The Dream of A.I.: There is no substitute for man - artificial intelligence will never reach level of real humans

Steven Spielberg's new movie, A.I., is the latest in a long line of fictions about artificial human beings, reaching back to the golem legends of medieval European Jewry and the "homunculus" that the 16th- century alchemist Paracelsus claimed he had made. In one of the earliest literary appearances of this idea, a certain Rabbi Loew of Prague was supposed to have created a golem-a clay figure brought to life by magic-and used it as a household servant. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein was obviously inspired by the same idea.

Whether made from clay or assembled from bits and pieces of cadavers, the central issue in these stories was always: What is the moral status of this thing? If it walks like a human being and talks like one, does it also feel like one? Is it capable of good and evil, and does it understand the difference? In the golem legends, the artificial man (they never seem to have got around to women) was liable to develop unexpected powers, and had to be restored to an inanimate condition by erasing the aleph from his forehead. Mary Shelley's monster famously got out of control, though whether as a result of free will acting on moral turpitude or from being driven mad by his rejection from polite society, I have never been quite sure.

With the coming of the machine age, human beings, and the work they did, seemed to require fewer and fewer human faculties, while the increasing capability of machines suggested that a machine-man might be manufactured in a workshop. The gap between man and golem thus narrowed, and in Karel Capek's 1920 play R.U.R., the humans and the robots meet on pretty equal terms, with the humans only narrowly coming out ahead. (Capek's robots remember everything, and never think of anything new. "They'd make fine university professors," remarks one of the play's protagonists.)

Leaving aside juvenile tales like The Wizard of Oz, Capek's play was the first serious treatment of the artificial-man theme in a modern form, and the first to introduce us to the golem in its now-familiar manifestation as a construction of metal, wires, and blinking indicator lights. R.U.R. begat a hundred thousand science-fiction stories and movies, most of them not so much concerned with the moral aspect of the matter as with the robot's exceptional abilities in the area of breaking things and killing people.

The principal exceptions were Isaac Asimov's robot tales, all predicated on the "Three Laws of Robotics": A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm; a robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law; a robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.

By the 1960s, as ordinary homes filled up with mechanical appliances, fictional robots had been pretty much domesticated too. Most robots were gentle and helpful, like the one in the classic sci-fi movie Forbidden Planet that had been programmed with the Three Laws. This line of thought continued all the way down to the recent Warner Brothers movie The Iron Giant. Meanwhile, the robot that could break things and kill people still kept its grip on the popular imagination, appearing most memorably in the Terminator flicks. And, of course, the computer revolution had hit, and sometime around 1960 the idea dawned on everyone simultaneously: What if these things are smarter than us? The archetype of the super-smart computer was HAL in Stanley Kubrick's movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, who, for all his artificial intelligence, was eventually outfoxed and deactivated by a more imaginative human being.

A.I. returns us to the earlier themes about the moral status of the golem. Its robots are not especially destructive-rather the contrary: With that trademark sentimentality toward his non-human creations, Spielberg has them more the victims of human aggression and Frankenstein-style rejection. Nor are their intellectual powers very dazzling; they are designed so that human beings can keep them firmly in their place as companions, toys, and substitute family members. These automata are close to us in ability, and even, in the case of the Haley Joel Osment character, appearance. The issue is whether they feel as we do, and are responsible in the way we are (or, more accurately, should be).

The release of A.I. the movie has led to a new flurry of interest in A.I. the thing. As a field of genuine scientific inquiry, Artificial Intelligence has been around for a while. John von Neumann, who has the best claim to having invented the modern computer, wrote a group of essays in 1955, recently collected by Yale University Press under the title The Computer and the Brain, exploring some of the key underlying concepts. For 40 years now, small groups of researchers have been pursuing the dream of getting computers to do what brains can do.

The results are surprisingly meager, and suggest that the fictional robots of our own age are as far from our reality as Rabbi Loew's golem was from 16th-century Prague's. Not that you would know this from the propaganda. "In thirty years, machines will not only be able to speak like humans but they will exceed humans in areas like poetry, music, and philosophy," burbles Jack Dunietz, who leads one of the world's foremost A.I. projects.