8
Preface
this book is about. Unfortunately, this issue is not only, and predictably so, an extremely complex one, but, more importantly, the whole debate is also plagued by a deep ignorance about the nature of human mental processes, about the human psyche. This need not surprise us, because the debate is largely dominated by engineers, mathematicians and information scientists. Sadly, psychologists, actually the specialists responsible for the very mental functions the computer scientists intend to emulate, have contributed little to instructing those computer scientists about the nature of human mental functions or the grave definitional problems that plague the science of psychology. They rather decided to ride the computers-can-be-human-like wave and thus furthered rather than criticized that flawed project, promulgating even such outlandish ideas as that of computers becoming superintelligent or even superhuman, and that they eventually will take over control of the world from those outmoded creatures that used to be called humans.
