The atomic bomb was based on science theory. A computer can run many programs and do a great many things, but it will never be able to think by itself.
Our study of (automated) intelligence is based on science too.
> A computer ... will never be able to think by itself.
Turing wrote an entire paper about this (Computing Machinery and Intelligence), where he rephrases your statement (because he finds it to be meaningless) and devises a test to answer it. He also directly attacks your phrasing of "but it will never":
> I believe they are mostly founded on the principle of scientific induction. A man has seen thousands of machines in his lifetime. From what he sees of them he draws a number of general conclusions. They are ugly, each is designed for a very limited purpose, when required for a minutely different purpose they are useless, the variety of behaviour of any one of them is very small, etc., etc. Naturally he concludes that these are necessary properties of machines in general.
> A better variant of the objection says that a machine can never "take us by surprise." This statement is a more direct challenge and can be met directly. Machines take me by surprise with great frequency. This is largely because I do not do sufficient calculation to decide what to expect them to do, or rather because, although I do a calculation, I do it in a hurried, slipshod fashion, taking risks.
> A better variant of the objection says that a machine can never "take us by surprise." This statement is a more direct challenge and can be met directly. Machines take me by surprise with great frequency. This is largely because I do not do sufficient calculation to decide what to expect them to do, or rather because, although I do a calculation, I do it in a hurried, slipshod fashion, taking risks.
This seems like a cop out. Sure, if you do your calculations wrong, it doesn’t behave as you expect. But it’s still doing exactly what you wrote it to do. The surprise is in realizing your expectations were wrong, not that the machine decided to behave differently.
I think any AI researcher has a tale where an algorithm they wrote genuinely took them by surprise. Not due to wrong calculations, but by introducing randomness, heaps of data, and game bounderaries where the AI is free to fill in the blanks.
A good example of this is "move 37" from AlphaGo. This move surprised everyone, including the creators, who were not skilled enough in Go to hardcode it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HT-UZkiOLv8
Investing into a bubble only to make sure the money go to yourself. Seems like a economic loophole. You think computers will start to have dreams and desires? Abusing such a machine would be unethical. Go ahead and build a better OCR, just don't fall to the AGI hype.
All sciences that collaborate with the field of AI: Cognitive Science, Neuroscience, Systems Theory, Decision Theory, Information Theory, Mathematics, Physics, Biology, ...
Any AI curriculum worth its salt includes the many scientific and philosophical views on intelligence. It is not all alchemy, though the field is in a renewal phase (with horribly hyped nomenclature such as "pre-AGI", and the most impressive implementations coming from industry and government, not academia).
And eventhough the atom bomb was based on science too, there is this anecdote from Hamming:
> Shortly before the first field test (you realize that no small scale experiment can be done—either you have a critical mass or you do not), a man asked me to check some arithmetic he had done, and I agreed, thinking to fob it off on some subordinate. When I asked what it was, he said, "It is the probability that the test bomb will ignite the whole atmosphere." I decided I would check it myself! The next day when he came for the answers I remarked to him, "The arithmetic was apparently correct but I do not know about the formulas for the capture cross sections for oxygen and nitrogen—after all, there could be no experiments at the needed energy levels." He replied, like a physicist talking to a mathematician, that he wanted me to check the arithmetic not the physics, and left. I said to myself, "What have you done, Hamming, you are involved in risking all of life that is known in the Universe, and you do not know much of an essential part?" I was pacing up and down the corridor when a friend asked me what was bothering me. I told him. His reply was, "Never mind, Hamming, no one will ever blame you."
It does not need to. It just need to get complex enough. This is from an 1965 article:
"If the machines are permitted to make all their
own decisions, we can’t make any conjectures as to the
results, because it is impossible to guess how such machines might behave. We only point out that the fate of
the human race would be at the mercy of the machines.
It might be argued that the human race would never be
foolish enough to hand over all power to the machines.
But we are suggesting neither that the human race would
voluntarily turn power over to the machines nor that the
machines would willfully seize power. What we do suggest is that the human race might easily permit itself to
drift into a position of such dependence on the machines
that it would have no practical choice but to accept all of
the machines’ decisions. As society and the problems that
face it become more and more complex and as machines
become more and more intelligent, people will let machines make more and more of their decisions for them,
simply because machine-made decisions will bring better
results than man-made ones. Eventually a stage may be
reached at which the decisions necessary to keep the system running will be so complex that human beings will be
incapable of making them intelligently. At that stage the
machines will be in effective control. People won’t be able
to just turn the machine off, because they will be so dependent on them that turning them off would amount to
suicide."
I agree with the above, but imagine the same argument where "the machines" is replaced with "subject-matter experts", or "politicians acting on the advice of subject-matter experts".
The accumulated knowledge and skills of not just specialised individuals but entire institutions, working on highly technical and abstract areas of society, seems like it has created a kind of empathy gap between the people ostensibly wielding power and those who are experiencing the effects of that power (or the limits of that power).
> "... turning them off would amount to suicide."
Although this conclusion appears equally valid in the replacement argument, it sadly doesn't come with the wanted guarantee of "therefore that wouldn't happen".
> A computer can run many programs and do a great many things, but it will never be able to think by itself.
A computer being able to simulate a brain that thinks for itself is the logical extrapolation of current brain-simulation efforts. Many people think there are far less computationally intensive ways to make an AI, but "physics sim of a human brain" is a good thought experiment.
Unless you think there's something magic about human brains? Using "magic" here to mean incomprehensible, unobservable, and incomputable.
I believe ekianjo wasn't talking about neural networks, but simulations using models that are similar to how neurons work. Computational neuroscience is a thing.
Our study of (automated) intelligence is based on science too.
> A computer ... will never be able to think by itself.
Turing wrote an entire paper about this (Computing Machinery and Intelligence), where he rephrases your statement (because he finds it to be meaningless) and devises a test to answer it. He also directly attacks your phrasing of "but it will never":
> I believe they are mostly founded on the principle of scientific induction. A man has seen thousands of machines in his lifetime. From what he sees of them he draws a number of general conclusions. They are ugly, each is designed for a very limited purpose, when required for a minutely different purpose they are useless, the variety of behaviour of any one of them is very small, etc., etc. Naturally he concludes that these are necessary properties of machines in general.
> A better variant of the objection says that a machine can never "take us by surprise." This statement is a more direct challenge and can be met directly. Machines take me by surprise with great frequency. This is largely because I do not do sufficient calculation to decide what to expect them to do, or rather because, although I do a calculation, I do it in a hurried, slipshod fashion, taking risks.