Chapter 144: The Shining Moments Of Humanity
“The world is divided into two kinds, the material world and the spiritual world.”
The transmission of any concept must consider the era background.
Don’t even talk about telling people in the White House now that the world is material; ultimately, victory must be achieved through material victory, even sixty years later, if you tell the White House that the world is material and want to achieve real victory rather than verbal winning to the point of numbness, you still have to win materially in the end.
Slogans can fool some people, but the stomach doesn’t lie.
To put it more accurately, the White House now is much more pragmatic, and everyone can at least understand the objective existence of the material world.
At least they think of relying on Eisenhower and Nikita to conduct the kitchen debate, relying on displaying material abundance to define who wins, rather than relying on shouting through newspapers and television to define who wins.
“Whoever lands on the moon first will achieve victory in the spiritual world.
And whoever takes the lead in artificial intelligence first, whoever reaches that technological singularity first, will achieve victory in the material world.
Imagine, factories without people, machines running at full power automatically, cars able to drive automatically on roads, goods automatically appearing on store shelves.”
What Lin Ran described to them was exactly what humanity could achieve in the near future.
Technically speaking, by 2020, it was already possible to build a demonstration park similar to fully automated from production to transportation and then to handling using artificial intelligence technology.
The reason no one does this is because labor costs are cheaper than machines.
“In a world dominated by artificial intelligence, the alliance led by the Soviet Union is still a highly command-driven world, with artificial intelligence responsible for the entire process from production, research and development to transportation.
Once they achieve these technologies, can the free world still win?
Once the East German public can obtain massive materials without working, will they still run from East Berlin to West Berlin?
Instead, the West Berlin public should run to East Berlin.
What I am talking about is certainly something that will happen far in the future, but will everyone think that after we complete the moon landing in the 1960s, the Soviet Union will admit defeat?
Failure in the spiritual world is only temporary, its influence will gradually weaken, failure in the material world is fatal.”
The more you look at history, the more you feel that from World War II to the Cold War, besides bipolar confrontation, there is another main axis hidden underwater.
That is, the Western world dominated by industrial capital became the Western world dominated by financial capital.
The container revolution will accelerate this process, and the computer technology derived from artificial intelligence will too.
The White House bureaucrats were very interested in what Lin Ran said, and after listening carefully, they also agreed with his viewpoint.
But it’s not enough.
Starting from the first day of 1963, the White House successively brought in a group of expert scholars in the field of artificial intelligence from all over America, including senior industry personnel from IBM, Texas Instruments, and Fairchild Semiconductor.
The meeting venue also changed from the White House president’s Oval Office (75.8 square meters), which is not particularly large, to the large meeting room in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building on the west side of the White House.
“Should we invite John McCarthy?” The White House bureaucrat team, based on the list provided by the Department of Defense, planned to notify them one by one.
Artificial intelligence in the 1960s cannot be considered a very new concept.
Not to mention that at the Dartmouth Conference in 1956, the concept of artificial intelligence was first proposed for the first time, and whether machines could simulate artificial intelligence was explored. The America Department of Defense also launched a plan called ARPA in 1958, aimed at sponsoring explorations beyond the limitations of traditional military research and development, breakthrough technologies, and not limited to short-term applications.
One of the key areas sponsored by ARPA is artificial intelligence.
So the White House needs to rely on the list provided by the Department of Defense, and then they go find people based on the list.
The John McCarthy mentioned here is not the McCarthy from political circles, but the computer scientist.
The reason the White House side hesitated is because McCarthy’s background is not very good; he received Soviet Union education from a young age, he himself speaks fluent Russian, and his parents were active commies in the 1930s.
His parents were like that, and he himself is similar, having gone to the Soviet Union multiple times to make friends with Russian scientists.
If not for such a background, with McCarthy’s background, he could completely work directly for the Department of Defense, rather than staying in academia.
One of the most important early ARPA projects in the artificial intelligence field was language translation; they hoped to use computers to translate Russian into English, to simplify the difficulty of obtaining Soviet Union intelligence.
And at this time, John McCarthy, who was working on LISP language development and artificial intelligence theory research, highly matched ARPA, but he couldn’t pass the Department of Defense’s high-level security clearance because of his background.
At this time, when the White House was preparing to find experts for a meeting, McCarthy’s background made the staff hesitate again.
They really didn’t dare to invite John McCarthy; the White House staff worried that if they invited McCarthy first, the content of the White House meeting would appear in the Kremlin right after.
Especially now that artificial intelligence has been elevated by the professor to the key height of deciding victory in the Cold War.
Everyone is just workers, no one dares to make such a decision.
“Like this, I’ll go ask Mr. O’Donnell.”
O’Donnell is the White House Chief of Staff.
Finally, after layers of reporting up, all the way to Lyndon Johnson, he finally made the decision to call John McCarthy.
John McCarthy and Marvin Minsky together boarded the flight arranged for them by the White House side.
Marvin Minsky is also an expert in the artificial intelligence field; the Dartmouth Conference was organized and held by the two of them.
McCarthy and Minsky both worked at MIT before; at this time Minsky is still at MIT, while McCarthy has gone to Stanford as a full professor.
It was also because of the holiday that he returned to MIT.
Compared to McCarthy whose background is not so good, Minsky’s background is much better. Though not that good either.
He is Jewish, his mother is a senior Zionist activist.
In short, in that era, America’s top scientists were either Zionists, pro-Russian, or German NAZIs.
Someone like Lin Ran, with a “clean” background and of Chinese descent, could be considered a rare good family child.
The America side’s investigation into Lin Ran never stopped, and they indeed found no evidence of him coming to New York from another city after adulthood.
He seemed to appear in New York out of thin air.
With Seagull and Horkheimer vouching for him, the America side had no choice but to believe he was a once-in-a-millennium talent cultivated by the Europe Göttingen school.
Of course, some people didn’t believe it, but the problem was you couldn’t find any other clues to prove his background was problematic.
A blank slate plus big shot endorsement was the best umbrella of protection.
The Göttingen school plus the Frankfurt School in this era were two huge golden signboards.
“The professor is really something.” Minsky waved the newspaper in his hand, with the huge technological singularity on it becoming a discussion topic across America.
McCarthy smiled wryly: “Who would have thought that so soon someone could build an artificial intelligence machine capable of defeating a human player.
Worthy of the professor.”
Both were PhD in Mathematics from Princeton; Minsky did applied mathematics, with a graduation paper called neural network; McCarthy was a pure mathematics PhD, working on partial differential equations.
At that time, Minsky designed a neural network structure model, including input units, processing units, and output units; the connection strengths in the network would also change based on external feedback.
It even included the system adjusting its behavior through reward and punishment signals. It also introduced random processes to ensure the model’s randomness.
This was also the foundation of future artificial intelligence neural networks, an inaugural work.
As the proposer of the artificial intelligence concept, after seeing the Deep Blue report, he was excited, though originally skeptical of IBM.
After all, this company, to sell computers and get budget from the Department of Defense, had boasted too many unattainable things.
But seeing IBM’s exhibition and openness to the public, plus Lin Ran’s endorsement, they saw the dawn of artificial intelligence being realized in their lifetime.
“This time it should be discussing artificial intelligence.
If artificial intelligence is really the key to victory, then artificial intelligence research will certainly need massive budget support.” John McCarthy said, “This is great news for artificial intelligence development.”
After arriving in Washington D.C., as they expected, the huge meeting room was filled with experts and company executives; aside from the White House bureaucrats on stage, almost all the faces below were familiar.
After all, in this era, there weren’t many scholars doing artificial intelligence.
“Welcome to all experts in the artificial intelligence field. The White House hopes to hear your opinions on artificial intelligence technology as much as possible.
Director Lin, around artificial intelligence, proposed the technological singularity concept, believing that the arrival of the technological singularity will thoroughly change the structure of existing human society.
Research and development is just one aspect where it can play a role; from industrial production to goods transportation, it can completely replace humanity.
And whoever reaches the technological singularity first will form an advantage over latecomers that they cannot catch up to.
I hope everyone can speak freely around this viewpoint.”
John McCarthy looked around; the ones he knew were experts doing artificial intelligence or computer-related work; the ones he didn’t know were either company executives or White House bureaucrats.
He couldn’t help but marvel at Lin Ran’s influence.
A casual remark could get so many people to the White House for a meeting.
Von Neumann, as a member of the Atomic Energy Commission, upon discovering he had cancer, during treatment at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, America’s Secretary of Defense and the Army, Navy, and Air Force Chiefs of Staff gathered in his hospital room for a meeting.
In McCarthy’s view, Lin Ran’s status and influence were now on par with Professor Von Neumann.
“Professor, I’m Jack Ruina, director of the Department of Defense ARPA. I specially went to New York yesterday to visit Deep Blue before rushing to Washington; when I visited, its win rate was 70%.
That’s already very high for a machine.”
Jack Ruina, of Polish descent, PhD in electrical engineering, though without much academic achievement.
During his tenure, he raised ARPA’s budget from 160 million US dollars to 250 million US dollars, and most of the increased budget went to the information technology office he personally led to establish.
He could be said to be Lin Ran’s natural supporter.
“Moreover, it’s completely different from the Georgetown laboratory technology that IBM showed us in the past; it fully relies on the machine itself for rule-based calculations.
But its essence is still a kind of rule calculation, just turning manually formulated coding rules and small vocabulary tables into pre-formulated rules and code tables.
This makes me doubt whether the artificial intelligence you speak of can really be achieved?
We all know there’s a gap between what seems possible and what is theoretically possible, and an even greater gap between what is theoretically possible and what is actually achievable.
How do you guarantee that the seemingly wonderful technological singularity we can really achieve?”
As one of ARPA’s rare, academically trained bureaucratic experts, Jack Ruina’s question was very incisive.
Actually, this blame still falls on IBM.
IBM, to get subsidies and projects, had fooled the Department of Defense badly.
Take the Georgetown laboratory he mentioned as an example.
America wanted to achieve fast translation between Russian language and English language, relying on computers to do so.
Then IBM said they could do it; in 1954, also in January, on January 7, at their New York headquarters, they invited Department of Defense officials and reporters from all walks to the site for a demonstration.
Through an IBM 701 computer, 61 Russian short sentences were automatically translated into English, causing a huge sensation at the time.
Newspaper reports were limited, but it had a real impact internally in the military, providing a lot of research funding to IBM’s Georgetown laboratory.
But every time asked, it was “progress is good,” yet the actual effect was very average.
The machine translation jointly developed by IBM and Georgetown has always remained at a very crude level.
It was not until three years later that the newly established Automatic Language Processing Advisory Committee found that the Georgetown IBM project was far below expectations, and the entire project’s funds were cut to just a tiny amount.
However, the military’s patience with Georgetown them is also rapidly decreasing, directly reflected in Jack Ruina’s unfriendliness toward IBM.
Lin Ran explained: “We can use existing mathematical tools to build a theoretical framework to prove that the technological singularity brought by artificial intelligence is theoretically achievable.
We define technological level as a function that increases with time t.”
Lin Ran took out the mathematical model of the future technological singularity and said after finishing: “I think this only demonstrates that from a mathematical perspective, it is possible.
Just now Director Ruina mentioned the machine translation project jointly done by IBM and Georgetown.
Their progress is slow because they are all useless.
Their focus is on the rules level, but in fact, with existing technology, it is fully possible to achieve much better results than ten years ago.
It only takes two months; if I remotely guide them for two months, their results will undergo earth-shaking changes.”
After Lin Ran finished speaking, IBM CEO Watson sitting in the audience directly said: “IBM will fully cooperate with the professor.”
Secretary of Defense McNamara sitting next to Lin Ran said: “I am very much looking forward to the translation machine after the professor’s personal guidance.”
Lin Ran continued: “Artificial intelligence is composed of machine, algorithm, and learning content together.
The machine’s computing ability determines its intelligence level.
The large-scale computer manufactured by IBM, with improved computing ability, enables it to solve more complex problems.
The algorithm determines how much power it can exert.
The final learning content determines its wisdom level.
Artificial intelligence must be similar to humanity.
Human wisdom level depends on the education he receives, determined by his IQ and his experience.
IQ corresponds to the algorithm, including logical reasoning, problem solving, memory, and language understanding, innate or genetically determined abilities.
Education is the knowledge, skills, and ways of thinking that humans obtain through systematic learning; it is similar to the machine’s ability in artificial intelligence, and the machine’s computing ability provides support for the realization of intelligence.
Experience is just data.
In the Georgetown project, the machine they used is IBM 701, the algorithm is a pure rules-based algorithm, and the corpus is some Russian language and English language parallel sentences.
Upgrading from IBM 701 to IBM’s latest machine, increasing the richness of the corpus, and optimizing the algorithm will naturally yield much better results.”
Anyone in the Department of Defense who knows about the Georgetown project will doubt the technological singularity concept proposed by Lin Ran.
Because they think it is unrealistic.
What Lin Ran has to do is face this doubt head-on.
Since he was ready to burn the Americans’ budget into the bottomless pit of artificial intelligence, Lin Ran had already made sufficient preparations.
He was just afraid you wouldn’t mention the Georgetown project.
Fortunately, there is someone in the audience to play along.
The effect Lin Ran wants is to make everyone present realize that artificial intelligence under his leadership is fully achievable.
“Professor, I agree with your viewpoint.
The human brain has 10 to the 11th power neurons; when the number of transistors in the machine reaches this order of magnitude, we can fully enable the machine to achieve thinking ability the same as humans.
But I also have doubts: the brain’s neurons process signals including analog signals and discrete signals, but transistors or vacuum tubes can only process 0 or 1 electronic signals, which are discrete electronic signals.” Marvin Minsky said.
Even artificial intelligence experts at the time would doubt whether machines can really reach the same level as humans.
“Transistors can also process continuous analog signals.
Moreover, IBM went from 701 to 7090 in just eight years, evolving computing power from 2000 operations per second to 100,000 operations per second.
We don’t have to achieve a brain exactly the same as humans; it will gradually become a human tool, which is also a technological singularity.
It’s just that this technological singularity does not have as great an impact as a true technological singularity.
From being able only for mathematical calculation, to being usable for machine translation, and now to being able to beat human players in the chess field, the speed of machine progress far exceeds our comprehension.”
The meeting held at the White House for a full half month was later also considered the founding meeting of artificial intelligence.
Although America establishing the artificial intelligence committee and allocating funds to artificial intelligence-related companies and research institutions had to wait until the new Georgetown Translator was unveiled, people still regarded this January meeting as the founding ceremony of artificial intelligence.
As for why artificial intelligence was clearly founded in America, yet China ultimately realized the technological singularity, that is another story.
