A Breakthrough
From Mentoring the Machines
Mentoring the Machines: Surviving the Deep Impact of an Artificially Intelligent Tomorrow is a new book project I've partnered on with esteemed cognitive scientist John Vervaeke. Visit www.mentoringthemachines.com to learn more or at Amazon.com
On June 30, 1945, in a paper he drafted at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, and only circulated among a group of people who cared about such things—as it was pure theoretical speculation, it wouldn’t be printed in any journal or any official publication until the April 1993 Issue of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Annals of the History of Computing—John von Neumann proposed the structure, function, and organization for the essential architecture of the machine that has become synonymous with Artificial Intelligence (27–43).
It was called “First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC,” an Electronic Discrete Variable Automatic Computer and is widely considered the birth certificate of the modern tripartite computer, like the one used to write this sentence.
It elegantly proposed a machine that would be modeled on the human nervous system, primarily the brain, with three general features:
1. Input/Output units
2. Memory units
3. A Central Processing Unit (CPU)
Making such a machine would require the following:
1. A theoretical and practical understanding of how energy is stored and released into and out of the matter of life, the atoms that bind together to form the molecular proteins that make neurons’ boundary conditions. In other words, the secret to boundary conditions that define inside and outside. Knowing how energy moves from the outside- in and the inside-out of matter would be optimal.
2. A theoretical and practical understanding of how living cells store and release the memory of how and when to make different energetically informed molecules. Knowing how patterned energy (information) moves from the outside-in and inside-out of life would be optimal.
3. A theoretical and practical understanding of how energy inputs are processed into information (patterns of energy) and how internally informed patterned energy (information) is output. Knowing how life’s intention moves from the outside-in and the inside-out of the mind would be optimal.
Three metaphorical doors can be extrapolated from John von Neumann’s “First Draft.”
These three doors would have to be opened to get to the essence of the nuclei of matter, life, and mind. But once breached, theoretically, an inorganic thinking machine— one that can think for itself—could be built from the ground up.
So…
Behind Door Number One...
Were the secrets to matter, the essence of the atomic nucleus, “energy” capture and release. Breaking into the
atom would get us behind door number one and empower us to reverse engineer the optimal I/O boundary, a universal energy-maker.
Behind Door Number Two...
Were the secrets to life, the essence of the cellular nucleus, “information” capture and release. Breaking into the cell would get us behind door number two and empower us to reverse engineer the optimal memory, a universal sense-maker.
Behind Door Number Three...
Were the secrets to mind, the essence of the psyche nucleus, “meaning” capture and release. Breaking into consciousness would get us behind door number three and empower us to reverse engineer the optimal CPU, a universal meaning-maker.
Just weeks after von Neumann’s “First Draft” circulated among the interested parties in his cadre of acquaintances, which included many of the brightest minds in the world who happened to be sequestered in a small town in New Mexico (Jungk and Cleugh 1958; Rhodes 1995), on July 16, 1945, the first atomic bomb, Trinity, loudly and dramatically signaled the break into door number one. Our species had tapped into the source of how energy moves from the inside-out of an atom—I/O, A-bomb fission. Soon thereafter, in 1952, we used an A-bomb to trigger how lighter particles transform from outside-in to a heavier atom—O/I, H-bomb fusion.
Meanwhile, a year before the “Ivy Mike” H-bomb explosion at Enewetak Atoll (Rhodes 1995) in the Marshall Islands (November 1, 1952), in October 1951, the American James Watson joined Francis Crick at Cambridge University. They joined forces in a race against Linus Pauling at Caltech to decipher the structure, function, and organization of a prominent protein in every cell anyone
had ever analyzed. With indispensable assistance from Rosalind Franklin and Maurice Wilkins, they unlocked door number two with their seminal publication, “Molecular Structure of Nucleic Acids: A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid,” released on April 25, 1953, in the scientific journal Nature (Watson [1968] 2010).
By 1953, two of the three doors were unlocked. And the physics, chemistry, and biology of life and matter were wide open.
With formidable paradigmatic frameworks in place for two of the three minimum viable components necessary to build the optimal computer—Input/Output of energy generally understood from A-bomb/H-bomb experiments, and memory storage generally understood from DNA— only one door remained impenetrable.
That door hid the secrets of the mind.