Strong AI Is Simply Silly

ment of which Ford and Hayes are so fond) is silly. QED. So you can see why I feel so insulted. Here I sit, captain of enough silly proofs to take us, year by year, well into the next century, and I only win once, and only win now? Of course, our attitude may change if Jones’ says, “No, you don’t understand! Proponents of g are out there; and I have set myself the task of showing that they are at bottom buffoons.” We would now retract our disdain for his disproof and cheer him on. Likewise, when the uninitiated hear that there really are Strong AIniks out there in the world, they crane their necks and cup their ears to hear my arguments. Strong AIniks will doubtless cringe upon hearing their beloved m classified as silly. Well, I’m sorry, but it is. In his inaugural writings (independent, by the way, of Turing’s), Post (1936) spoke of mindless “workers,” humans whose sole job was to slavishly follow explicit, excruciatingly simple instructions. This perfectly clear and seminal scheme has been supplanted by all sorts of obfuscating exotica—Turing machines, register machines, neural nets, and so on—things which facilitate formal analysis, but hide from the unsuspecting the stark, irrepressible fact that we can indeed operate as computers through and through, but doing so is for us to call upon only the dim side of our psyches. We know what it is to move the beads in an abacus; we know that such use is essentially what Post (and others) genIam deeply offended by my failure to win the Simon Newcomb Award in the past, and even now, in this victorious year, I must confess that I am greatly wounded by the sad but undeniable fact that only one of my rigorous attacks on “Strong” AI has managed to secure a trophy. Lest it be thought that my umbrage arises purely from matters of the heart, I hasten to reveal that my attitude is the product of a proof, which runs as follows. Begin by noting this principle: