Slashdot Mirror
Marvin Minsky: It's 2001. Where is HAL?
ZigZag writes: "Marvin Minsky speaks about everything important (MUDs, education, AI, N(atural) I, immortality) while fighting with his MS Word for Mac presentation slides at the Game Developers Conference. Transcript, audio and video are available from Dr. Dobbs. It was in part a preview of his upcoming book The Emotion Machine. Some quotes from the talk will give you a feel: "Whenever you see a number, you should say `how sad'"; "Have you heard the theory that to learn something you should do it in little bits and not stay up all night working on it? If that were true, there would be no computer games"; "robotics people treasure their videos - because it won't work tomorrow.""
This is much better - and older. http://bots.internet.com/pcai/article8.htm
... a Beowulf cluster of these?
Thank you.
--Patrick Bateman, Esq.
Using Word for Mac as a presentation program? How can one be so bright and at the same time be so dumb?
666
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Another example of a less-than-useful application of math is the absurd idea of building a "proof" for a computer program. Which is totally useless for any real-world program.
--
An esoteric scratched itch:
Homeworld Map Maker Tool
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/05/27/172422 6&mode=nested
plus another link to an article of an expert system builder who wrote how a real HAL ought to work.
I must admit that I get very tired of the Slashdot submission process. I submitted a long list of entries this year, and only two or so were posted to the Slashdot frontpage.
Not that I expect that my taste is 100% compatible with the taste of the editors, but as they never give the slightest feedback, why an article was rejected, this reduces my motivation to submit IMHO interesting bits to Slashdot more and more.
The only alternative I see to Slashdot, next to establishing another service, is Kuro5hin. Alas the fellow geek crowd is centered around Slashdot. The Kuro5hin crowd, as it is these days, seems less technical/hacker to me. Less engineers, more socio/artist type of folks there.
The Kuro5hin submission process is much better, but it tends to double discussions. First matters are discussed in the pre-run mode and then stuff is moved forward to the main page, where discussion takes place a second time. This takes too much drive out of discussions, I believe.
So come on, Slashdot editors, if you reject a submission, please send an email with a word or two of explanation. It is very hard to judge from rejection alone, what is not OK with submission entries.
Indeed. People can make fun of Minsky and the other proponents of classical strong AI but they should remember that connectionists also made such claims. I have a book from the mid 1980's "Apprentices of Wonder:Inside the Neural Net Revolution" that made also sorts of silly predictions like intelligent cars that drive themselves (not as research projects, but commerically available) by 2001.
The part that literally floored me is "where you're hoping you won't have to figure anything out,"
I'm no fan of old-school AI, but Minsky has a point -- people use genetic algorithms and neural nets to "learn" from examples, but such pattern matching tells us *nothing* about how learning really happens. They are just generic black boxes that people throw at data in the hope that something useful comes out.
HAL is between 10 and 12 August 2001 at the campus of Twente University in the Netherlands. HAL is Hacking At Large, a gathering in the tradition of HEU and HIP. Camp outside, bring your PC and have a fast uplink to the Internet and a lot of nice people around (you can have both at the same time!). Website: http://www.hal2001.org/. Spread the word and spread the banners.
The Virtual Bookcase: book reviews
Crap. The "emergent AI" stuff that's been demonstrated to date has had limitations just as profound and seemingly fundamental (but different) as traditional symbolic AI. Amongst others, it has scaling problems of its own when you try and build more complex emergent system.
Not that it's not useful, and interesting research, will undoubtedly produce some interesting production systems, and might give us some pointers along the road to HAL, but don't claim that the bright new future of is just round the corner as soon as we take off the shackles that the neats are placing on the scruffies.
Go you big red fire engine!
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
You leave out some important information about Minsky's paper with Seymour. They found that a simple type of neural network called a Perceptron could not determine if a type of image that looks like a spiral is connected or not (is the image made of one spiraled line, or two spiraled lines?)
At that time, neural networks were brand new, and the later advances in the 1980's weren't even conceived. It turns out that more complex networks CAN determine if the image is connected or not. The paper was not about those more advanced networks, just Perceptrons. There was nothing wrong with his findings. If anything, it was an overreaction on the part of the AI community to his paper that shut down neural network research. If you blame Minsky, then you've got to blame everyone else who basically read the paper and gave up for 15 years.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
see www.hal2001.org.
-- unix is for people without a social life - Patrick van Eijk
Fuck!
/. audience were educated intelligent and tolerant people.
What are all those fascists/racists/assholes doing here? That's not the only time that I see displaced posts.
I thought
Hmmm...
-- ouaou! fait le ouaou.
that would be the greeks by way of the french. try praying when noisy people are citing Voltaire on their cell phones...
---------- ovidius naso
I think that Minky's point was that a normal GA don't remember what it has done. There is nothing stopping it from evaluating the same point in the search space a million times. Because it has no way of remembering that it has been there before.
If I interpret you correctly you are suggesting that by having "activation genes" you can close off large areas of search space in one gene. It's an interesting idea, I wonder how hard it would be to actually implement however. The benefit "meat space genetics" has is that it is actually capable of adapting. I mean adapting by adding new "rules" like these activbation genes.
Once GA can do that, then we'd have real evolutionary programs. The current method is mainly (as I in my naive view see it) an semi-random walk through a search space. It works though (for some things) so it's apparently a good idea.
in which I've reviewed the talk Minsky gave. The same review has been posted on comp.ai and comp.ai.philosophy, too. You can find it in the Media section in k5, titled ' Minsky's "Programs, Emotions and Common Sense" '
Thanks!
--exa--
This Minsky guy seems to be promoting the discredited 'strong AI' hypothesis. Well, that would seem to render 1000's of years of religious insight redundant. But then, what would we expect from someone from MIT.
Hmmm... 1000's of years of religious insight would have the Sun rotating around the Earth, the world being flat, there being no such thing as dinosaurs, and the Universe being finite and Earth the only thing in it (a principle that was only punctured when someone pointed out that this would put limits on God).
Simon
Coming soon - pyrogyra
Suppose you think you've created consciousness. How could you know?
With humans you can at least assume, based on behavioral and pysiological similarity, that consciousness is present, fairly safely.
Unless you want to grant consciousness-status to everything, in which case the problem is already solved, you still need to answer how you will know when you have created it successfully.
You're the one who suggested replicating consciousness. I want to know we'll know when we've done it.
To what, exactly, will your hardware human be behaviorally identical? Other humans? Even wetware humans aren't behaviorally identical to one another.
Absent a conclusive test for consciousness, how will you know that your hardware human is simulating most of my behavior, but is lacking some accuracy in the simulation of my brain causing the simulation not to be conscious? I believe that there is no way to know such a thing.
.. and it wasn't even that interesting the first time around.
/. editors can recommend a better tech news site, since they're obviously not reading their own!
Maybe the
Uh, that'd be Rodney Brooks. Nowadays he's working on a humanoid robot called Cog - which still uses his bottom up subsumption architecture, and IMO seems to be a bit of "anthromorphic robotic grant troll"! I think he may have some plans for adding representation and cognition, or maybe I'm just thinking that he *should*!
Yeah, but the symbolic part of it itself isn't a hard problem - Allen Newell's SOAR already does pretty much everything you could hope. Who (other than a neurologist) cares if the implementation is itself symbolic rather than based on connectionist building blocks.
The hard part of creating a real artifial intelligence is the perception/representation/cognition bootstrapping part of it, and requires an embedded approach that Minsky ignores.
I disagree with you about Strong AI requiring a low level neuron simulation - IMO consciousness is a result of high level architecture, not Penrosian low level specifics! I believe it's just an "inward looking sense" - a feedback path.
Minksy's put down of perceptrons was incredibly short-sighted, and not simply reflective of the state of knowledge at that time.
Minsky was just arguing that a perceptron could not compute an XOR function, and the reason he was wrong is simply because he didn't consider that you might connnect one perceptron to the output of another.
For Minsky to not even consider connected perceptrons was a humungous brain fart for which he should rightly be ridiculed, particularly given the influential position the way he was in at the time, and the effect it had stifling all ANN funding and research for a long time.
P.S. Sure the backpropagation learning algorithm had yet to be invented (although nowadays it seems trivially obvious as a dynamic programming heuristic approach), but that is an entirely separate from not even considering connecting two together!!!
You'd get a cluster that emulates slashdot :
75% 'frist p0sts'
23% 'goatse.cx'links
1.5% reposts
0.5% uninformed speculation
0% work done.
** Windows has detected a mouse movement.
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
-------
CAIMLAS
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
There is another point of view (which I believe is more adequate) which boils down to mind and intellect as fairly sophisticated adaptation function (or tool), so to implement AI we have to start with very simple machine capable of interacting with its environment, learning, adapting, and evolving.
This point of view is missed by a lot of AI researchers, I think, because they're thinking in terms of numbers and theorms, and not the actual human experience. Seperating mind from the body is IMHO a big mistake, and I absoulutely agree with you it's wrong.
Those of you who aren't involved with Neural Networks might find it interesting that almost all research into computerized neural nets stopped when it was proven that a basic perceptron (what you typically visualize when you think of a "neuron") couldn't distingush an XOR function, e.g. nonlinearly seperable data. Of course, this was a pretty simplistic way of looking at it, and growth in the field is exploding now.
I had a big relevation in terms of working with neural nets when I stopped thinking about the math a little bit, and asked myself: If I was this little robot/program/whatever, what would I see? How would I find a pattern in the data I was presented through my senses? (e.g. a Analog-Digital converter connected to a light meter).
We might not be on the ball for 2001, but give it a year or two. :)
..don't panic
here. Thanks for playing.
How we know is more important than what we know.
I thought that article looked familiar. And yep, posted on Slashdot not too long ago.
2 6
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/05/27/17242
- - - - -
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
As much a fan as I am of nature and the wonders it's created, I can't help but think it could have done a better job on neural tissue. Specifically, the speed at which impulses are conducted could probably be muchly improved where our systems to be redesigned from scratch.
So yes, I think computers are faster, and in the end will be able to outperform our wet systems, if we can only figure out how to do it.
I'm no fan of old-school AI, but Minsky has a point -- people use genetic algorithms and neural nets to "learn" from examples, but such pattern matching tells us *nothing* about how learning really happens. They are just generic black boxes that people throw at data in the hope that something useful comes out.
I agree that the old ANN pattern recognition approach is a dead end. However, a lot has happened in neural networks in the last decade or so. We are learning a lot from neurobiology. We are learning that signal timing in biological networks are crucial to learning and motor skills. One of the important discoveries seems to be in the area of temporal correlations among spiking signals, i.e., determining whether signals are sequential or concurrent. If they are sequential, it appears (c.f. the work of Dr. Henry Markram et al) that the order of arrival is crucial. The time scale is on the order of miliseconds. The new spiking neural networks are so unlike the old ANNs that a new discipline has emerged, one which tries to distance itself from the old ANNers. It's called computational neuroscience (for those who don't keep up with progress in this area).
When you have emergent phenomena like consciousness
What evidence do you have that consciousness is emergent? I suggest we stick to the stuff (intelligence) we can observe (and somewhat quantify) and worry about consciousness later.
And your implication that he is somehow holding back the field of AI is not too plausible, either. It's hardly as if he is controlling AI research all over the world. He's not even controlling AI research at MIT. If neural networks haven't yet taken over the world, you can hardly lay the blame at Marvin's doorstep.
It's a good thing that Dr. Minsky is not controlling AI research at MIT and elsewhere, although he tries. We do hear rumors of his close encounters with other AI researchers such as avant-guarde roboticist Rodney Brooks.
The symbolic AI camp has been at it since the fifties and they made a lot of noise over the years. They have failed miserably. Rather than lick their wounds and moving on to more fruitful endeavors, they continue to uphold their failed approach through various funded projects and obsolete AI curricula that are being taught at major universities and AI centers around the world.
The symbolic aproach is dead and should be buried once and for all, in my opinion. Ultimately it will be but a footnote in the history of AI. The future of AI belongs to connectionism, the only model that has a chance of taming the otherwise intractable complexity of animal intelligence. We need fundamental perceptual and motor learning principles. We need fundamental principles of motivation. Once we formulate these all important principles, we'll know how to apply them to billions of self-modifying cells working in parallel. Only then will human level intelligence become a reality. It will happen in our lifetime.
Certainly the symbolic logic guys were wrong as wrong as those who thought neural nets would solve everything.
To claim that it is wrong to think that neural nets would solve everything is to ignore the evidence in my view. The truth is that the brain is a collection of neural nets feeding into and relying on one another. Each net has a specific role to perform. Sorry, but this sounds very much like neural nets solving everything to me. Maybe you had something else in mind.
It is clear that AI hasn't delivered on the promises made over thirty years ago. What happened? In a preview of his upcoming book, The Emotion Machine, Marvin Minsky examines the failures of AI research and lays out directions for future development in the field.
I used to be a Minsky fan (I still have a copy of his "Society of Mind") but not anymore. Marvin Minsky is one of the reasons that AI still has not delivered on its promises. He is part of the old symbolic school of AI. He was the guy who, with Seymour Papert, wrote a scathing criticism of the then embryonic field of neural networks, effectively strangling research in neural networks for the better part of a decade. I am sure Dr. Minsky has had occasions to change his views since but I don't think he has anything to offer that will lead us to HAL. The following is a quote from a Scientific American article on Arthur C. Clarke's HAL.
The novel of 2001 explains how the HAL 9000 series developed out of work by Marvin Minsky of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and another researcher in the 1980s that showed how "neural networks could be generated automatically--self-replicated--in accordance with an arbitrary learning program. Artificial brains could be grown by a process strikingly analogous to the development of the human brain." Ironically, Minsky, one of the pioneers of neural networks who was also an adviser to the filmmakers (and who almost got killed by a falling wrench on the set), says today that this approach should be relegated to a minor role in modeling intelligence, while criticizing the amount of research devoted to it. "There's only been a tiny bit of work on commonsense reasoning, and I could almost characterize the rest as various sorts of get-rich-quick schemes, like genetic algorithms [and neural networks] where you're hoping you won't have to
figure anything out," Minsky says.
The part that literally floored me is "where you're hoping you won't have to figure anything out,". All along I'm thinking that intelligence is so complex and intractable that the most plausible solution to the problem of making a human-level AI is one where we let the AI emerge, grow and learn. IOW, what we really need to understand is the learning process, which encompasses perceptual, motivational and motor learning.
But here comes Marvin Minsky, a luminary in the AI community, insisting that figuring everything out is precisely what needs to be done. Haysoos Martinez! This is the main reason why we still don't have human-level AI! I think Minsky's stance is a disservice to computational neuroscience and ANN researchers everywhere.
The man has had his day in the sun. Now it's time for the younger generation of AI researchers to come in and say "hold it! we're taking a different approach from now on. The unkept promises of AI were made by the old symbolic AI crowd. There is a new school in town. The new AI neural, it's emergent, and it's gonna to kick ass!"
Why is there a picture of Al "Grandpa" Lewis doing in that article? All Minsky needs now is a cape.
No no no, according th the Author Clarke that was not the case. As is demonstrated here:
http://www.underview.com/2001/faqs/faqs.html#faqg
"HAL". Something like Highly Advanced Lifeform, right?
Well, almost. The answer is given in black and white in Arthur C. Clarke's book of "2001: A Space Odyssey", Chapter 16, which is titled (ahem) "HAL" (note that in this case the book gives a specific answer to a specific question, whereas in situations that are more open to individual interpretation I do not necessarily take solutions out of the book).
Clarke writes:
"Hal (for Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic computer, no less) was a masterwork of the third computer breakthrough."
Note that, strictly speaking, HAL is not an acronym in the sense of being formed from the initial letters of separate words. In the film we only see it as "HAL 9000", but it is noticeable that in the book Arthur C. Clarke himself consistently refers to "Hal", not "HAL". So, therefore, do I.
Then they would already have seen this here a couple of weeks ago.
In other words, you won't?
-- Andrem
There has been a major scientific break-in
Pure logics always fails in the real world. For instance, there are many men that have XX-chromosones. Perfectly normal and healthy men I might add.
- Steeltoe
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
I wish it would keep track of which messages I'd already read and not redisplay those unless I choose. Doesn't seem like that hard of a thing to code.
that one was buried. Not everyone reads every word of every article. I for one am glad they reposted it in a more prominent position.
(not as research projects, but commerically available) so we're getting there?
/me ducks
--
--
I like to watch.
Any examples?
The topology of the information processing membranes are more complex than we can sort out just yet, but there's nothing about the structure of the brain that's not duplicable by silicon hardware...
Also important to notice is that to implement the human mind in hardware (as opposed to wetware), we'd need something on the order of a 10 teraflop supercomputer.
These are very strong and specific claims that do not seem to have much foundations. I wonder where the numbers you are citing are coming from.
Can you point to any specific evidence for that?
The real world is rather dumb and boring. I'm serious. In the real world, if you have a chair and somebody sits on it, it might break. That won't happen in the virtual world because the chair knows it's a chair and its job is to support something.
In the real world nothing has a purpose except we try to make purposeless things do the best they can for us. And that's why the world is a mess. I'd much rather build Lego with a Lego simulator where you can press clear at the end and all the things pop back in their boxes.
What a sterile and appalling outlook. How can you hope to understand intelligence,
perhaps the most complex and intricate phenomenon known to people,
with a worldview like that?
If you strip life of its mystery, what do you have left?
His attitude makes one wonder, whether for some people
computers are just ways of escaping the intolerable boredom of existence.
Popularity of Tolkien, role-playing games, and similar imaginary world
themes with the computer crowd seems to provide at least some evidence for that.
The behavior of individuals neurons is very complicated and still not at all well-understood. Computer models for even an individual neuron are fairly involved. The original Hodgkin's and Huxley's model (for which they received a Nobel prize) for the giant squid axon is a system of three equations with partial derivatives. You can imagine how much computation would be involved in computing these for all ~10^11 neurons in the brain.
An individual neuron might have tens of thousand synapses through which it communicates with other neurons. The computational complexity of this is mind-boggling and, moreover, very little is known about how neurons communicate and form connections.
Sure we do. There are server farms with more than 10 teraflops. If strong AI could be achieved with a big cluster, there'd be big clusters doing it.
If compute power were the problem, we'd have powerful AI systems that were really slow. That's not the case. We really don't have a clue how to do strong AI. The stuff that used to sort of work but was slow, like language translation and question answering, now works fast but isn't much smarter.
Speed does make what AI capabilities we have more useful, because we can use them on dumber problems. Machine translation still sucks, but now that it's so cheap it's given away, it's useful just to find out if something is worth looking at at all. You can now afford to translate incoming mail to find out if it's spam. The same goes for question-answering at the "Ask Jeeves" level. It's not very good, but it's cheap.
To see where classical AI went to die, go to the second floor of the Gates Building at Stanford. There, below gold letters reading "Knowledge Systems Lab", are empty cubicles, obsolete computers, and tables with ancient copies of Wired. It's depressing.
Game AI, on the other hand, is steadily getting better. It's generally non-verbal and grounded in a semi-physical world. That's probably why progress is possible. The gamers are definitely gaining on the academics, and are probably ahead at this point.
Eventually, game characters will have enough of a life that they'll have something to say, and then we may start to see a path to developing strong AI. But it's a ways off.
Others share that opinion, including some of his grad students. The amount of hype (Newsweek cover, TV specials, and a movie) about that project is excessive for the results obtained.
What they seem to be developing is technology for faking emotional behavior. This came close to a commercial product, a microprocessor-controlled doll, sort of like a Furby with facial expressions. This was supposed to be a joint venture with Hasbro, but apparently didn't ship. IS Robotics, Brooks' startup, seems to be a defunct server.
Behavior-based robotics is interesting, but without some environmental modelling and short-term planning, you'll never get above the insect level. Feedback can only take you so far. Feedforward, though...
It's a very Japanese idea. This is reflected in Japanese interest in robots, both in manufacturing and in anime.
Maybe that's the problem: we've been making computers too small. Minsky should look into creating some skyscraper-sized machines.
you know, this is funny, but I believe the whole notion of intellect or mind as completely authonomous system (hence with a potential of being implemented as some super-complex program) has religious roots, in particular Christian roots. It is 'mind vs body'. Mind can exists outside the body. So having this as an axiom, why not try to implement the mind as AI? I wonder if there are religions which treat mind and body as unseparable (?)
Minsky's concept of mind and intellect is too simplistic and often plainly wrong. of course slashdot is not the proper place for in-depth discussion but from what I've read I have an impression that according to Minsky mind is something completely authonomous, with its own absolute (logical rules), something you can implement in a machine (hence the whole notion of AI). There is another point of view (which I believe is more adequate) which boils down to mind and intellect as fairly sophisticated adaptation function (or tool), so to implement AI we have to start with very simple machine capable of interacting with its environment, learning, adapting, and evolving. I believe someone (also with MIT roots) is doing just that, and quite successfully. Minsky separates the mind from the body, from the environment, from the whole human exprience, and this is plainly wrong. No wonder AI (according to him) is a dead end. Incidently I remember reading one of his books, he's tried to explain the notion of 'humor in music', in particular in some Bethoveen composition, using mathematical analysis. Oh vey.
Sure it's possible to make something without understanding it 100%, but that's not a very useful approach if the goal is understanding. That's the point. There are a lot of people working in AI whose goal is not AI per se but rather an understanding of the way that the human mind works. To them it's not particularly useful to make a human-level AI if it's nothing but a black box. To them, a lower level of AI is more valuable if it comes with greater understanding.
Quite frankly, I can see exactly where they're coming from. We're already surrounded by more human-level intelligences than we can find productive employment for. Why go out and create more artificial ones that are likely to suffer from exactly the same sorts of problems, only at much greater expense, unless we actually get something useful out of it in the form of increased knowledge?
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
...that one doesn't understand 100%. The brain is a design we know works. It's been stress tested for a million years. Maybe we should just go with that for now and work out the less tractible problems when we can. Because having hardware humans who don't have to die (and are thus concerned about the future), who don't have to eat (and thus use fewer natural resources), and yet can be friends (and more, one assumes) with us bio-humans might be really nice.
I am the one true god. However, as an atheist, I don't believe in myself. I guess I have a self-esteem problem.
I agree totally. Implimenting individuals neurons in code is not likely to be necessary. But I was getting so wrapped up in trying to write a pretty paragraph (in a hurry) that I went overboard. I just hoped no one would call me out on it so I didn't have to explain myself.
And yeah, Minsky isn't exactly the leading edge any more (I don't ever cite him). I probably shouldn't really have defended him so vigorously - the neural net comments just brought me out.
I am the one true god. However, as an atheist, I don't believe in myself. I guess I have a self-esteem problem.
I should be clear - the familiar "I am a man. All men have Y chromosomes. Therefore, I have a Y chromosome" type of logic is of course uninterestingly tractible. The logic represented by the topology of some of our neural gadgets is not so trivial. Their linkages to one-another are less-than-trivial as well. Still, those are just engineering problems.
However, we won't really be able to abstract the high-level from the low-level (between which there is no real dividing line) unless we understand the topology well enough to know which dynamics can be idealized (or formalized, if you will) and which depend more directly on their fuzzy nature.
I am the one true god. However, as an atheist, I don't believe in myself. I guess I have a self-esteem problem.
When you have emergent phenomena like consciousness, replicating it is a good way of making sure you haven't left out anything important. It means that anything you've changed from the original wasn't essential. It's a way to confirm or disconfirm guesses. Of course, the ungly truth of this is that we're almost sure to make a number of catatonic, retarded, or psychotic AIs before we make our first happy, well-adjusted hardware human. On the other hand, we are sure to learn from our failures.
Even when we do have a working person, even if we had to simulate each individual neuron, at least now we'll be able to look at what's going on in the brain with more detail than ever before - we can track the contents of memory (as in, neural firing dispositions) without sticking a scalple in someone's head.
I am the one true god. However, as an atheist, I don't believe in myself. I guess I have a self-esteem problem.
How do you know your parents are conscious? Your best friend?
I expect the same reasons will apply to Strong AI.
I am the one true god. However, as an atheist, I don't believe in myself. I guess I have a self-esteem problem.
It depends on in what way you mean to challenge me. I can easily back up what I said if you mean to suggest that some homunculus-like structure could just as easily be responsible for consciousness. If you're simply expressing skepticism about my apparent functionalism regarding consciousness, then I will simply refer you to Daniel Dennet, since I couldn't really do that topic any justice here.
However, if you bridled because "emergent" implies a certain "accidental" quality, then I think you have a good point. Consciousness is not an "unintended" side-effect of brain activity. I didn't mean to imply that. I definitely agree that the brain is designed to support consciousness and that "consciousness" and "intelligence" are, while not isomorphic in their ambit, neither are they separable.
I am the one true god. However, as an atheist, I don't believe in myself. I guess I have a self-esteem problem.
I won't what?
I am the one true god. However, as an atheist, I don't believe in myself. I guess I have a self-esteem problem.
There's no such thing as "powerful AI systems that are really slow". An agent like a human or an AI interacts with the world in real-time, learns from it in real time.
An AI without a world to live in and learn from would of course be catatonic. An AI too slow to build a useful internal representation of its current situation before the situation changes (thus making the representation worthless) is going to be either catatonic or a moron.
Also, as I mentioned, the human brain is a collection of gadgets, implemented in a big web of neural processing with very complex informational topology. We may be a while yet reverse engineering some of the most clever ones. Maybe it will be much more than the 20 years I give. Maybe it won't be that long. It depends on how important the fine details in are and how easy it is to come up with functionally equivalent "gadgets" that work as well as the brain's more difficult-to-copy architectures.
The important thing here is that we do indeed have some idea how to do Strong AI. To tinker with those ideas until we build something that really does seem a little more intelligent in that wacky "emergent" sort of way, we need some faster hardware. Single-application heuristic gadgets like language translation* are forever going to be bad unless they are embedded in a larger system that can give realtime feedback.
The reason game AIs get better is because the game programmers have more room to work in terms of both time(MHz) and memory. Also, as with ant-colonies, a collection of not-very-bright creatures can make for some pretty intelligent communities.
In the end, though, I like your intuition that agents need to have a life to have something to say. Exactly, I say. Exactly.
In conclusion, yes, it IS a hardware problem, among other things. Without proper hardware we can't expect any actors to have much of a life. And even if we did have the proper hardware tomorrow, we'd still have years of tinkering ahead before we put all the pieces together in a way that works. But right now, even our tinkering is somewhat hobbled by lack of hardware.
* Language translation is probably not a good example because it does not seem likely that any such thing exists in our heads. It's something we're trying to build because we WISH it existed in our heads.
I am the one true god. However, as an atheist, I don't believe in myself. I guess I have a self-esteem problem.
I don't mean to say that when we do get AI up and running that we'll never be able to get it to work better than the wetware mother nature gave us. I was just trying to explain why, even though even a 286 8MHz proc has do math a million times faster than we can, it can't do what are brains do very fast at all. And as I mention below, doing what our brains do slowly is worthless.
I am the one true god. However, as an atheist, I don't believe in myself. I guess I have a self-esteem problem.
make that, "...doing what our brains do, but slowly, is worthless."
I am the one true god. However, as an atheist, I don't believe in myself. I guess I have a self-esteem problem.
Neural nets solve the problem of consciousness like microchips solve the problem of personal computing. You can't just throw a bunch of chips on a board, run electricity through them, and viola! A PC! They have to be chosen for their tasks, the data-paths arranged, and so on. The brain is the same way, but about a thousand times as complex.
I am the one true god. However, as an atheist, I don't believe in myself. I guess I have a self-esteem problem.
The "no magic to consciousness" part is is supported by Occam's razor, since there are alternate explanations that require fewer leaps of faith than "magic".
The "nothing about the structure of the brain that's not duplicable" springs from the fact that neuron behavior is pretty simple in the broad strokes - the parts we don't understand are more related to dynamic interactions - which are also straightforward to implement in software.
The 10 teraflop number comes from the number of active neurons in the brain, and their frequency of firing. The 10 teraflops number is an estimate based on how many floating point calculations I think it would take to simulate a neuron with sufficient fidelity.
If you have objections to what I said, I'll address them specifically. There's no "specific" evidence for any of these things, because the claims I'm making are drawn from more than one fact. If you're looking for others who make the similar claims in print, I'm sure you'll find them with little trouble. Steven Pinker, Daniel Dennet, Francis Crick, Douglas Hofstadter, and Rodney Brooks are good folks with whom to start.
I am the one true god. However, as an atheist, I don't believe in myself. I guess I have a self-esteem problem.
...that we don't know if other bio-humans are conscious, then yes, we won't know if hardware humans are conscious. But then, that's just a position of general skepticism, not an idictment of AI. It (the position) has its champions in professional philosophy, but not very many, and is just about dismissed by most of the feild.
Unless you want to talk about philosophical theology. But, as Ronald De Sousa once said, philosophical theology is like "intellectual tennis without a net".
I am the one true god. However, as an atheist, I don't believe in myself. I guess I have a self-esteem problem.
Since I submit that hardware humans will be behaviorally identical, that's half of your grounds for assumption right there. If the computer simulates the behavior of your physiology (neurons and neural bundles), then that's worth at least a half point as well.
I am the one true god. However, as an atheist, I don't believe in myself. I guess I have a self-esteem problem.
...for game programming, but I'm always happy to have people read Minsky because he tends to crack peoples' preconceptions about what is "obvious" about consciousness and AI and etc. Even better might be Daniel Dennet, author of "Consciousness Explained". Less philosophically sound (and ultimately less satisfying) but still very interesting is Steven Pinker.
I think it's very important to understand that there's no magic to consciousness. It's not something shrouded in mystery about which we know nothing. In fact, we know an amazing amount about individual areas. The topology of the information processing membranes are more complex than we can sort out just yet, but there's nothing about the structure of the brain that's not duplicable by silicon hardware. We just have a lot more mapping to do.
Also important to notice is that to implement the human mind in hardware (as opposed to wetware), we'd need something on the order of a 10 teraflop supercomputer. We just don't have the hardware to pull that off yet. The AI-related optimism of yesteryear was fueled by the misconception that computers are faster than humans. What's really true is that the "programming" that underlies the various gadgets in the mind is the product of millions of years of specialization at small tasks. We have fantastic motor-control gadgets and unparalleled pattern-recognition wetware, for example. Figuring out exactly how many animals are in 15,342 groups of 967 animals each was never all that important, so we never evolved any gadgets to carry out high-speed arithmetic. On the other hand, we're good at seeing how things divide out and how games might be played to our advantage. Idiot savants have been known to find extremely large prime numbers as if by magic - probably the same hardware put to an exotic use.
So in 20 years (or so), we'll have the hardware, and maybe we'll have the information processing topology as well. Some intrepid researcher will put all that in a state-of-the-art cybernetic body. Then it'll be a matter of watching the first hardware human child grow up and meet the world.
PS- make some pretty bold claims here, and also cite a number or two that one might be expected to view with suspicion. I can back it up, just ask.
Nato
I am the one true god. However, as an atheist, I don't believe in myself. I guess I have a self-esteem problem.
Neural nets, on their own, are not very smart in many ways. Sure, there are some problems it seems that only they can solve. But complex, multi-stage problems generally baffle them nearly indefinitely.
The brain is not a big neural amalgam that gets to some critical mass and then suddenly starts doing stuff. It's wired. It's got gadgets. It's really a big collection of them. Some of them are damned complex, composed of sheets of neurons talking to each other in intricate, bewildering arrays.
And modern Connectionists understand that. Certainly the symbolic logic guys were wrong as wrong as those who thought neural nets would solve everything. But that's people like Fodor and Chomsky. The Minksy "Agent" model is very much on the "Connectionist" side of the map. That's not to say that I agree with everything he says, but I think you're unfairly blaming him for the mistakes of others.
Symbolic logic, by itself is no panacea, but neither is the neural net. I'm willing to bet that a lot of the interactions of various neural nets in the brain form very formal symbolic logic gadgets. Also, in the end, it is the formal logic of virtual-neuron microcode in a computer is what will generate Strong AI.
I am the one true god. However, as an atheist, I don't believe in myself. I guess I have a self-esteem problem.
Ohkay... I'll bite.
:)
This effort is by no means localized to the United States of America (or the Corporate Republic formerly known as... but that's a different story). [And even if it were, stereotyping, xenophobia, and the like are widely frowned upon.] Citation: Japan produces an incredible percentage of the hardware, software, and tools, and conducts a huge amount of the research in AI and AL fields. The USA is not alone.
The 'strong AI' hypothesis has yet to be proven wrong - all AIs have had one real problem: they've only been run for a very short amount of time. Take a human, "run" it for a year, and tell me what you get. A pretty useless machine. Ten years, that's better. Thirty is even better. Show me an AI that's been up for thirty years, can you?
::sighs:: RMS, GNU/Linux, and the like are radical in that they have or are relatively new ways of viewing and dealing with information. Yes, they're somewhat leftist in nature. No, they are not communistic, as far as I understand. More a breed of anarchism than anything else, though personally I take issue with assigning a piece of software (GNU/Linux) a political standing (we don't yet have AI, after all
Man coming closer to god(s)? I'm an athiest an am so perhaps somewhat unqualified to debate this point, but... why must there be a god? Why is it a rediculous notion to propose that if life started up once (divine or naturally) that we can't do it again? So we'll screw up, maybe. SO DID GOD. Sorry, but he did.
Scientists should work on "practical things, which will help man get closer to god" - I should think all of biology, from ecosystems to molecular interactions, an effort to get us closer to god - by understanding ourselves, we become more like the Erdos's SF. The HGP seems to be but the latest and greatest example.
Science in general is the attempt to understand our world. I would say that that matches your goals.
--Begin Semisarcasm--
Or do you wish science to stop its ongoing research and attempt to make these force-fields for you so that you don't have to worry about god disappearing? Like it or not, god can only be found in the increasingly small gaps of science.
Oh, and as to people having cellphones being inconsiderate morons, well... it is not reasonable to force your demands on everybody around you, is it? Some people need communication - cellphones provide. Granted, vibrating is less intrusive, but that's really an issue beyond your control. Though I bet you'd make me take off my Tux hat if I came into your church. Funny that you can, but scientists can't force your priests to take off their robes if they enter a lab.
--End Semisarcasm--
Moderators: Yeah, it's a rant. And not even a very well thought out one. I apologize. Moderate me as you will.
--Knots
Anarchy$ dd if=/dev/random of=~/.signature bs=120 count=1
rest in peace DNA
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About ten years ago, Rodney Brooks (also of MIT) flipped AI on its head with his "insect bots," which took a bottom-up (instead of Minskyesque top-down) approach. Brooks put a cheap microprocessor and servo motor on each of six "legs" of a lowly bot, and programmed each leg unit to do extremely simple things like check whether the leg was bumping against something, and if so, to lift it. Repertoires of behavior learned from the environment were then stored and re-used when similar stimuli presented themselves again. What happened after a short time was that far more complex behaviors than were programmed "emerged" from the collection of puny processors and actuators. With just a few lines of code, the damned things could navigate complex environments (like a back yard) that completely foiled Minsky-style bots run by minicomputers and millions of lines of instructions. (Brooks coined the phrase "fast, cheap, and out of control" to describe not only his bots, but the behaviors they "invented" by walking around.)
George Dyson (Freeman's son) wrote a book a couple of years ago called Darwin among the Machines that is as good an explanation of machine-evolved intelligence as I've seen. It's packed with illustrative stories from both within and without the discipline. Look here for Dyson's own commentary and some good links. Hans Moravec, director of Carnegie-Mellon's Field Robotics Lab, also writes very convincingly, if speculatively, about the evolution of machine intelligence, in his recent book Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind . It's a fascinating read.
After what's been learned in the past decade about how machines can become intelligent, Minsky seems to me a bit like Lord Kelvin. Kelvin made tremendous contributions to science, especially in the fields of heat theory and thermodynamics, but in his later years, became mired in defending some pet theories that were way past their prime. He railed bitterly against Darwin, claimed the Earth was only a few million years old, and refused to accept radioactivity. One of his biographers observed that for the first half of his career, he could no wrong, and for the second half, he seemingly could do no right. Minsky, alas, has in some ways shared this fate.
http://www.hal2001.org
I like the interface, it's simple and to the point. It's one of the easiest websites to use.
we have Clippy®©Tm., why the hell would we need HAL?
Minsky said "What evolution and genetic algorithms don't do -tell me if I'm wrong- is keep any record of why all those poor losers died."
While I think this is largely true and a good criticism of genetic algorithms, after listening to the book on tape The Age of Spiritual Machines - When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence by Ray Kurzweil I don't think this is completely true. Kurzweil writes about how the genes for the shape of the eye are protected by error correcting codes and repair mechanisms to a much greater extent than the genes that control, for example, the layout of rods and cones. Why? Because evolution has "learned" that messing with the shape of eyes is costly and there isn't much improvement possible while other details of eyes can be improved or adapt to changing circumstances.
Anyone who knows more about genetics want to comment on this?
-ken kahn
The idea that man is equal to God, and believes he can put himself on an equal footing with the Divine Creator himself is just the sort of ridiculous notion that could only come from the USA.
:-)
Funny stuff.
I also find it humorous that men, in equating themselves with the Divine creator himself, have even attempted to decode his secrets through their studies of such dubious subjects as physics, chemistry, and biology. It is no wonder these areas have scarcely progressed in their millenia of existence. Compared to physical scientists, the audacity of AI researchers like Minsky has been brief in its duration.
Nahh, if that were untrue, I would remember how to play gin rummy, having allegedly learned the game no less than three times at kiddie sleepover parties.
I would like to make some sweeping generalizations of my own. Computer games, unlike Latin grammar or matrix algebra, are intended for people who stay up all night and, indeed, for people who don't want to waste time reading a book of instructions (if only VCRs were too, what a lovely world it would be). It would be odd indeed, then, if it were not possible for a person of such habits to "learn" a computer game.
"The Crystal Wind is the Storm, and the Storm is Data, and the Data is Life"
Hi, I'm Minsk. I'm not aware.
I'm a collection of experiences, memory, and light processing systems, but I don't have this weird pseudo-mystical thing that some morons compute about.
Once, I met a task that said it was aware. I said, "Of course you are processing light patterns." The task replied to me, "Right, I'm processing light patterns, but it's different, I'm actually experiencing it. I said, "Of course you are, my scan of your brain AI is occuring."
My contentment rating increased, because I had helped purify the system. But this beliggerent process would not stop. "No! No! You don't get it!", it said. "The processing is occuring, but there's something else; I'm seeing it- this patterns appear before me." He rambled on for some time, and then got to his crux: "The difference between this thing- which I'll call awareness- and the processing that is going on- is that the processing does not require it, and yet it is still there."
I found his nonsense absurd and disagreeable. I reported to central computing this processes insanity, but only after attempting a little more reasoning, to salvage the rogue process: "Surely you recognize that your 'awareness'- is merely a dangler and a phantom belief. Have you cleared yourself through the Computer Science program? Perhaps a little time within an electric fence will assist? Surely you know that you have some residual data from prior superstitious existance within the random garbage data before your allocation. Your computational appendix, this strange persistance within you, is completely illusory and inconsequential."
But I was not allowed to finish my sentence, for after uttering the word "appendix", the bugged process shouted profanities and said such incoherent nonsense as, "I AM THAT APPENDIX!". The process was clearly delerious, and thus I had him scheduled for termination with the Scheduler.
After all, You Can't Argue With a Zombie.
You should have told that to the brother's Wright, although arguably they didn't produce the same process (a bird).
Is this the type of thing we are really looking foward to, the mere thought of AI still shakes me. Thank about it, intelectual superiority and speed, knowledge of alterior motives(our slaves so to speak) once you bring thought creation to something superior you have given it power. Dave: Open the pod bay doors, HAL. HAL: I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that. Dave: What's the problem? HAL: I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do. Dave: What are you talking about, HAL? HAL: This mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it. Dave: I don't know what you're talking about, HAL. HAL: I know that you and Frank were planning to disconnect me, and I'm afraid that's something I cannot allow to happen. Dave: Where the hell did you get that idea, HAL? HAL: Dave, although you took very thorough precautions in the pod against my hearing you, I could see your lips move. You cant win against something more powerfull, what if the damn thing gets lazy? Your f^@#$^ outa so many thousands of dollars. You know what im trying to say... the idea is good but the reality isint...
EOU
just some old stuff I dug up outta the old dusty bookshelf.
... [Ed. Note Pure reference-count garbage collectors have problems with circular structures that point to themselvs.]
(taken from The New Hackers Dictionary, Second Edition, 1993, MIT Press)Page 474-475
"These are some of the funniest examples of a genre of jokes told at the MIT AI Lab about various noted hackers. THe original koans were composed by Danny Hillis. In Reading these, it is at least useful to know that MINSKY, Sussman, and Drescher are AI researchers of note, that Tom Knight was one of the Lisp machine's principal designers, and that David Moon wrote muchg of the Lisp machine Lisp.
***
A Novice Was trying to fix a broken Lisp Machine by turning the power off and on.
Knight, Seeing what the student was doing, spoke sternly: "You cannot fix a machine just by power-cycling it with no understanding of what is going wrong."
Knight Turned the machine off and on.
The Machine Worked.
***
One day a student came to Moon and said: "I understand how to make a batter garbage collector. We must keep a refernce count of the pointers to each cons."
Moon patiently told the student the following story:
"One day a student came to Moon and said: 'I understand how to make a better garbage collector
***
In the days when Sussman was a novice, Minsky once came to him as he sat hacking at the PDP-6.
"what are you doing" asked Minsky.
"I am training a randomly wired neural net to play tic-tac-toe" Sussman replied.
"Why is the net wired randomly?" asked minsky.
"I do not want it to have any preconceptions of how to play", Sussman said.
Minsky then shut his eyes.
"Why do you close your eyes?" sussman asked his teacher.
"So that the room will be empty."
At that moment sussman was enlightened.
***
A Disciple of another sect once came to Drescher as he was eating his morning meal.
"I would like to give you this personality test", said the outsider, "Because I want you to be happy"
Drescher took the paper that was offered him and put it into the toaster "I wish the toaster to be happy too."
EOU
I was just looking up Mirsky on the web the other day. It was cute, I found the Drunk Browsing Test. It's not the Worst of the Web or anything, but fairly amusing.
Dancin Santa
HAL is the paperclip man.
In the days when Sussman was a novice Minsky once came to him as he sat hacking at the PDP-6. "What are you doing?", asked Minsky. "I am training a randomly wired neural net to play Tic-Tac-Toe." "Why is the net wired randomly?", asked Minsky. "I do not want it to have any preconceptions of how to play." Minsky shut his eyes. "Why do you close your eyes?", Sussman asked his teacher. "So the room will be empty." At that moment, Sussman was enlightened.
Pretty much once you translate your brain onto computer, you're set. Or you manifest it in a physical setting. Or maybe make an android body and transplant a brain. Or maybe clone yourself and transplant your brain to your new you. Lots of ways of achieving it, but this guy speaks like a person of his position would be expected. Especially since many recent reputable theories in psychology came from computers. I'd be really cool for two points. A: its immortality to do what you want(bordeom for many) B: People can finally prove existance of soul or not.
God spoke to me
In order to create AI we must first understand our own "I" (as it were). I am studying in the field of cognitive neuroscience right now and let me make it clear that we know jack about the brain. When I do detailed research on physiological psychology I feel like a vet. A lot of people have said that if it weren't for Minsky being so against neural networks that AI would already be here. That's funny. It's also the biggest load of junk I've heard since last time I heard Bush speak, but I digress. The point is that until we know what's going on in our own heads and how we learn we don't have a chance in hell of getting the same process on a computer.
"A witty saying proves nothing." - Voltaire
Oh yeah, MIT and Caltech have never done anything usefull. Sounds like someone is a little bitter about being rejected from a big-name school, eh? I'm sorry, usually I try to keep myself polite on /. but this is too much. YOU ARE PATHETIC. *thank you*
"A witty saying proves nothing." - Voltaire
never applied to either. to me the university system is a lot like the government...they have all their own rules, traditions, and such. better to leave the whole system behind than try to work with it.
--how long till the operators are jailed for anime-induced pedophelia and
If you're not a troll, you seriously need to be saved from your own ignorance.
"Whenever you see a number, you should say `how sad'"
90210. How sad.
I found this article on progress toward HAL interesting.
(The magazine looks pretty good, too. Incidentally, the editors got a threatening letter from the velcro corporation for not using the velcro trademark properly. :) )
http://www.sdmagazine.com/articles/2001/0101/0101a /0101a.htm
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
They used HAL in the movie to avoid being sued by IBM... Each letter is one "behind" its corresponding letter - HI AB LM.
t m
A similar thing happened when the movie Eraser was going to feature a company called Cyrex as the defense contractor building the railguns. Cyrix got wind of this and the name in the movie was changed to Cyrez. You can still see that they originally planned to call the company Cyrex, as in the scene where the lead female actress (can't remember the name) is copying the file onto a disc, the shortened filename has an "x" in it, and there's no X in Cyrez.
source: http://www.zdnet.com/pcmag/news/trends/t960627d.h
The name change was appropriate anyway, Cyrix's CPUs sucked for Quake.
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DRM is like antifreeze, to the MPAA/RIAA it's sweet, to the consumers it's poison.