14 Are the Androids Dreaming Yet?
moments — so we have packed them with diagnostic monitoring systems. These systems allow us to watch a computer think and, since they think symbolically, we can easily read their minds.
Unfortunately computers don't display many human-like thoughts. They don’t laugh and cry, they don’t report consciousness and they don't appear to exercise free will or display creative impulses. This is frustrating because these are the thoughts we would most like to study. It might be that computers are not yet powerful enough, and in another few years they will be giving Mozart a run for his money. But there may also be a fundamental difference which renders them incapable of this sort of thinking. This is the crux of the modern scientific debate: do humans
think differently?
Computer Brains On the face of it, humans and computers behave very differently. Our memories are poor, but we understand things. We are creative, but bad at mathematics. We learn by example, computers are programmed. We are emotional, impulsive and appear to have free will. Computers are ordered, predictable, but lack common sense. Both humans and computers appear to be physical, discrete systems. We both take inputs, generate outputs and are capable of solving similar problems. Indeed, each time we examine a problem solved by humans we usually find we can automate it. This is known as ‘knowledge engineering’ and there are many examples; from aerospace to finance, and architecture to medicine. An example of where computers excel is in medical diagnosis. ISABEL is a clinical diagnosis program designed to help ER doctors quickly diagnose critical patients. It was created by the parents of Isabel Maude, a little girl who presented with multiple symptoms to an ER unit. Doctors were initially confused by the symptoms and misdiagnosed her condition. She was later diagnosed with meningitis. Isabel suffered multiple organ failure but survived. Her parents realized there was something wrong with the ER triage process. They got together with some computer scientists and built the expert system ‘ISABEL. When ER doctors are presented with symptoms, they must mentally scan a vast array of literature to rule in and out possible diagnoses. The problem- solving process is not linear; if you've ever watched the TV series House it gives a great dramatization of the process. Certain symptoms might suggest a diagnosis but are not conclusive, and there are many paths to explore. Programmers have taken the heuristic rules from many doctors and codified them into software. ISABEL allows a doctor to input a set
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