August 2003 Sandia National Laboratory / Synthetic Humans

Introduction

- Download Document 1 (135 KB)
- Download Document 2 (182 KB)
- Download Document 3 (213 KB)

The United States has to be seen as a place where life frequently imitates art, and the art most frequently imitated is the motion picture. In 1978 Hollywood gave us a movie titled "Boys from Brazil" in which a Mengele-like doctor succeeded in cloning replicas of der Fuhrer. The objective was not necessarily to duplicate their physical resemblance to Adolph Hitler but to recreate the qualities of leadership which enabled him to inspire the German people before the disaster which ensued. Of course, the disaster which would ensue again was far off in the future of the clones and did not come into the calculations of the doctor, played by Gregory Peck. His ambition was to restore the pride of the remnants of the Nazi Party in exile.

As we have said, in the United States life frequently imitates art and the latest grand challenge is not to clone our most violent personalities but to replicate the design of their minds in the processes of a computer, so as to create 'synthetic humans.' Our opinion as to whether that can or cannot be done is of no consequence as the intention of the U.S. government is quite clear. However, we were recently asked to describe two or three of the experiments being conducted on the prisoners in the ECCS and the attempt to create 'synthetic humans' is certainly one of them.

In 1994, Anita Jones, then Assistant Secretary of Defense for Science and Technology, put out an invitation to a variety of government contractors and government laboratories to submit proposals for building a model of the human mind in a computer. This was to be the first step toward 'synthetic humans,' but the model ran into a problem. The mind is not exactly logical and consequently there is no mathematics available to describe its operation. It is thought that to understand human reasoning and the complex information processing system within the human brain that the mathematics of fuzzy logic (an important new field of mathematics) will be necessary while chaos theory (another recent field of mathematics) will be necessary to explain how the brain processes enormous amounts of information virtually instantly. Mathematics is attempting a synthesis of the two fields and until this is accomplished, work on the 'synthetic human' is in abeyance.

Actually, we hope that the construction of a computational mind is accomplished quickly because we have an inkling of the first thought which will occur to it.

Document 1 is an advertisement for a new book on the subject of fuzzy logic and chaos theory. Document 2 concerns the current state of affairs in the American program to create 'synthetic humans'. Document 3 describes a more measured and less violent European approach to the problem of increasing computational intelligence.

- Download Document 1 (135 KB)
- Download Document 2 (182 KB)
- Download Document 3 (213 KB)

© ICOMW 2006