FUQ

Frequently UN-asked Questions

(or Fu-Q. Pronounce this as you please)

I'm a pretty peaceful and forgiving sort of a soul, but sometimes people really wind me up. I get especially irritated when people in academia try to damage my reputation in order to avoid facing up to their own failings. This is rare, I hasten to add - almost all of my friends are academics and I have enormous respect for them - but there have been a few who prefer to spread rumours and lies, rather than admit to the possibility that I'm doing something that they can't. There are also non-scientists whose own understanding of the nature of life and the human mind is so poor that they take offence at anyone, whether academic or independent, who "meddles with nature".

Here are some of the particularly simplistic and hurtful assumptions people have been known to make about my work. I list them here because I rarely get a chance to counter them directly and I wanted you to know what to make of them:

You're a media whore who's only doing this for the publicity

Ouch! I'm actually pretty shy and I really hate being in the limelight. It takes me a lot of effort to steel myself up to give talks and I especially dislike appearing on TV. I actually turn down about 90% of all the interview requests I get - if I agreed to any more than I do I'd have gone bankrupt long ago, because they take a lot of work and time and I almost never get paid anything.

Nevertheless, people are interested in what I'm doing and it's only reasonable that I should take some trouble to tell them about it. I also think that people's understanding of science and of themselves could sometimes do with improving - I especially think that many people have lost the sense of wonder and excitement that the natural world should bring, and I want to do my bit to help restore this. Finally, I think many professional scientists fail to make themselves accountable to the public who pay their wages, and fail to do anything themselves to bridge the increasing divide between science and humanity - somebody has to do something about it.

So I do give lectures and the occasional interview. I'm passionate about what I do and I think other people would be passionate too, if they saw the world the way that I see it. I don't want to ram that down anyone's throat but who wouldn't want to tell everyone about their passions? Professional scientists who keep themselves to themselves and avoid the Media make me wonder whether they a) are not taking their responsibilities seriously, b) are too scared in case they say something dumb, c) aren't actually passionate about what they do at all, or d) never get asked in the first place.

Much the same applies to writing books. Did you know that many universities actively try to prevent their staff from writing popular science books? It doesn't give the department any brownie points in the all-important Research Assessment Exercise score, I suppose. Nor does it help academic reputations, which are better served by writing obfuscatory papers about very little, to be published in journals that are only read by people doing exactly the same work. Nevertheless, it is the general public who pays for science, and scientists should be accountable to them. Plus people are far more interested, far more intelligent and far more capable of understanding complex ideas than many scientists seem to think. Plus I need the money...

You're making wild and exaggerated claims that can't be supported

No, some professional scientists make such lame and conservative claims themselves that they would rather believe that my claims are wild and exaggerated.

One specific bone of contention is, I admit, my fault. In my first book I said that I thought I'd produced the closest thing to a new form of life on this planet in nearly four billion years. People seem to take this to mean I think I've done something really clever. I don't mean this at all. I stand by my claim, and challenge people to find an example of artificial life that has come any closer. But to say that I have come closest so far is rather like standing on the top of Mount Everest at midday and claiming to be the closest human being to the Sun. It's entirely accurate but not much of a claim!

Apart from that, people seem to think I'm claiming that Lucy will reach human-level (or orangutan-level) intelligence. I've never said anything of the kind. What I'm interested in is Human-like intelligence. This is not the same thing. By Human-like intelligence I mean the sort of generalised intelligence that comes from the human capacity for mental imagery and imagination (a capacity almost certainly shared to some degree by all mammals). Such a property does not seem to be present in other styles of brain, most notably the simpler invertebrates. Studying insects will tell us nothing about imagination if insects don't have one. The fact that mammals' brains are much larger than insects' brains does not in itself mean they are harder to understand, in much the same way that rain doesn't become hard to understand just because it's made from trillions of raindrops. I'm under no illusion that Lucy will suddenly wake up and start proving Einstein's equations. If anything my claims for Lucy are far more modest than the claims that I know for sure many professional roboticists and AI researchers routinely make in their funding applications (especially to the military, who fund most robot research).

You're doing this to get rich

Obviously I'm not going to say no, should any riches come my way! But so far this project has cost me and my family a lot of money. I know it's an extremely risky venture, and I'd have to be pretty stupid to choose this as a path to wealth, rather than, say, setting up an online auction site or running a second-hand book shop. I'm not doing it for the money, but I do need money in order to do it. Sometimes I have to be a little less than saintly or I'll just go out of business. It's easy for academics with tenure to forget how scary the world outside the Academy really is.

Incidentally, many people seem to think I'm wealthy already. They think I made a fortune from Creatures. I wish! It sold a million copies and I'd have done rather well out of it. But after more than a decade of scratching a living as a freelance programmer I'd decided to accept a regular wage a year or two before I started to write Creatures, so I didn't earn a royalty. I was later made a director of the company, which was satisfyingly well paid but unfortunately rather short-lived...

You're trying to diminish the human spirit

There is a kind of logic in many people's minds that seems to go: if people like him can make machines like us, then that means we must be machines too. I don't want to be a machine. He's trying to diminish the human spirit.

This is an error of reasoning on several levels, mostly as a result of the ideological use of reductionism in science and a complete failure to appreciate the true meaning of the word "emergence". That's a long topic that I don't want to get into here. The important thing to realise is that if we are machines (as I'm certain we are) then this does not mean we are no better than the machines we see around us. We've only been making machines for a few thousand years and we're not very good at it. Nature has been doing it for hundreds of millions and is an expert.

Nobody knows what the limits of machines really are. But we have certainly never made anything that remotely approaches those limits. My aim is not to bring the human spirit down to the level of present-day machines, but to bring machines up a little way towards us. We are machines, but we are staggeringly beautiful and splendid machines - machines that other machines should look up to.

Any nagging doubts you may have about the implications of this for our notion of free will, justice, love, purpose or anything else is a very complex and difficult subject that I encourage you to discuss and explore, rather than suppress. In my world view, there are no limits to the creative power of the universe, and speaking as one of its latest creations I'm perfectly happy to be a machine. Any problem you might have with that is simply due to the fact that you don't understand the true nature of machines.

Your robot is nowhere near as clever as X's

Believe what you like. What I'm saying with the Lucy project is that you don't get to the moon by learning to jump higher and higher, no matter how quickly you seem to be progressing at first. As a general rule, the more intelligent a machine appears to be, the less likely it is to be on the true path to intelligence. For example I'm not smart enough to find the square root of a 16-digit number in my head, which is something a pocket calculator can do with ease. But try dropping us both in a pond and see who drowns first...

Here endeth my rant.