ö we ôempathizeö with even more than other animals because their ômindsö will be designed on the elements of ôhuman thinkingö (63). I disagree with KurzweilÆs claim, mainly because he makes a leap from the Law of Accelerating Returns to development of ôhumanö machines, despite my belief that because we are ôhumanö we can never fully understand what ôhumanö is.
In A New Form of Intelligence on Earth, Kurzweil (1998) contends that it is possible to emulate the complex and mysterious process of intelligence: ôAll that is neededàare simple methods with heavy doses of computationö (73). From a review of chapters four and five, I disagree with KurzweilÆs contention. The three simple paradigms presented, the recursive paradigm, the neural net paradigm, and the evolutionary algorithm paradigm, are only methods of organizing information (Kurzweil 1998, 74-82). No machine can acquire knowledge and no machine is able to make human distinctions in order to arrive at original thought or even clear understanding. The example of the different conclusions of a computer when presented with the sentence, ôTime flies like and arrowö, is ample evidence of this.
Kurzweil (1998) maintains computers will one day be able to go out into the world and read and learn and acquire knowledge on their own. I find this to be an invalid prediction, primarily because even the most sophisticated artificial intelligence cannot function without human assistance. For example, Kurzweil (1998) maintains that some computer systems can make ôinsightful recommendationsö with respect to diagnosis of health problems (93). However, KurzweilÆs terminology is misleading. Such systems have, in fact, not mimicked the process of insight. Rather, these kinds of systems have merely organized data programmed by humans beings and have searched for relationships. This is not insight it is computation. This is like saying a computer that is programme...