Walter Bradley Center director Robert J. Marks was a guest at C-SPAN 2 TV in July, discussing his book, Non-Computable You: What You Do That Artificial Intelligence Never Will (Discovery Institute Press, 2022), and we now have the transcript as well as the video:

Here’s the link to the video.

Excerpt:

Peter Slen: Professor Marks, what’s the missing element in artificial intelligence? To make it sentient. To make it innovative too…

The premise of my book is that it will never be there. There are certain things which are non computable. This goes back to the genius Alan Turing in the 1930s. Now, Turing is probably best known for helping crack the Enigma code that helped win World War II for the Nazi codes. But he was also a mathematical genius. And as the father of computer science, he was able to prove back in the 1930s that there were things which were non-computable.

Now this was not conjecture. This was not hand waving. This was not parable, this was a mathematical proof. And so since then there have been a number of other problems which people have identified that are non-computable. These are problems which computers will never ever solve.

So this begs the question, are there aspects of us which are non computable? Right? And I think the low-hanging fruit there are things such as emotions such as love, compassion, empathy and such — but the deeper ones as you mentioned, our creativity, understanding and sentience.

These look to be non-computable. And the thing is that if they were non-computable in the thirties, they’re non-computable now. Non-computable means non-computable. And they’re also going to be non-computable in the future. Even if we get super duper computers, it’s still going it’s still going to be something which is out of the reach of artificial intelligence in computers in general.Peter Slen, “Non-Computable You” at C-Span (July 15, 2022)

You may also wish to read: Marks: AI looks very intelligent — while following set rules. In an excerpt from Chapter 2 of Non-Computable You, Larry Nobles reads Robert J. Marks’s account of evolving AI “swarm intelligence” for Dweebs vs. Bullies (transcript also). They had programmed the computer to sort through millions of strategies that would maximize the life of the Dweeb swarm — and that’s what the computer did.