Professor Aaron Sloman works in the School of Computer Science at the University of Birmingham. He is primarily a philosopher and his objective is to find out what minds are, what sorts of minds are possible and what sorts of physical machines can implement them, whether made of meat, silicon or anything else. He says that A.I. is the best way to study philosophy of the mind by thinking about how to design working minds or fragments of working minds.

On why A.I. scientists haven't already far exceeded the capacity of brains:
"The way I see it, the real problem is we don't know what it is that we are trying to model. Human beings and other animals have all sorts of capabilities but trying to characterise them is very hard. You look at a piece of paper, what happens when you just look at a blank area? If it's Picasso looking, something very powerful will start happening, even a young child with a paintbrush will look at a blank sheet. Now there are many things that we don't know how to characterise, so we don't know what we're trying to explain, and that's one of the reasons why it's taken so long. The fact that computers are very fast doesn't necessarily help us understand the problem that we are trying to use them to solve."

On what intelligence means:
"Well, I think it is a large collection of capabilities in humans and different subsets. It can be found in other organisms. Now one of the problems is that some people try to define intelligence in terms of what you could observe that shows that something is intelligent. The problem with that is that what you observe might be explained in a number of different ways. So you could have something which looks intelligent, but if you know how it works, it isn't. So part of the problem is how to build things that don't just look intelligent (simulated sheepdog)."

On whether machines can have the same kind of capabilities as humans:
"In order to come up with machines that have the same kinds of things as humans, we have to do a huge amount of analysis of what it is to be a normal human being, and the people that made claims about Artificial Intelligence did not do that, so they thought it was going to be much easier than in fact it turned out to be. So the hard task is to know what the tasks are that you have to replicate on machines, and I think we have a huge way to go. Evolution produced a huge variety of capabilities which we share, we don't know what they are. Most animals do not have them. Some animals have very similar ones, but they're in the minority. I don't think it would be easy because there are lots of things that we don't understand, like enjoying a scene or finding something funny. There are many things that we are familiar with that are very hard to analyse, and it's hard to analyse what it is to find something funny. People have tried. I don't myself find any of those analysis that I've read totally satisfactory, and when we've analysed what it is, we may have a better idea what architecture can do it."

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On the possibility that A.I. will have a sort of consciousness which is even better than ours:
"If we find out what it is that gives us the ability to think about our own thoughts, to be aware of our own experiences, we may well find that there are limits in the way we can do that, which have to do with, for instance, how much processing can go into one brain, that can fit into your body, that can feed itself and so on. There are constraints that evolution had to meet. Now if things are built in an artificial way, some of those constraints might be removed, and you might have distributed systems, each which has some of our abilities, but you link them together in new ways in which we can't link, and perhaps they will be new."

On the possibility of a culture with machines in it:
"In principle I think it could work, but whether we'll want it is another question. We might want to use them mainly when we don't want to go into dangerous environments, inspecting the bottoms of these oil pylons in the sea and so on, but there may be other reasons why we do want them. For instance, there are tasks that humans have to do which require strength, and patience, and intelligence as well, like looking after people who are very ill, and they may prefer to be looked after by robots rather than feeling that they're imposing on human beings, and they might start then developing relationships with them. This isn't my idea, some people believe this is one of the ethical tasks that A.I. should aim for."

On the future:
"In the short run, say in the next ten years, I think that one of the really important things that will happen is the development of A.I. in entertainment, and that's beginning to happen in computer games where they're trying to make the characters more entertaining, and other forms of computer entertainment. But I think we might also, more importantly have systems that we can play with, which are working models, which will help us get much deeper understanding of ourselves. For instance, I would like to see every psychology department teaching A.I. and having A.I. tool kits where the pupils can play with systems with simulated emotions and simulated perception, in order to get a deep understanding of perception and emotion, instead of just doing all these measurements and then running statistics packages, which is what happens now. So our educational practices will be greatly improved by doing A.I.

It’s possible that our brains are too complicated to be understood by something as simple as our brains."

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