Diana McPartlin (diana@asiantravel.com)
Thu, 16 Oct 1997 05:53:26 +0100
Hettinger wrote:
> I think we already have machines that can perceive quality. We certainly have
> social and intellectual patterns that perceive quality and make decisions
> (allow static Quality or even Dynamic Quality to operate at a particular
> balance point) thereupon. The human individual is not the choicemaker here.
> The human individual is often a cog in the wheel, a cell in the organism.
>
> Example: the ATM machine (an inorganic pattern set up by the mediation of
> social, biological and intellectual patterns) decides whether or not you get
> money when you stick your card in. Some human has programmed it, but the
> point of decision (the Quality Event) happens at the inorganic level if the
> reason you are rejected is due to your card being bent or the machine
> experiencing a power surge, or a strong magnet nearby; or at the social level
> if the cause of rejection is the fact that someone in an office messed up your
> account records; or at the intellectual level if some boundaries have been set
> by the bank and your balance has gone out of bounds.
Yes we have machines that seem to perceive quality. But only static quality. The
machine is given a set of requirements that must be met before the card can be
accepted. I would dispute that the machine is actually *aware of* the low quality of
a bent card. However it behaves as if it is and that's the best we can do. As it is
possible to fake the perception of static quality my test for AI is whether or not
it can perceive dynamic quality.
A friend of mine's ex-boyfriend out of some twisted revenge motive (I don't remember
the full story) stole her cheque book and wrote cheques in her name. But he was
caught out because there was another woman at my friend's bank branch who had the
same name as my friend and to avoid problems both of them had become meticulous
about keeping track of the cheques they wrote....How would a computerized bank
teller sort that out?
And even if you could program a machine to deal with this situation it wouldn't
matter. Someone would always come up with another completely new set of
circumstances. This is not just some kind of Murphy's Law. This is the real live
nature of dynamic quality.
Diana
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