a question like what or who is good or bad, machines lacks a sence of judgement. Mathematics, on the other hand, is probably the area easiest connected with machines as both tend to be very logical. Computers can often draw logical conclusions as illustrated above, 1+1=2, but there is an error. Say that you, for example, programme into a computer that 1+1=3, the computer would not say that this was wrong, since it cannot develope its own thoughts. Or can it? Would the computer react on this flaw contradicting the axioms of mathematics. My guess would be that the computer itself would not work if this the very bottom foundations of mathematics was changed, since so much of the computer’s thinking is logical it would not last in the long run.

You could claim that humans are like machines - machines made of meat - biological information processors. That we are being programmed to think a certain way. What is it then that differs us from machines? As said earlier, machines are just being programmed for one specific purpose, and only have a special response for an special command. A machine could therefore make the same mistake over and over again without learning or gaining any new experience from it unless its programme was changed. But it cannot make an individual decision to, for example, improve or change itself - to do so it need humans. Machines are still dependent on humans, and not vice versa. A machine cannot know anything a human do not know, at least not yet on this planet. Nor do a machine have any emotions or imagination, and that is probably the thing that differs us, humans, from machines the most; they cannot feel happiness, sadness, or fear. Simply put, a machine do not possess a consciousness. Professor Jefferson Lister states, ”not until a machine can write a sonnet or compose a concerto because of thoughts and emotions felt, and not by the chance fall of symbols, could we agree that machine equals brain.” Machines also process the information and data given to them bit by bit. While humans gives a more holistic judgement over all the information collected. You could also argue that humans possess a free will that machines do not.

John Searle, a professor in philosophy, argues that a machine cannot know anything or show intelligence. His Chinese Room Argument is supposed to illustrate that machines only simulate understanding without really understanding the meaning behind it. The Chinese Room Argument: ”Suppose that [...] we have constructed a computer that behaves as if it understands Chinese. In other words, the computer takes Chinese characters as input and, following a set of rules, correlates them with other Chinese characters, which it presents as output. Suppose that this computer performs this task so convincingly that it easily passes the Turing test [a test of a machine’s capability to perform human-like conversation]. [...] The conclusion proponents of strong A.I. would like to draw is that the computer understands Chinese, just as the person does. Now, Searle asks us to suppose that he is sitting inside the computer. In other words, he is in a small room in which he receives Chinese characters, consults a rule book, and returns the Chinese characters that the rules dictate. Searle notes that he does not, of course, understand a word of Chinese. Furthermore, he argues that his lack of understanding goes to show that computers do not understand Chinese either, because they are in the same situation as he is. They are mindless manipulators of symbols, just as he is — and they do not understand what they are ‘saying’, just as he does not.”

Does a encyclopedia know just because it contains information? No, most of us would say, it only contains some agreed truths. And knowledge is not only to be right, but also to be able to process, convert and apply the knowledge. In order for humans to agree on that a machine can know, I think, we would need to develop a machine with something called strong AI, i.e. a machine which supersedes the human intelligence, becomes self-aware and demonstrate a level of human cognitive abilities, most importantly to accomplish independent ”thinking”. Thus far, humans have only developed computers with weak AI, for example, the chess computer Deep Blue - the first computer to beat a human. Deep Blue is agreed by many that it know how to play chess simply because it is programmed with an infinit number of possible moves. Therefore it cannot ”think”, nor does it show knowledge in any other area of knowledge.

Hence, a machine cannot, in reality, know because it is programmed in a certain way to perform a certain task and only follows a set routine. The machine cannot fully ”know” or understand what the command means, it can just follow the command directive and carry out the objective. It is not able to take any own decisions or adjust faults on its own. Even if there was an very large machine with an infinite memory able to store all the data in the univers, it would probably still only simulate understanding. This could actu...