What are the benefits?
What part of this new understanding about how to encapsulate 'emotional' methods of thinking could you see becoming useful in handheld computers, laptop computers, the Internet?
Well, I think a gigahertz computer, which you can buy now for about US$1,000 or so, could be as smart as a person.
How, though, do we determine which emotions, which kinds of thought, get applied to different ways of thinking? How do we decide which parts and which processes to apply?
I think a big market right now is search engines. Wouldn't it be nice if we could make a machine that could read a story or read an article and understand it in some of the ways that a person does? Right now, search engines are using tricks. They are using statistics about words to try to guess what an article is about. But no machine is doing anything like reading the article and parsing the sentences - which isn't so hard - and figuring out what it's saying. So there is a big incentive to make machines that actually understand texts more or less the way that people do, look at movies the way that people do.
And the practical benefits there would be what? Ranking a story by three tears if it's sad [by a user's tastes] or hearts if it's a very romantic story?
Well, I'm more interested in saying, 'How do you prove some theorem, or how do you solve complicated problems?' Or, 'How do you design an object that people will like the looks of?' All the sorts of things that you hire people to do.
What you have here is this idea of the emotion machine. And we're using it to clean house?
What I'm saying is that the only way to make a machine that's intelligent and solves hard problems and is useful is to have many different ways of thinking. The emotion machine is about how to make a machine that's resourceful. There is no particular reason to make it angry, but you certainly would want to make it impatient internally so that if it's not making progress, it will switch to some other way of thinking.
I could see boldness being a quality that you would want with executive decisions. How do you make use of emotional makeup, emotional characteristics?
If you look at a person, you will see these large moods where for 10 minutes they are happy, then they are bored or they're getting angry and so forth. What I'm saying . . . is that ordinary thinking is flashing these feelings on and off in seconds or milliseconds. So you want the machine to be very bold and uncritical for a tenth of a second while it generates five ideas. Then you want it to be extremely critical while it throws most of them out. And then for a half a second it's going to be analytical . . . so what I'm saying is that the large-scale emotions are not very useful. But for any kind of thinking, what you're going to have to have are similar things on a very much smaller scale. These have never been detected. Psychologists haven't had the idea of looking for them, so nobody knows that they exist. I'm saying that every five seconds, you're probably going through 10 emotions in this exploitative fashion, where one process is turning the others on very briefly to get over some little obstacle or to get a new way of looking at something.
If you have machines that have multiple ways of thinking, what will be the nature of the improvement?
Right now, if you have something that you want done, you hire an architect for your house, or you hire a builder or you hire a contractor. Maybe you go to the bank and get somebody. We're used to having lots of people who are good at different things. We're not used to a little box which is good at a thousand different things. . . . So there is no way to look at the future now.
But the idea is to build in special modules.
Well, I used to build in the resources and then you'll have thousands of hackers who are inventing new ways to rearrange them.
And that's where the network will get angry. People will build [antibodies] into the logical process to notice that and reject it.
Right. It's going to be a very strange world where you've got lots of little minds that can do things that a person can do.
You talk about consciousness. That awareness is just a state, but it is also the result of some set of processes. What implications does that have for us?
Well, I think of consciousness as being by itself pretty trivial. Consciousness is really a word that covers a lot of things, but most of them have to do with the ability to remember what you were thinking recently and criticise it or modify it. But that by itself is no good if you're dumb. So the important thing about machines of the future is having them able to understand things and solve problems, and making them conscious.
How easy it to make something conscious? Why isn't the Net already conscious?
It is. Consciousness is nothing. Consciousness is just remembering what you've been doing lately. We have programs like a list we [can use to] turn out a trace program. It remembers all the functions that you've called recently. But there is nothing that can understand the trace, so without understanding, consciousness is nothing, and with understanding it's easy. I don't see any mystery to consciousness, except that people don't understand that without intelligence, without common-sense reasoning, you can't think.
If you look at what people are actually conscious of, you see it's almost nothing. You don't know how you get the next word you think of. You don't even know how you raise your arm. You don't know how you walk. So we're not conscious in any important sense. What we are is smart. We have a little ability to reflect on how we think, but we're not conscious in the deep sense that we know how we think. We know what's in our minds. We know how we remember things, and we know how we solve problems. I think the so-called mystery of consciousness is one of the myths that has kept people from having good theories of how the mind works.
You would argue, then, that large parts of the Internet are conscious.
The Net is not smart. It can't do much. It is conscious in the sense that it backs up its records. But consciousness is not intelligence. It is just something that we only have a little bit of. It's a little ability to remember what you were doing lately. If you can remember it, and can't think about it, you're nowhere.
