It is related that Peter Drucker once told the bewildered management of a tool-making company that they were mistaken if they thought that their customers needed their three-quarter-inch drill bits; all the customers needed were three-quarter-inch holes. The argument is indeed worth paraphrasing over and over again. The designers and builders of robots are actually concerned with artificial stupidity, as the objective of this glorified field of engineering is not to create intelligent machines but stupid and docile humans. Natural intelligence is already overabundant, and it therefore hardly warrants replication.

Addendum I (July 31, 1992)

In an article entitled “Artificial Stupidity,” The Economist[1] replicates the last point in my piece and then proceeds to argue for promotion of machine intelligence as distinct from artificial human intelligence:

In 1950 Alan Turing, a British mathematician of genius, challenged scientists to create a machine that could trick people into thinking it was one of them. […] Thanks to 40 years of research into artificial intelligence—a field that has adopted Turing’s test as its semi-official goal—Turing’s prediction may well come true. But it will be a dreadful anticlimax.

The most obvious problem with Turing’s challenge is that there is no practical reason to create machine intelligences indistinguishable from human ones. People are in plentiful supply. Should a shortage arise, there are proven and popular methods for making more of them; these require no public subsidy and little or no technology. The point of using machines ought to be that they perform differently from people, and preferably better. If that potential is to be exploited, machines will need to be given new forms of intelligence all their own.

The argument that follows focuses on the problems inherent in the replication of human intelligence, which is intrinsically bound with human stupidity. To wit, a machine which recently passed Turing’s test did so in part because it successfully mimicked human typing errors. Although The Economist fails to replicate my main point in the text of the article, there is a small cartoon next to the title showing a robot directing a cringing man hunched over the production line. A picture is better than one thousand words?

Addendum II (December 26, 1993)

Thirty spokes converge on a single hub, but it is in the space where there is nothing that the usefulness of the cart lies. Clay is molded to make a pot, but it is in the space where there is nothing that the usefulness of the clay pot lies. Cut out doors and windows to make a room, but it is in the spaces where there is nothing that the usefulness of the room lies. Therefore, benefit may be derived from something, but it is in nothing that we find usefulness.

From Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching (translated by Victor H. Mair), New York: Bantam Books, 1990, p. 70.

Footnote

1. August 1, 1992, p. 16.