• Summary
• Related Documents
  • Active Bibliography
  • Co-citation
• Version History

Abstract:

Can we build computers that are intelligent and alive? This question has been on the minds of computer scientists since the dawn of the computer age and remains a most compelling line of inquiry. Some would argue that the question makes sense only if we put scare quotes around \intelligent " and \alive, " since we're talking about computers, after all, not biological organisms. My own view is that the answer is unequivocally yes, no scare quotes or other punctuation needed, but that to get there our notions of life, intelligence, and computation will have to be deepened considerably. You can ask ten biologists what are the ten (or 20 or 100) key requisites for life and you'll get a dierent list each time. But most are likely to include autonomy, metabolism, selfreproduction, survival instinct, and evolution and adaptation. As a start, can we understand these processes mechanistically and capture them in computers? Many people have argued a vehement \no " for the following reasons: Autonomy: \A computer can't do anything on its own; it can do only what humans program it to do." Metabolism: \Computers can't create or gather their own energy from their environment like living organisms do; they have to be fed energy (e.g., electricity) by humans." Self-reproduction: \A computer can't reproduce itself; to do so it would have to contain a description of itself, and that description would have to contain a description of itself, and so on ad innitum." Survival instinct: \Computers don't care whether they survive or not. " (For example, from an editorial in the Boston Globe: \Deep Blue may have beat Kasparov, but it didn't get any joy out of it.")

Citations