Artificial Intelligence: How to Recreate the Mind

     An artificial intelligence, or AI for short, is an intelligent machine or program. When I think of AI, I think of an android that thinks and behaves like a human. Is creating a replica of human intelligence possible? Well, an actual dynamically learning artificial intelligence is probably far out of reach of our current technology, if it is reachable at all, but an artificial intelligence functioning using logic and "learning" is probably possible to make today.

Android Concept Image from ImmortalDC.com

     In order to make an artificial intelligence, one must program every possible stimulus that the AI should react to and program various reactions depending on what the AI is exposed to. These can be chained in sequence, so if an AI is exposed to certain things in certain orders, it may respond differently than if it was exposed in a separate order. This is extremely difficult, because in the worse scenario, it can have an infinite number of different if statements in order to program a truly completely reactive AI. For example, if I had two stimuli, say seeing the color red and seeing the color blue, I could program a robot to point upwards if it sees red then point downwards when it sees blue. However, I can also program it to point to the right if it sees red after blue, or point to the left if it sees blue after red. Additionally, I could program things for the robot to do if it sees red twice in a row, or if it sees red then blue then red again, and so on. This means that even for this simple two stimuli example, there is an infinite amount of responses that the robot could have. To put this into human context, imagine that someone prods you in the arm with their finger. You might let it slide the first time, but each time they poke you after that you will react differently, probably with more and more irritation each time. How fast you get angry and how you respond would probably be determined by things that have happened previously in your life, maybe things in your childhood, or even things that have happened within the past hour. Now imagine how difficult that would be to program in an AI.

Image from Disney's WALL-E

     As you can see, while artificial intelligence is a very interesting concept and idea, one that functions like the human mind is currently way out of our reach. It would just take much too long to program and be far too complex to finish, especially since we aren't even entirely sure of how the human mind functions. However, this isn't to say that we can't have simpler AI's in the modern day or near future. We can already program machines that respond to different stimuli and "learn" as they are exposed to stimuli. There is an AI that is able to successfully crack CAPTCHA codes by learning from its failures and adapting. Nevertheless, this is just an illusion of learning, the robot isn't actually adding any new code to its system using free will, it is just following pre-programmed responses to stimuli that have been coded into the software. I cannot think of a possible way for a robot to update its own code and program new ways for itself to behave, and that is the true meaning of a dynamic learning AI, something that is not achievable with current technology, if it is possible at all.