The Surge Towards a Mechanical Mind

According to the reading, computerized warfare was initially the most prominent champion of the development of artificial intelligence. This seems reasonable, as automated warfare should at least in theory be far more efficient. The perfect warrior could be construed as a mechanical mind which mimics that of a brilliant human being but which is uninhibited by emotional modulation, hormonal and neurochemical changes in the brain, and various other types of distraction. Where the Turing test created the theoretical model for a universal machine, the development of artificial intelligence allowed that idea to take form on a level which is both more complex and more practical. While the perfect military mind in mechanical form may not yet be completed, the development of symbolic mimicry of machines finds widespread use in our culture. Predictive behavior is central to many computational algorithms in everything from our Pandora stations to our search engines.

As computer languages became more complex, modeling of human consciousness became more obtainable and the progress towards efficient variations of artificial intelligence developed. It is interesting to remember that all levels are reducible to machine code, which is operationally very similar to Turing’s theoretical machine. In hindsight, it’s easy to think that the development of compiler programs was a logical next step that should have required little debate. The reality of course is that engineers, who dealt primarily in hardware, were horrified by the idea of compilers. It’s easy to imagine a room filled with furious engineers arguing about inefficiency. Considering that multiple levels of computation took manual priming and ate up a lot more time initially, they had an excellent point considering the hardware of their day. This and many other similar examples we’ve covered in this class continuously remind me that the technological viewpoint we have today has radically evolved in very recent history.