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It seemed right to take a moment and
In his book What Computers Can’t Do,
humans. Now what kind of paradise might
summarize the necessary properties we
Dreyfus explains what is keeping artificial
this computer be able to design for us? The
found for our robot so far. A design robot
intelligence from becoming like human
answer is as simple as it is paradoxical: it
needs to be: 1) able to acquire experience;
intelligence.
Humans developed their
would not change that much. Because as
2) able to give value to that experience, by
consciousness and states because of their
designing is such an integral function of a
attaching emotion; 3) able to make good design decisions, on the basis of those weights; 4) self-learning, so that it can create new emotions and improve itself; 5) empathic, so that it can also feel emotions towards situations of others. Now that we know this, what does it tell us about designing? There is one clear conclusion to be drawn from this: that being a designer is
human being, the imperfect world as we
There is one clear conclusion to be drawn from this: that being a designer is very close to being human.
very close to being human. Then, our conversation took a sidetrack on
so-called situatedness, the complete set of
the difference between consciousness and
characteristics that describe how they exist
subconsciousness, as some noted that ideas
in the world. For robots to achieve something
can come up spontaneously, after a night’s
like human intelligence, one would have to
sleep. It seems the edge between the two is
build in properties like mortality, a front
not a very sharp one. Again we approached
and back side, etcetera. Our conclusion that
the problem from an evolutionary point of
being able to design is to be human, and that
view. Spahn believed that once a system
to be human means being able to design,
becomes complex enough, consciousness
was only strengthened by this argument.
emerges. The ability to plan ahead, closely bound to having consciousness, is what
In the end we talked about the creation of
pushed evolution. For a moment it seemed
a supercomputer for designing. Because if
we were back to the necessity of a self-
we were able to create a robot that could
learning capacity, but then Brus noted
design as well as humans can, than we could
that the self-learning capacity of a robot is
maybe also create one that is even better.
fundamentally different from the process of
This computer would be superior to us in
evolution.
every way, including ethically, which is why it would even bother to design for us
know it is in fact quite perfect. We felt that this was the right moment to end our discussion. Satisfied with our surprisingly concrete answers, we paid for our drinks and left.
1 Nigel Cross, Design Thinking: Understanding How Designers Think and Work (London: Berg, 2011). 2 Ibid. 3 Hubert Dreyfus, What Computers Can’t Do (New York: MIT Press, 1979).