ENTERPRISE ENGINEERING, INC.
FALMOUTH, ME

Life mostly seeks to sustain life, and so living things care about what happens. The computer, not alive and not designed by evolution, doesn't care about survival or reproduction. In fact, it doesn't care about anything. Computers are not dangerous in the way snakes and hired killers are dangerous. Although many movies explore horror fantasies of computers turning malicious, real computers lack the capacity for malice. What would the computer on your desk or lap have to do so that you would say it has free will, at least in whatever sense that humans have free will? Certainly it would have to be able to re-program itself; otherwise it is just carrying out built-in instructions, which nobody thinks is free will. Plus the re-programming would have to be done in a way that was flexible, not programmed in advance. But where would that come from? In humans, the agent comes to exist because it serves the motivational system: It helps you get what you need and want. Humans, like other animals, were designed by evolution, and so the beginnings of subjectivity come with wanting and liking the things that enable life to continue, like food and sex. The agent serves that, by choosing actions that obtain those life-sustaining things. And thinking helps the agent make better choices. Human thinking thus serves to prolong life, such as by helping one decide whom to trust and what to eat and how to make a living and whom to marry. Machine thinking is not motivated by any innate drive to sustain a machine's life (though machine thinking probably serves to improve human life!). The computer may be able to process more information faster than a human brain can, but there's no "I" in the computer because it doesn't begin with wanting things that enable it to sustain life. If computers did have an urge to prolong their existence, they would probably focus their ire mainly on the computer industry, so as to stop progress—because the main threat to a computer's continued existence arises when newer, better computers make it obsolete. I think, on the contrary, that these alarm calls distract us from a more pressing problem, an impending disaster that won't need any help from Moore's Law or further breakthroughs in theory to reach its much closer tipping point: after centuries of hard-won understanding of nature that now permits us, for the first time in history, to control many aspects of our destinies, we are on the verge of abdicating this control to artificial agents that doctor to overrule the machine's verdict when it comes to making a life-saving choice of treatment? This may prove to be the best—most provably successful, most immediately useful—application of the technology behind IBM's Watson, and the issue of whether or not Watson can be properly said to think (or be conscious) is beside the point. If Watson turns out to be better than human experts at generating diagnoses from available data it will be morally obligatory to avail ourselves of its results. A doctor who defies it will be asking for a malpractice suit. No area of human endeavor appears to be clearly off-limits to such prosthetic performance-enhancers, and wherever they prove themselves, the forced choice will be reliable results over the human touch, as it always has been. Hand-made law and even science could come to occupy niches adjacent to artisanal pottery and hand-knitted sweaters. trying to make them understand what they are doing. Ironically, the impressive results are inspiring many in cognitive science to reconsider; it turns out that there is much to learn about how the brain does its brilliant job of producing future by applying the techniques of data-mining and machine learning. (2) Use it or lose it. As we become ever more dependent on these cognitive prostheses, we risk becoming helpless if they ever shut down. The Internet is not an intelligent agent (well, in some ways it is) but we have nevertheless become so dependent on it that were it to crash, panic would set in and we could destroy society in a few days. The real danger, then, is not machines that are more intelligent than we are usurping our role as captains of our destinies, but machines that are basically clueless in almost all regards being . Units are organized into the enterprise network and maintain transactional (buying/selling, requesting/servicing, giving/taking), hierarchical (directing/reporting), and collaborative relations not only with other units, but also with the environment. Functional units develop specialized intelligences and perform specialized activities such as production, distribution, sales, marketing, etc. In contrast, executive units develop the management intelligence and focus on making things happen by making sure that other units contribute their best to the whole that the executive unit represent. Executive units set and adjust boundary conditions within which their subordinating units must operate. provide authoring and runtime environment and manage the lifecycles of artificial agents, enterprise tools and boundary constructs. Sometimes the operations of individual agents can be governed by a set of predefined rules. These rules define start and end events, sequential or parallel flows of activities, and important decision points. This is the command-and-control type of coordination, which works best for production workflows, simple case management scenarios, and basic administrative processes. One can use Business Process Management (BPM) software to model, execute, monitor, and improve those types of business processes. At the enterprise level, units communicate asynchronously; the intermediation services (queueing and publish/subscribe) are provided by a higher authority unit. At the unit level, individual agents communicate both asynchronously and synchronously. In the case of asynchronous communication, the intermediation services are provided by the unit itself. At the enterprise level, communication is mediated to provide location transparency, protocol bridging, message transformation, and cross-cutting communication aspects such as security, logging, and auditing.