Computer pioneer discusses
atheism, artificial intelligence
BY DAVID F. SALISBURY
After he was introduced,
John McCarthy glanced up briefly at the stained glass
windows in the side chapel of Memorial Church and then
down at a single sheet of folded paper that he held in
his hands.
"Considering where
this is, I have to express my attitude toward
[religion]," said the Charles M. Pigott Professor of
Computer Science and one of the fathers of the field of
artificial intelligence. "To count as an atheist,
one needn't claim to have proof that there are no gods.
One only needs to believe that the evidence on the god
question is in a similar state to the evidence on the
werewolf question. So I am an atheist."
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The eminent computer
scientist found himself in this clearly unfamiliar
setting March 10 as the invited speaker at "What
Matters to Me and Why," a biweekly series that
provides a forum for Stanford educators to discuss the
formative experiences, values, and religious or
philosophical convictions that inform their work.
McCarthy described himself
as a "tolerant atheist," who upon hearing of a
group in Alabama that was trying to prevent the 10
Commandments from being removed from a school wall sent
the organizers $100 because he thought they were being
bullied.
Citing the well-known
quote by J. B. S. Haldane "Now, my own suspicion
is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose,
but queerer than we can suppose" McCarthy
said that he views the basic nature of things as a
puzzle. He said that he subscribes to an extreme
interpretation of quantum mechanics that describes the
universe as made up of multiple possible worlds.
"The universe itself
has no purpose. Purposes are constructed by human
beings," he said.
When he considers what
matters to him, McCarthy said that he cares about a lot
of specific things that don't seem particularly related,
that don't follow a single general principle. Logical
artificial intelligence means a great deal to him
"after all, I've been thinking and working on it for
40 years" but it doesn't have much to do with
another of his interests, which is the ultimate destiny
of mankind.
Despite the progress that
has been made in AI since he coined the term
"artificial intelligence" in the 1950s, the
research has not brought the field within development
range of simulating human intelligence, which is its
ultimate goal, he said. "We still need new basic
ideas. So it may take five years, and it may take 500
years. The understanding of intelligence is a hard
scientific problem."
Nevertheless, the computer
scientist remains confident that creating artificial
intelligence is an achievable goal. This confidence, he
acknowledged, is rooted in his materialist worldview.
"Human intelligence is carried out by the human
brain. If one material system can exhibit intelligence,
why can't another?" he said.
Several years ago,
McCarthy got interested in the ultimate fate of humanity:
how humanity will make out over the long term. "I
would find it depressing
if . . . we were going through a period of temporary
prosperity, but, in the long term, people are doomed to
be poor [due to the lack of some basic resource],"
he said.
Fortunately for his frame
of mind, McCarthy has concluded that human society has
access to adequate supplies of energy, food and some 20
other basic necessities to support a total world
population of about 15 billion, a figure that it is
unlikely to top if current world demographic trends
continue. "I haven't done any original work on this.
I've just collected information, which I have posted on a
lot of web pages," he said.
When asked why the fate of
humanity mattered to him, McCarthy responded, "Why
do I need an added justification? I was raised to be
concerned about humanity. Of course, I was also raised as
a communist, but I rejected that."
In response to the
question of how he reconciled free will and artificial
intelligence, McCarthy answered, "I believe in free
will, even for robots!" Suppose you build a robot,
he said. What attitude would you program into the robot
regarding free will? If you programmed it to say, "I
have no free will!" then the program would turn out
to be unsuccessful. SR
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