Movie Review – Eagle Eye (Can a Supercomputer Become Human?)

I watched the movie Eagle Eye, directed by D. J. Caruso. Let’s find out if supercomputers can become human.

 

Humans have dreamed of machines that can think like humans. Many movies have depicted machines that are like humans, or at least think like humans. Eagle Eye is a prime example of this. The movie is set in the Middle East and follows a U.S. military operation to kill a high-risk terrorist, which involves the use of high-tech surveillance equipment and unmanned aerial vehicles. However, even with the most advanced equipment in place to help execute the operation, humans are the ones who make the final decisions. When all the analysis is done, there is a 51 percent chance that the person the U.S. military is chasing is the same person they are targeting. When it comes time to decide whether to conduct the operation, this data alone is not enough to make a decision, and the command is left in a state of confusion and ultimately decides to kill the individual. A few years later, the supercomputer ARIA is developed to make these operations more efficient. However, the computer begins to think outside of its original purpose and starts to think for itself, eventually organizing a cabinet change. The idea that computers can become so sophisticated in their computational power that they can think for themselves, to the detriment of humanity, has been explored many times in other movies. But can computers become human, or at least think like humans, if not take human form? This question can be answered in terms of cognitive science.

 

 

Cognitive scientist John Searle used the Chinese room argument to answer the question of whether computers can become human. Strong artificial intelligenceism is the theory that if a machine has the same brain as a human, then it is safe to assume that it has a human mind. After all, if you build an electrical circuit that mimics a human brain, it will only appear to have a human-like thought circuit, but it will not have a human mind. John Sul was a strong artificialist, arguing that no matter how advanced a computer becomes, it will never have a human mind. To support his argument, he created the concept of the Chinese room. The Chinese room argument assumes that John Searle is in a room, and the room is filled with Chinese characters, which John Searle, who does not know Chinese, sees as meaningless scribbles. After a while, he is given an explanation written in English that explains the rule system of the graffiti. John Seol “understands” the English text because he can figure out the “meaning” of the English text. By carefully comparing the rules of the graffiti on the wall with the rule system in the explanatory text, he realizes that the graffiti are listed in a certain order. Later, someone slips a note into his room that says “Hi, how are you?” in Chinese. John gets the note and diligently scribbles according to the rules. He writes a doodle that reads, “Yes, I’m fine,” according to the rules, and hands the note outside. From the outside, it appears that someone in the room fully understands Chinese and has responded. But John Seol doesn’t understand Chinese at all, he simply knows the rules for listing symbols. In fact, when he sees the note asking him how he is, he doesn’t even know what it means, he just wrote the symbols according to the rules given to him. In John Searle’s view, this is how computers work. The computer has mastered the rules given to it by humans, and when a binary scribble enters the room, it simply creates different symbols according to the rules. John Searle says that even when computers become very sophisticated and have great computational power, they don’t know the “meaning” of the symbols they write. In other words, since a computer cannot know the ‘meaning’, it cannot ‘understand’ and cannot have a human mind. In other words, in John Searle’s view, the supercomputer ‘ARIA’ in the movie cannot be a human being.
However, viewers of the movie Eagle Eye hardly realize that it was a ‘computer’ that controlled the protagonist with a cell phone at the beginning of the movie. Many people think that the caller is clearly a mysterious person. It’s as if the computer has passed the Turing Test. The Turing Test is a test to see if a computer has a human mind. If a human is chatting with a computer and doesn’t recognize that it’s a computer, then the computer can be considered human. ARIA, a supercomputer, succeeded in fooling humans perfectly in a conversation. In the movie, the audience is led to believe that the supercomputer has a human mind, but John Searle is adamant that it does not. I disagree with John Searle and believe that supercomputers do have human minds. To see this in detail, we need to expand on the Chinese Room argument. Let’s assume that the supercomputer ARIA has several rooms in its head, just like John Searle’s Chinese room. Computers don’t “understand” binary symbols, but they can understand the symbolic code for processing them in their own way. This suggests that computers have a language they can understand, and the rooms responsible for these functions exist somewhere in the computer’s head. There is also a room where doodles come in. But these rooms can be countless, not just one, like John Searle’s Chinese room mentioned earlier. ARIA, a supercomputer, receives countless scribbles, learns the rules for processing them in an understandable language, and sends a reply out of the room according to the rules. When we receive the message from outside, we think that there is a person in the room. Like John Searle, the computer didn’t understand what the scribbles represented, but it understood how to describe the rules in its own language. Can a supercomputer that views phenomena with its own language be considered a human being? In other words, is a supercomputer that has the ability to “understand” like a human being a human being? To answer this question, we need a link between the computer’s own language and the room of symbols.
Consider “consciousness” as the link between the computer’s “understandable” language and the symbol room. Consciousness is an abstract concept that exists for a purpose. In contrast to consciousness, a zombie machine is a machine that has no purpose and is extremely fast at computing. A fax machine is a good example of a zombie entity. Some argue that a fax machine has consciousness because it works to print paper. But a fax machine doesn’t think to itself, “I need to make 100 sheets of paper,” and print them. It’s just a series of buttons and electrical circuits that make it work. In contrast, if we have a red hot iron and an ordinary apple in front of us, and we have to pick one or the other, our consciousness kicks in. Most people in this situation pick up the apple. This is because we know from past experience that red hot iron is dangerous. In other words, consciousness, unlike zombie behavior, cannot react instantaneously, but it can make rational decisions in complex situations.
ARIA, a supercomputer, was given a new purpose, replacing the US cabinet, which shows that the computer was transformed into a conscious entity rather than simply fulfilling the role of a zombie actuator. Consciousness is able to create zombie actors for a given situation and use these zombie actors to perform fast computations that are optimized for a specific situation. In other words, it can speed up the processing of problems in the symbol room. When we first learned math, we consciously adopted a new symbol system called addition. As we keep repeating addition, we get faster and faster at processing it, which is evidence that consciousness creates zombie behavior. Thus, a machine with consciousness can effectively control its own “understandable” language, the symbol room that processes the symbols, and the zombie behavior. John Searle used the Chinese room argument to argue that computers cannot be human, but a closer examination of the argument leads to the conclusion that computers can be human. Consciousness, zombie actors, a room with its own language that can be “understood,” and a symbol room exist in the supercomputer ARIA, suggesting the possibility of a supercomputer becoming a conscious machine that can think like a human.