I Am a Strange Loop - Douglas R. Hofstadter [119]
On the other hand, where dogs are concerned, I find, not surprisingly, much more reason to think that there are at least the rudiments of such a loop in there. Not only do dogs have brains that house many rather subtle categories (such as “UPS truck” or “things I can pick up in the house and walk around with in my mouth without being punished”), but also they seem to have some rudimentary understanding of their own desires and the desires of others, whether those others are other dogs or human beings. A dog often knows when its master is unhappy with it, and wags its tail in the hopes of restoring good feelings. Nonetheless, a dog, saliently lacking an arbitrarily extensible concept repertoire and therefore possessing only a rudimentary episodic memory (and of course totally lacking any permanent storehouse of imagined future events strung out along a mental timeline, let alone counterfactual scenarios hovering around the past, the present, and even the future), necessarily has a self-representation far simpler than that of an adult human, and for that reason a dog has a far smaller soul.
The Supposed Selves of Robot Vehicles
I was most impressed when I read about “Stanley”, a robot vehicle developed at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory that not too long ago drove all by itself across the Nevada desert, relying just on its laser rangefinders, its television camera, and GPS navigation. I could not help asking myself, “How much of an ‘I’ does Stanley have?”
In an interview shortly after the triumphant desert crossing, one gungho industrialist, the director of research and development at Intel (you should keep in mind that Intel manufactured the computer hardware on board Stanley), bluntly proclaimed: “Deep Blue [IBM’s chess machine that defeated world champion Garry Kasparov in 1997] was just processing power. It didn’t think. Stanley thinks.”
Well, with all due respect for the remarkable collective accomplishment that Stanley represents, I can only comment that this remark constitutes shameless, unadulterated, and naïve hype. I see things very differently. If and when Stanley ever acquires the ability to form limitlessly snowballing categories such as those in the list that opened this chapter, then I’ll be happy to say that Stanley thinks. At the present, though, its ability to cross a desert without self-destructing strikes me as comparable to an ant’s following a dense pheromone trail across a vacant lot without perishing. Such autonomy on the part of a robot vehicle is hardly to be sneezed at, but it’s a far cry from thinking and a far cry from having an “I”.
At one point, Stanley’s video camera picked up another robot vehicle ahead of it (this was H1, a rival vehicle from Carnegie-Mellon University) and eventually Stanley pulled around H1 and left it in its dust. (By the way, I am carefully avoiding the pronoun “he” in this text, although it was par for the course in journalistic references to Stanley, and perhaps also at the AI Lab as well, given that the vehicle had been given a human name. Unfortunately, such linguistic sloppiness serves as the opening slide down a slippery