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A.I. and the Future
The guesses about the future above are as good as yours or mine. But Spielberg's haunting and provocative movie A.I. has opened a window into human consciousness and the moral implications of artificial intelligence.
This window is unlikely to last very long. The next Monica Lewinsky scandal is always around the corner, ready to fuel the Big Media machine and distract the public. Given the short attention span of Americans in particular to scientific issues like this (genomics, copyright, intellectual property, fertility research, alleged global warming), it's worth beginning a discussion on A.I. Where is it going? Which vision of A.I. and the future do you think is closest to reality? Will machines make us uncreasingly dependent on them, as the Unabomber suggests? Will they take us over, as George Orwell believed?
Or, as M.I.T. computer scientist and artificial intelligence researcher Kurzweil suggests, will humans and machines -- especially miniaturized, increasingly powerful computing machines -- simply become an integral part of out bodies and lives? Kurzweil envisions the distinctions between these two "species" and entities (biological and digital) rapidly blurring.
It says a lot about our willingness to think seriously about technology that no national politician has ever addressed these issues in a meaningful way. But a murderous student of technology has:
Unabomber Kaczynski wrote in his infamous manifesto:
"As society and the problems that face it become more and more complex and machines become more and more intelligent, people will let machines make more of their decisions for them, simply because machine-made decisions will bring better results than man made ones. Eventually a stage may be reached at which the decisions necessary to keep the system running will be so complex that human beings will be incapable of making them intelligently. At that stage the machines will be in effective control. People won't be able to turn the machines off, because they will be so dependent on them that turning them off would amount to suicide."
Reading that excerpt, it occurred to me -- not for the first time -- "What a shame this demented creature chose to express himself through the maiming and murder of innocent people." Because he sure has a point.
i wish someone who actually knew something real about AI, at the VERY least had a degree in csci, not tabloid journalism, would write something here to set the record straight. its like katz wrote this after a bad dream or something. get a grip man!
What about an android sex doll (think Blade Runner's replicants) that resembles a 13 year old girl? No children are harmed, used, nor required to produce such an item. If you believe otherwise, please list who. Why should such be illegal? However, you know there will be baseless, "moral", and irrational cries to outlaw such. What if a place that exists today like Read Doll which makes lifesized, sex dolls from steel and silicone that resemble humans in appearance, size, and weight made a "lolita model". Who is harmed?
"I'll point to computer viruses as the hackneyed example: What could have been a terrifying constant danger has become no more than a nuisance. Why? Because there are very intelligent people working in the field, and there are such people because there is a demand for protection."
And, um, because if you write a virus and release it, you'll most likely get caught and go to prison.
Just a thought.
Man, I never knew Enlightenment and AI are so closely intertwined... Raster must be trying to take over the world!
I'd like to know where he got the number for the human brain's ability.
The difference is that every tool until now has only done something that a human could already do, only better. Physical labor? Lever, power tools, cranes. Traveling? Car, airplane, spaceship. Use our senses? Media and communication technologies. An AI will be the first tool that is capable of doing something that it was not explicitly told to do by a human supervisor, and that has never happened before.
As emergent systems become more complex, "programming" their thoughts will become more and more difficult. Eventually, the three laws would have to be inserted via some form of psychological conditioning, the same way humans are given equivalent unbreakable rules.
Of course there's nothing that stops the robot from learning how his own brain works and hacking the laws out of himself.
okay, so this was intended as a joke - but who GIVES A SHIT if the machines don't have feelings?
I think it's really an academic question as to whether "intelligent machines" will arise, or whether they will manifest the phenomenon we refer to as consciousness.
We already have machines that are starting to do things - that make this question moot. The "music composing" machine that fooled the music experts. Deep Blue. Etc.
It's already happening, and it's inevitable.
Are these machines conscious? No, but it doesn't matter. To us. They are tools. Nothing more. Can an army tank be accidentally set to drive forward mindlessly without a human driver, and run over buildings and cars and cows? Yes, of course, and the same thing can and will happen with "intelligent machines" as well. It's inevitable. Especially as their workings become so complex as to be unpredictable, even to their designers. (hell, I'm supporting software that does that already).
Is humanity in danger? Of course. We've been in danger of extinction from our unnatural tinkering from the first time Oog started a campfire near some dry grass.
Why all the hemming and hawing about it now? Because it sells books, and tickets to movie theaters, and gets venture capital for companies working on "AI".
I personally believe that natural (or supernatural) human consciousness will never be duplicated by a machine. Others believe that one day, we'll have the mastery over the physical universe that will permit that. Frankly, that's not an important question, because outwardly, "intelligent machines" will be indistinguishable from conscious beings long before we might actually reproduce human consciousness (if that were possible).
Outwardly indistinguishable.
Long before that, either we'll figure out adequate safeguards for such machines, or we'll be the victim of a stupid accident, and become another species on the very long list of extinct species. No biggie. It happens.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Humorous answer:
Douglas Adams said that 20% of your brain was useful and the rest was made up of penguins. Therefore you only need 168Tb, plus a small amount to represent the idea of a penguin. (That's in one of the Dirk Gently books.)
Serious answer:
You assume that in order for something to appear intelligent (in human terms) it needs to work in the same way as the human brain. This is not true. Although neural nets could allow us to understand more about the brain they are not the only (and may not be the right) way of simulating intelligence.
You're missing a very important one that was created R Giskar (I'm not sure of the english name) and taken over and exercised by R. Daniel Ilivaw: (which forces a rewrite of the 3 laws you mention)
Zero: A robot must not harm, or through inaction, allow to come to harm Humanity.
One: A robot must not harm, or through inactivity allow to come to harm, a human being, as long as it does not conflict with law zero.
Two: A robot must obey all commands given to it by a human being except when these conflict with the first law.
Three: A robot must preserve itself at all times unless by doing so it contradicts the first two laws.
So, assuming this is programmed right, the law Zero could most-certainly be applied to kill as many humans as required for humanity to progress, and most-certainly allow AI to take over humans in every aspect of their lifes.
The foundation books by Asimov illustrates this quite clearly. The master puppeteer is an AI robot throughout thousands of years. For the better of humanity, of course.
Karma karma karma karma karmeleon: it comes and goes, it comes and goes.
It's just hype, not even techno.
Some AI researchers have made wildly optimistic predictions about how quickly AI would advance. They have been mostly wrong so far. We just barely got a computer program that can beat a person in chess - and that's by use of brute computational power and some very clever programming by people.
We still don't really understand what this thing called "intelligence" really is. How do you expect to solve a problem without understanding it?
The idea of "evolution" of machine is just a cop out. We don't know how to create a something, so we just put things in a room and how they will create themselves and in only 50 years.
Good grief! Biological evolution took several billions of years and it occured as a massively parallel computation (this view is stolen from Stanilaw Lem).
Just think. Programming computers is essentially engineering. To solve problems engineers need some science that explains how things work, otherwise they just hack (and sometimes create working systems). But without science the engineer is as good as an alchemist.
Now consider that Newton figured out the science of howto fly to the moon in the 18th century and took took engineers over 200 years to actually build a machine that could do it.
Why do you think it's possible to create an "intelligent" machine, when we can't even agree on the definition of the problem...
...richie - It is a good day to code.
it should have been created in 1982 iirc, same year that susan calvin was supposed to be born...
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"Science will win because it works." - Stephen Hawking
hum, you forgot the law Zero
0. A robot may not injure humanity or, through inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.
also did you see what happen at R Daneel Olivaw? he becomes like a megalo, and in fact rulez the whole galaxy and humankind, himself.
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"Science will win because it works." - Stephen Hawking
To be honest... first I don't think that in a true AI situation that these rules would apply. And second, there will be people like my children who grow up and may create an AI driven robot... and who after carefully thinking them out, threw away Asimov's rules as nothing better than a tool to inslave a sentient being.
Asimov's notions of AI/robots comes from an age where if you weren't white and male, you didn't count, and the future would be full of "ATOMIC" things so why the hell would a robot do any better at having a shot at sentient independance.
For crying out loud, humans aren't going to last forever... Our best chance to pass on the "spirit of man" may be to eventually merge with the machines to increase longevity, create an artificial life form that can evolve.
Or a Wand of Enlightenment. That'll work too.
All this stuff about leaving behind the bits controlling bodily functions and sex drive and things is a bit naive I think. I'm guessing that all of these messy sensory inputs and systems are necessary for intelligence and consciousness. I mean, if all you think intelligence is is a set of well defined rules linking together a set of ideas, there's Cyc, which I don't think anybody thinks is intelligent.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
The general theme of the movie was how can a robot be created to act like a little boy. Human nature and being human (unfortunately) can occasionally contradict the rules above.
But think about it - did David knowly harm anyone? At the time the harmful actions were performed - he didn't realize his actions were harmful. Which reflected the intelligence of a little boy.
Judging from the other articles under this topic, it doesn't seem to be used very consistently.
On the other hand, was anyone else jealous momentarily to see that Rasterman is going to get an EVA? If anyone can save Tokyo-3, it's him.
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
You forgot:
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
It's really nice to see a Katz story which is actually shorter than the Unabomber Manifesto. Way to go!
Cheers,
I tried using Alice. I logged in as "Zzyzx." Alice asked me if that was from a movie. "No, it's a road in California." "Her" response started, "Why so negative?"
Are we EVER going to move away from Eliza responses?
And then it got even worse. Next screen:
me: what do you mean, Why so negative
Alice: Zzyzx, "Is that from your favorite movie" What did I mean by it?
Who exactly is going to be fooled by this?
Bit of a problem here. You seem to be assuming that the machines would have to be self-willed, inner-directed entities to "take over the world". Not so. Consider a small subset: Air-traffic controller.
... and the insurance companies will make sure that they do! Again, no intention is needed on the part of the computers. This needs a lot more intelligence than the simple case of the airplane, but nothing that we would call sentience.
20 years ago this was a dominantly human directed process, though radar, radio, etc. were already totally necessary components. Incrementally over the years more has been automated. In the last couple of years steps have started towards having planes automatically dodge each other. They already pretty much navigate from known origin to known destination. Once planes keep track of each other, and landing is automated (probably technically doable today, but not yet acceptable) then we move towards the stage where the pilot is just there as an emergency backup, who probably wouldn't be able to do anything anyway (the instruments display via the computer, active flight depends on a computer to manipulate the wing controls, etc.). Maybe he'd be able to reboot it.
This process proceeds without any intention on the part of the machines, but it causes the entire flight experinece to be totally dominated by these same machines. No A.I. needed, beyond the ability to dodge, navigate, and land. (These are either already here, or just about.) And social acceptance, which is the sticky point.
Watching drivers, I have frequently speculated how much safety would improve if computers were driving. Not really practical yet, except on specially prepared test tracks, but slow steps in that direction are visible, if you look for them. Again, a bit part of the limitation is social acceptance. Without that, any automated car will be 100% responsible for any accident that occurs, regardless of the circumstances. So nobody works very hard on developing it. (And it is a tricky problem, no question!) But eventually it will be here. Then the computers will have taken over the cars
Caution: Now approaching the (technological) singularity.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
The lack of a desire to might stop that.
So much of the argument is a projection of our own purposes onto a computer. This is a bit wierd, as I find it quite difficult to get a computer to see things the way I do on purpose. To assume that it would happen by accident strains credulity.
Caution: Now approaching the (technological) singularity.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
I don't think that the problem is that the computers being used aren't fast enough or don't have enough RAM.
I think the fundamental problem is that we don't know what intelligence is, and so are, understandably, finding simulating it quite difficult.
People have been saying since the fifties that, in 10 or 20 years, we'll have sufficient computing power for a machine to become intelligent. Well, I have more computing power than those people could have dreamt of sitting under my desk right now. It didn't turn out to solve the problem.
What AI research needs is plenty of "RI" to crank through the conceptual problems too, not just the biggest supercomputers money can buy.
Cheers,
Tim
It's official. Most of you are morons.
As someone pointed out in the A.I. review, some of the questions of malicious machine intent can be solved by Asimov's Laws of Robotics:
1. A robot must not harm, or through inactivity allow to come to harm, a human being.
2. A robot must obey all commands given to it by a human being except when these conflict with the first law.
3. A robot must preserve itself at all times unless by doing so it contradicts the first two laws.
A.I. didn't reflect this very well - David put humans at risk at several points. This gives an inaccurate, overly frightening picture of the intelligent machines we would likely create - it somewhat serves as FUD.  "Oh no, the robots will only act in their own best interests, and we'll die."
0x0D 0x0A
AI research is in such a poor state these days I have little hope that we will see the "Rise of AI" anytime soon. Look around. The bigest computers are not being used for AI reasearch they are being used for Weather, Atomic Bombs, and other hairy math problems. I wonder what type of AI we might see if "I hate to do this" a few big Beowolf Clusters where being used for AI research.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
But Spielberg's haunting and provocative movie A.I.
Didn't Katz say it was a POS last week? Heh, Katz reread last weeks column before writing this weeks!
And to answer your question.
Intersections used to have a policeman to direct traffic. Now we have automated lights. Ever tried to get around a big city when the lights go out? It's tough, but he policemen on the corners try to keep things going.
Oh, and what do people do after a hurricane? They cook on grills, and live in tents.
My point? People adjust to the point of least resistance. We rely on machines and automation because it is easier. If/when the machines die, we go back to doing the old/hard way. It sucks for a while until we get used to it, but such is life. I feel an undertone of "we'll all die out after the machines are gone" in your column. Let me reply simply, "No, we'll just adapt and start inventing new machines."
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
..just what does this have to do with Enlightenment?
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Check out my blackbox styles
If you want to truly 'protect' humanity from this technology, get a PhD in a relevant field and start doing serious research. Because that's the only place where you are going to be able to institute controls, at the development level. And by control I do not mean creating Ethics Police, I mean developing techniques that stop problems before they start, or at the very least, clean up minor messes before they become serious threats.
I'll point to computer viruses as the hackneyed example: What could have been a terrifying constant danger has become no more than a nuisance. Why? Because there are very intelligent people working in the field, and there are such people because there is a demand for protection.
Also, where does it say that humans and computers fusing is a bad thing? Explain to me what is so special about a given classification of elements. So what if my far future descendants make significant use of inorganic chemistry in their physiology? Big whoop. I'd still call them kin.
"Avast! Prepare for the rodgering!" THWACK! "Arrr.. me nards.."
David Kaczynski, Teds' brother, was profiled in the Washington Post Magazine on Sunday.
Best Slashdot Co
It was resoundingly bashed by a number of contributors to a special issue of the journal Psyche (which is on the web somewhere) - but Roger came back, undettered, with a rebuttal to all of them. Very technical stuff.
Female Prison Rape in NY
A trend per se does not an argument make.
Anyway, computers still can't play Go very well. compared to good human players.
Female Prison Rape in NY
The first artificial intelligences would probably need a lot less computation power than that. Not being real organisms, they wouldn't have to concern themselves with the biological systems we do (digestive, cardiovascular, endocrine, nervous, reproductive, limbic, movement/navigation, etc, etc).
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
You need to read Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies by Douglas R. Hofstadter. It explains a few "experiments" he lead and other Farg programs. Table Top is very interesting, and there's a recap on Copycap, if you read already know about the project.
Cheers!
I don't think machines will be making any moral or ethical decisions any time soon.
That seems to me more like a point in favor of the machines...
What AI research needs is plenty of "RI" to crank through the conceptual problems too, not just the biggest supercomputers money can buy.
I could not agree more. IMO, the most exciting research in AI right now is the work being done at MIT by Rodney Brooks and his students and colleagues. Dr. Brooks is also keeping a close eye on progress in computational neuroscience and I expect a few conceptual breakthroughs to come from that sector in the not too distant future.
The traditional AI community has conviced itself that AI will come gradually. They're in it for the long haul. I completely disagree with that assessment. I am convinced (as is Dr. Brooks) that there is something important that we are not seeing. Once we see it, AI will be upon us like a flood, almost overnight.
The basic problem with AI machines is lack of CPU power. To explain....
The human brain has 100,000,000,000 neurons. Each neuron has an average of 1,000 connections to other neurons. It is probably most accurate to think of the connections as being the active components. The cycle time is 30ms.
So you can do about 3e15 computations per second. The typical new desktop these days is about 3e9 instructions per second. So the gap is a factor of about 1,000,000. This gap should close in about 20-30 years, assuming Moore's law continues.
I know this is rough but it does give the flavour of the problem.
Current computers have the processing power of an insect brain, and they are mostly about that smart.
I think computer scientists have done pretty well given the lack of CPU power that is available. A lot of things that computers have trouble with such as vision procession are handled in the brain by brute force - many neurons in parallel doing lots of simple repetitive things.
Assuming Moore's law continues, we are going to see a dramatic closing of the gap between silicon and carbon based intelligence in our life times.
AI is the field to be in over the next few years. Having the processing power is not enough. There will be many theoretical questions to answer before we can build truly smart machines.
First, shouldn't we be worried the Jon is quoting the unabomber? Well, maybe not. He's probably just going to that place in Redmond. ;)
Seriously, I don't think it is a 100% issue. There will always be degrees of exceptance--even in the techie world. I don't have a cellphone, nor do I want one, but I know fellow techies that have to have the latest version. Look at the Amish. For those of you unfamiliar with the Amish, the don't use technology at all (or in some cases very rarely). The use a horse and buggy to go places. This is the complete opposite of the person who has to have the latest technology to play with. A vast majority of the people will fall in between these two extremes.
I don't think we can call AIs a species--if that is what Jon was doing because I am unsure of his intensions.
I think there will be some who are ruled by machines, and there will be those who rule the few machines they have. Given the diversity in humanity, I think both of the cases Jon mentions will happen at the same time to varing degrees. There is not a whole lot of times when something is 100%. I for one refuse to become a cyborg (or borg in Star Trek speak) with machines integrated into me.
At the next eco-hypocrisy-meeting, count the private jets used to get to the meeting. Should be interesting to see that
There's no doubt about it: it's an Angel. Prepare to launch the Rasterman.
Could someone please explain to me what Godel, Escher, Bach is all about? I've heard about it, but I would like to know what the theme or main point of it is. Thanks.
(hehehe)
I think you may have it backward. Your reasoning assumes that the brain works like a computer, and each neuron is a process that takes up a given amount of RAM and a given number of CPU cycles. I think you could equally claim that each neuron is itself a processor, so you have 100 billion processors running in parallel, rather than 100 billion processes tended to by one CPU. And even that is obviously wrong, since it doesn't take into account how adjacent firing neurons affect each other, how a memory seems to be stored holographically throughout the brain rather than sequentially, etc. If true A.I. (whatever that is) is possible at all, it isn't going to run on a Pentium or the like.
Well, I don't know about you, but the thought of Clippy with its big dumb eyes behind THE button....whew. Scary.
120 characters isn't enough to explain it.
Not so much a link as an address. But I digress...
You bothered to point out that the link was just the address....So, why didn't you post the link ?
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Moderator's essentials
"Ghost in the Machine"
I don't think I'd like to have my body hacked.
Thank you.
We should take care not to make the intellect our god; it has powerful muscles, but no personality. -Einstein Hm... we should take care not to make the muscle our god; it has powerful personality, but no intellect.
And yet, humans are still on top. We have not yet reached the point where the creation is greater than the creator, and it's unlikely that we ever will -- As machines take over certain mundane aspects of human life, we move on and put our time into other things.
Got Rhinos?
I don't think machines will be making any moral or ethical decisions any time soon. I think you tryed to say that between the lines, but didn't out right say it.
Money managment, paperwork, etc.. there things are half done by machines, this will simply continue. However a real (and unpredictable) breakthrough would be a machine that makes any kind of moral decision.
-Jon
this is my sig.
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
The Anti-Blog
Agreed.
We're on the road to Tycho.
Speaking to the former point, however, you remind me a bit of David Pearce's thinking (which he calls the Hedonistic Imperative); if we can recreate consciousness, surely we can leave out the ability to suffer. I said to him, as I say to you, it may not be possible. And I mean, fundamentally, impossible. You are treading over interesting ground with respect to fundamental aspects of consciousness and subjective experience that we do not understand yet. If it were possible to systematically prevent suffering, however, I would tend to agree with him that by allowing suffering when we could choose not to, we would be cruel. Regardless, I am certain that we, as a people, would do it anyway.
I define the notion of "soul" as the idea that there is some agency beyond the brain which is responsible for our consciousness, our decisions, or our identity. I would hold that this has nothing to do with "good" and "evil," a dichotomy which is arbitrary and based, as much as we have a species-wide consensus on the subject, on our instincts, our genetic heritage.
We're on the road to Tycho.
I will go farther to say that I believe our machine consciousnesses will do what we make them to do, just as we do what evolution requires of a successful species.
We're on the road to Tycho.
I believe that the soul is sentimental superstition, and that the notion of human consciousness as somehow fundamentally "unique," "indomitable," or "unassailable" is insecure and adolescent. I have no doubt in my mind that we can and will make machines "in the likeness of a man's mind," and that these systems will, whether we grant it or not, be every bit as "human" in their thoughts as I am - they have my sympathy in advance.
We will, of course, learn a great deal of very important and revolutionary things about ourselves along the way. I believe human consciousness, not genetics or space, is our next great frontier, and we may see revolutionary developments there in our lifetimes. Cognitive science is a remarkably well-funded academic discipline, and has been the subject of massive and relatively quiet investment for several decades.
However, right now it's mired in very un-sexy pursuits, needling sea slugs and flies and mice, and we're still hammering away at nerve cell biology, chemistry, and physics. Pure theory of consciousness is pretty much at a standstill, after the great claims and great failures of the computer science-based AI folks, who showed pretty uniformly that, while they could do a lot of neat tricks, they had little fundamentally in common with the operation of human or animal intelligence, thereby at least giving us a slightly better definition of it.
And, in the meantime, we have "luminaries" who love to sit around in masturbatory celebration of what the future will be like, although this has the feeling to me a of a popular science magazine speculating about how we'll all travel around in air cars and eat food pills and vacation in space. It has nothing to do with the real implications of AI, and after the 100th or so run through the science media grinder, these tired old speculations are poor company whether they turn out to be true or not.
We're on the road to Tycho.
I know.. It's modded up as funny, but I really wasn't kidding. Much.
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PaxTech
All movements for social change begin as missions, evolve into businesses, and end up as rackets.
Yeah, the one good thing about those Packard Bells is that you could intimidate them into working..
But try that with an IBM and you'll get nowhere... IBMs need to be cajoled or bribed into working. Just say loudly, "Well, I *was* going to double the memory on this machine, but since it won't boot..". Works every time.
Compaqs, however, require a judicious application of precussive maintenance. They just won't listen to reason at all.
Also, NEVER NEVER NEVER screw the case cover back on before testing the card / memory you just changed. This shows the machine that you lack humility, and it will of course refuse to work. Turn it on and test it, THEN replace the cover. This shows the machine the proper respect.
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PaxTech
All movements for social change begin as missions, evolve into businesses, and end up as rackets.
Percussive mantainence is dangerous on machines that keep the bios on a hard drive partition. Which is sort of like leaving the parachute in the aircraft hangar. Or, as the old Marine Corps cadence goes : "Running through the jungle with my M16 - I'm a dumb mother****er, I forgot my magazine." =)
I'm a sysadmin. Duh. But let me tell you, Skippy, I bite those machines back HARD.
It's about self-reference in arts, language, logic and mathematics. Or about self-reference in language, any language that is structured enough. But, as a book on the musicological aspects of the Art of the Fugue it is pretty dense, since you have to untangle the mathematical references that illuminate on the structural aspects of Bach's opus. As a book on Escher's art it is rather slim, amounting to more or less twenty smallish, black and white pictures. As a book on Gödel's Incompletness Theorem it is rather too longwinded, because once you understand the "main trick" (quining a coded sentence), the rest comes easily enough by a diagonalization argument; but GEB explains and explains and dissects and dissects and makes a lot of too little.
And despite all, somehow the book manages to be quite good: it is funny, entertaining and quite illuminating. After reading it I have come to love Bach more than I ever did.
Of course, it would have been a far better book had the turtle not been such a wise-cracker, and Acchiles not such a dimwit.
"Ted Kaczynski predicts that humanity will easily drift into a position of such dependence on intelligent machines that it will ultimately have little choice but to accept all the machines' decisions"
I'm at the mercy of my Windows box at work when it BSOD's or my Macs at home when I get an out-of-memory error.
If I remember right, Searle was one of the original advocates of the position that computers could never play chess. Oops. I would not choose to quote him as an authority.
More to the point, as Kurzweil points out in his book, every time someone has set up a target and said that computers can't do that (e.g. computers can't write poetry), someone has programmed a computer to do it. Clearly the trend favors the notion that one day we will have intelligent machines.
The brain's a horribly inefficient jumble of neurons which gets away by throwing massive parallelism at any processing needs.
Remember, the only way neurons computate is by variating their firing rate. Granted, this gives you relatively analogue approach instead of a binary one.
However, much of especially "auxiliary" functions are actually boolean in nature, built from neural nets. For example, there *is* a function which recognizes a horisontal line and another for vertical ones. Neat part is, of course, that the end product of the two functions are combined in analogue manner so if you have something a little horizontal and a little bit more vertical, you have angle of the line.
Result? Brain's really good for motoric stuff and interacting with "real" world but very bad for logic and abstract thought. AI's strengths should be exactly reversed.
So likely our machine overlords would use humans as robotic shells and take over the cognitive functions by an API extension..
Besides, reproduction is *fun*!
I'm a grad student in computational neuroscience, and I just want to point out that AI is not about simulating the brain. That's what we do. AI is about abstracting out the principles that underlie "intelligence" and programming them into a computer. Sort of a top-down approach. AI people will often use so-called "neural nets" and other optimization procedures, but do not confuse this with actually modeling the brain. Of course, all lines are blurry in this kind of work. That said, it's also entirely pointless to draw comparisons between computers and the brain at this level. This is partly because the physiological substrates of computation in the brain are not entirely understood even now (depending who you ask), but also because the brain does things in a way that's best for the brain, not most efficient for a digital computer. For example, if the visual system wants to do some sort of image processing in the spatial frequency domain, it effectively calculates a fourier transform using millions of cells, each exhibiting some spatial frequency tuning. To actually model this process with reasonable biophysical accuracy would bring any supercomputer to its knees, yet functionally equivalent calculations could be carried out on a fast PC. The point is, making computers fast enough to model a whole brain accurately in real time will probably not happen during our lifetimes. However, if one could figure out what the different parts of the brain were doing and perform functionally equivalent computations in silicon, we could do it. That's the goal of AI, not realistic modeling of the nervous system.
Uh, what does this article have to do with the linux desktop Enlightenment?
Therefore, the AI machines we build will run a Microsoft OS, and with some version of Microsoft software.
Thus, if the AI machines get out of hand, we just have to wait for them to BSOD, which won't take all that long, and we can go kick the crap out of their lifeless hulks!
==============
Department of Homeland Security: Removing the rights real patriots fought and died for since 2001
I have trouble buying into Kurzwiel's vision. In order for his ideas to be possible, one of the two things must be true:
1. An assumption that human intelligence is a deterministic system. I strongly disagree with this from a philisophical perspective.
2. Computers will no longer be deterministic, which really means they are not computers anymore (or a turing machine).
Much of his crediability seems to come from his previous predictions of AI advancements from years ago, such as the Deep Blue victory in chess. Chess, however, is at its root is purely deterministic with a fairly limit set of possible outcomes and a problem set where there are no hidden preconditions. This is a far cry from the types of intelligences he presumes possible in Age of Spiritual Machines.
Roger Penrose (a fairly reputable English mathematician) has a theory that the human mind is non-deterministic because of quantum physics. He has several good books worth reading:
The Emperor's New Mind
Shadows of the Mind
Hmm, I'm not sure where the 'quantum bit in the vicinity of your head' hypothesis came from, but if that is the basis of your understanding of quantum physics, I can see why you do not think the theory holds any water. No, I am not prepared to defend that hypothesis.
Even if you apply a non-deterministic input to a computer program (such as your microphone), the computer process itself is still deterministic. Given the same initial conditions, it will always come to the same result. Just because the initial conditions are not repeatable does not mean the process is no longer deterministic.
Also, modern AI algorithms don't really come close to approximating human pattern recognition abilities. There are certainly vast improvements that can be made and I am not sure why you would make the assertion that they "work fine".
I'm curious as to why you would label me as a "/.er" but preclude yourself from that label.
You admit you do not know your "QM", yet you dismiss any relevance it may have to Cognitive Science. I get the feeling that you do not intend on reviewing the Penrose books I provided links for and would like me to present the argument. I will not be able to argue Penrose's view point as well as he can obviously, but I will attempt to give you the general idea.
There is evidence that human intelligence has accomplished tasks that are not possible by deterministic systems, such as a computer. The most notable of these tasks is proving that a specific set of tiles can cover an infinite plane, but never with any symmetry. These non-periodic tiling patterns are often referred to as Penrose Tiles . Penrose has proven the tiles will cover an infinite surface without a repeating pattern, yet a computer could never prove this with certainty (unless maybe you hooked up a mic to it...). For a detailed description of the proof, I will have to refer you to Penrose's books (I'm sure it is all with in your conceptual grasp, as you are used to "hard math & science" in your graduate studies). It is all fantastic evidence of the prowess the human mind is capable of that escapes the potential of a computer, no matter how big or fast it is.
Quantum may not be the reason behind this non-determinism, but it seems like the most likely explanation. Other explanations tend towards meta-physical or spirtual type things, which are often frowned upon in the scientific community.
I am not familiar with "Connectionist", "Perceptron", "Support Vector Machines", "Graphplan", nor "XFRM". I'm sure other "/.ers" that are bored enough to peruse our discussion don't know what they are either. Please explain what their respective domains are. I certainly believe that computers can out perform humans in some intelligence tests, but pattern recognition is rarely one of them.
Or is Katz just trying to enlighten us all?
I basically agree with this. I don't think it will become some horribly destructive life-controlling machine.
Though, I know it's not impossible, unless we make sure some people don't let it happen.
It's gonna be a while before my computer gives me an upgrade.
Sounds like lots of things...
the ECU for my car
my home AC thermostat
my digital indoor / outdoor thermometer
-- www.globaltics.net
Political discussion for a new world
The only fool bigger than the person who knows it all, is the person who argues with him.
I do not respond to cowards. Especially anonymous ones.
The main point of the book is that AI is really complex and shouldn't be approached by the faint hearted.
Hehe. Actually it's about a tortoise and a Greek guy who hang out with strange creatures and have far out adventures.
No, really, it's about the fundamental concepts of the computablility of intelligence. It has nice pictures too.
The Moore-Murphy Law: The number of things that will go wrong will double every 2 years.
As machines become more intelligent, it is likely that such simple and direct laws will be difficult to program into them, if not impossible. For instance, if an intelligent system is a neural net that learns from it's environment, it will be problematic to have the Laws Module (LM) monitor the state of mind of the neural net to determine whether or not it is about to break the Laws. The LM will have to be "outside" the neural network of the AI (since neural networks are altered by the environment) but at the same time be able to interpret the network with sufficient understanding stop it from any transgression. In effect, the LM will have to be an extremely intelligent agent in its own right. It must understand the definition of "harm", which seems easy to us, but is extremely difficult to program. Then there are the ambiguities that crop up -- preventing the harm of one person causes another harm -- is some emotional harm more damaging than physical harm -- etc. It is questionable whether or not an intelligent entity that approaches human capabilities will be able to function 30 seconds with such simple rules constricting it in our extremely complex world without locking up.
Humans do not run by simple ethical rules. I suppose the most simply stated ethical rule is the Golden Rule -- "Do unto others as you would have them do to you." That won't work for AIs until they have emotions. It still doesn't work for most humans.
The Moore-Murphy Law: The number of things that will go wrong will double every 2 years.
I'm thinking it might be possible for someone sometime to incorperate a bioligical brian of insects or other animals into a machine. But I really doubt there will ever be man-made AI machines that can think and reason and learn new things. I just don't see it ever happening. I think anything with intellegence will always be biological. I think we will always be stuck with things that seem intellegent with things like voice and photo recognition based on code that will always follow predictable algorithms. But we'll never have true AI.
Techno-hype.
Problem solved.
Honorary Member of Jackie Chan's Kung Fu Process Servers
Laws of robotics are based on what might be seen as a good idea. Airbags don't know, or did not know that there were babies in rearward facing seats. No safeguards built in. Most people who are working on AI or machine to interact with humans should take this into account. You might say that silicon will replace the carbon on this planet as the "lifeform" of choice. 2008 in Bejing, I say the sooner the better.
Just saying it doesn't make it so -- got any references or should we just take your word on it?
Right today, computers do many things that were entirely the province of human intelligence a decade ago: they play chess at the highest levels, recognize speech, translate text (more or less), conjecture and prove mathematical theorems -- and they can read and summarize your typical business document.
And there are certainly a lot of promising projects that look like they might bear fruit, see eg Douglas Lenat's CYC. If CYC does what it's supposed to, then it would be artificial intelligence.
What evidence do you have for your case?
The three laws of robotics are a bit of a joke. If a machine is sufficiently able to interprete the laws, it is intellectually capable of ignoring them.
The only way to make a robot in such a way that it does not kill humans is not to give it the capability in the first place. In reality I think killing people will be one of the first and probably most popular use intelligent machines will be put to.
Unmanned fighters will be a good example - autonomous aircraft, capable of outflying any human pilot. The US has these in testing now. I think in 20 years there won't be much left for lowly humans to do.
I suspect we will find something to do though, as without jobs the whole economic system would collapse.
I don't know. I vistited a porn site in Windows XP and a wizard popped up offering to call a hooker....
there are no stupid questions, but there are a lot of inquisitive idiots
For information on the man himsdelf, you can visit,:
http://web.mit.edu/invent/www/kurzweil_bio.html
His company's website can be found at:
http://www.kurzweilai.net
Tom
Oh arse
Yep, Alice Bot is amazing, I spent like an hour talking to it, it is really good.
But NIALL sucks, it crashed after 10 sentences.
http://dtum.livejournal.com
I'll go with the Steve Jobs model until there is a commodity robot hardware that runs Debian GNU/AI. The Steve Jobs model may cost a little more and not be binary compatible with the other 95% of the robots, but it will look cool as heck, be very durable, and may just take "Think Different" to a whole 'nother level.
I do not have a signature
Well I don't know why I'm bothering to respond to this post instead of the other 3 or 4 above it that say the same thing, but...
the difference between Artificial Intelligence and fire is that Intelligence thing.. assuming we ever get it right, there is some small chance that while we become increasingly dependent on the easy lifestyle it gives us, it may in turn become increasingly annoyed with us and eventually decide (since decision is a fairly major part of intelligence, I'm sure you'll agree) that humans have become a useless burden on their backs and do away with us (terminator, matrix, etc, take your pick)..
then again, they may not do away with us and we may end up just killing ourselves off, and the AI beings will spend millenia trying to figure out how to bring us back (AI).. but either way, the point is (again, assuming we get it right), that unlike fire, a true AI would have a fairly good chance of surpassing us as the dominant "life" form on the planet.. fire simply can't do that..
now the same COULD be said for other intelligent life (artificially created or not), but a dumb machine/fire/etc could never take over (a vaccine may accidentally kill us all off or something, but it wouldnt do so with the intention of taking control.. it would be a slip up on the part of the vaccine manufacturer (ie: a human) behind the occurance)..
Its made up and bogus :)..
Human brains and computer "brains" work quite differently. If you want an example, go program something like a 4th order differential equation in your favorite language. Run it on a data set of I dunno, 1000 points. Do them yourself. Who was faster? Bet it was the computer..
Now tell your computer to figure out where you derived the equation from. Do it yourself. Who was faster? I bet the computer didn't even get started.. (assuming the equation was derived at all! You may have just made something up. Can the computer tell you that what you made up wasn't derived from anywhere and has no bearing to any real-world or mathematical problems outside of being a candidate for a textbook example?)..
We don't know how the brain works completely. We make best guesses based on things like MRI scans while having the test subject perform some task, and see what parts of the brain become active.
We do know however, that the brain does not work in binary. We know that our brains do some things better (image recognition, heuristics, natural language), while computers do other things better (mathematics, logic).. Any direct comparison between the two is completely and utterly bogus at this stage in the game, and is generally created to justify some psychology professor getting a new hard drive so he can store pr0n (err.. or something like that;)..
AI will arrive as the result of a distributed effort. It is so obvious. Disney, Sony, whoever cannot do it alone. *shrugs*
1: Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas R. Hofstadter
6 7/ singinst
Artificial intelligence. Cognitive science. Mathematics. Music. Art. Language. Computer programming. Zen. Philosophy. Self-reference. Genetics. Paradox. Logic. Everything.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/04650265
May I suggest a few things? Read Kurzwiel. Read Hofstadter's Godel, Escher, Bach. Perhaps you'll come to understand the mindset of those who are developing this A.I. technology that every one else fears will run amok and distroy humanity. (I also thought I was supposed to be chained to a machine 24 hours a day working for the machines by now, too.)
Heh, I hope it's not like "info" on irc.linux.com.
MonkeyMan has joined
<MonkeyMan> Hey guys, what's up?
<info> up (Replacement program for uptime.), section Console/System, is GPL. Stable: 0.3, Development: none. http://freshmeat.net/redir/homepage/903122657/
<Guy> Ah, I see you met info
<MonkeyMan> what is it?
<info> [it] Information Technology - An international term for an information system, which consists of one or more automated information systems (AISs) or computer systems and communications systems.
<Guy> info: shut up
*info runs away in fear
<MonkeyMan> You're no fun
<info> info is no fun: http://music.excite.com/album/327756
Geez, I don't even trust humans to do their jobs correctly, and they've had how many thousand years of development? Which brings us to the topic of humans writing software for these beings. Do you think they'll get that right too? I doubt it.
And just in case everything does go wrong, that smart robot guy at MIT(I think) built his without legs. It's bolted to a table. Talk about reading too much sci-fi...
Jon Katz's article has all kinds of sweeping statements about robots taking over and leaving us helpless. It says more about his psychological state than it does about anything based in reality. The magnitude of creating such technology is enourmous. We're not even close to it yet. Computing hardware may be increasing power at a rapid rate, but software technology moves at a snail's pace. We're not going to see anything like AI in our lifetimes, and The Matrix wasn't remotely realistic.
So stop worrying, and use the power that you have now to make your future a bright one :-).
You had me at "dicks fuck assholes".
I seriouslly doubt GWB will have a world dialog even if they were going to take over. Infact, I'm kinda surprised he recognizes that there is a world :)
-- [ta]
Didn't the Sun guy say something that was almost identical to what the Unibomber said? But he got published in Wired (before it sucked maybe?) and people listened to him.
On a related tangent, why does Katz quote a criminal? It doesn't add anything to his arguement. Infact beliving what a semi-psycotic criminal says might undermind his stance.
There was a guy on IRC a few nights ago who I took for granted was a bot, and not a very good one. (Wild non-sequiturs, bursts of random abuse...) I thought people were putting me on when they insisted he was a real person, until the guy/bot made some reading-between-the-lines responses that could only have come from a human or a really superb AI.
Is there some kind of inverse Turing test to designate a human who is indistinguishable from a buggy Perl script?
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
Robot #31337 has achieved 32,000 points, it recieves an extra arm and 5% more oil per week.
Seriously, I love the idea of AI, lord knows my apartment looks like crap and I'd be only too happy if a Robo-Maid came in and put my books back in the shelf, alphabetized my CDs, cleaned the *ugh* bathroom, and tossed out all those old cans of stuff I never ate but seemed like a good idea at 2:30 am in the supermarket and are about to explode 7 years later. I just don't want one running anything *I* can't debug.
-- .sig are belong to us!
All your
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
-- .sig are belong to us!
All your
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Seriously, who most do you fear the most producing the AI units humanity would be dependent upon?
Microsoft
AOL/Time Warner
Disney
The Church of Scientology
Evil Mutant Communist Space Wizards©
Intel
Sun
Anything Steven Jobs is involved with
Her
Me
Cowboy Neal
-- .sig are belong to us!
All your
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
First, you can throw away the parts of the brain that are dedicated to regulating the body. Computers don't need them. Then realize that human beings probably aren't optimally wired for thinking. The processes which mold the brain from babyhood on do so through chemical processes and internal and external sensory stimuli, which can be rather crude tools. If nanobots went through our brains and rewired us synapse by synapse, we might see anything from a twofold to a millionfold increase in real intelligence. Or, if they screw up, we might end up with an appetite for shrubbery. But that's beside the point.
Also, looking at CAT scans, we see that at any given moment, a great deal of the human brain is not functioning at maximum capacity. This is especially true when the brain is being exposed to John Tesh or UPN programming.
More important than anything listed so far, we only have a vague idea of how ideas are stored in the brain, correlated, discarded, combined to produce interesting insights, and recognized as interesting. Until we have a better grasp of this process, there's no point in trying to draw a useful comparison between the brain and a computer. Simply due to the differences in architecture, these processes would have to proceed in radically different ways. It doesn't matter what the brain is theoretically capable of, if the bulk of its computing power is devoted to running print( "Hello, World!" ); in an infinite loop.
There are at least a few researchers in the AI field who believe that we've had the necessary computational power for a decade. The problem, in their minds, is the lack of fundamental understanding of intelligence, not more clock cycles.
Finally, approximately 80% of all brain calculations involve fantasizing about sex or trying to decide how best to obtain same. Presuming that neither function is integral to intelligence, this fact greatly lowers the bar separating human from computer.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
As long as the dominant operating system is a Microsoft product, I have no worries about "smart" machines.
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I disagree. Intelligence is the ability to figure out a task. You want an intelligent robo-maid. Intelligence can exist without sentience. They are not the same thing.
As x approaches total apathy I couldn't care less.
"// this is the most hacked, evil, bastardized thing I've ever seen. kjb"
I'll make this short and simple. If it makes money, It'll happen. If it doesn't, It won't happen *for long*
Children are immunized near birth. Our entire lives we are dependent on vaccines to help defend ourselves from the onslaught of bacerium and viruses in the world.
We are dependent on fire: it cooks our food and burns our coal to generate electricity to run our machines.
Dependency on new technology will be no different than dependency on old technology: we will eventually assimilate and/or dispose of it.
There's a great story called "The Days of Solomon Gursky" in 16th (I think) "The Year's Best Science Fiction" that Gardner Dozois edits which depicts a great view on how nanotechnology is used and abused, and eventually made an integral part of existence.
I definitely agree with your assertions.
I should have made it clear that my post simply illustrated a simple requirement to simulate an inherently parallel system on a sequential system.
I do realize my simulation would lack a lot of unknown and known phenomenon which may serve a vital role in the basic learning ontology, which would only reassert simulating the brain would take an intense amount of CPU time.
"Communism is like having one [local] phone company " - Lenny Bruce
I absolutely agree. Current applications using Neural Networks can work very efficiently given adequate training using only a fraction of a fraction of artificial neurons that our brain would probably employ.
Unlike the human brain, we can target artificial neural networks to learn functions, pattern recognition, and other specific problem sets with a good degree of accuracy given broad learning data and enough iterations in the learning process.
As AI has been progressively moving ahead, we began to tackle the various aspects of what we define as being intelligent from many differents angles, ranging from audio/visual pattern recognition to reasoning and communication.
I would expect as intelligent machines near human intelligence it will be based on integrating various technologies, some which are more efficient than a pure artifical nueron approach.
"Communism is like having one [local] phone company " - Lenny Bruce
For those of you who want to understand how much CPU power and memory it would take to simulate a human brain, here are some figures.
Est. 100 billion neurons
Est. 60 to 100 trillion synapses
Est. 1 khz clock speed (times a neuron fires a second)
Assume we assign 32-bits for the given state of a neuron for 100 billion neurons.
Required memory for neurons alone: 400 gigs.
Now, synapses connect two neurons. So we need 2 pointers or index per neuron. Now 32-bits isn't enough as we can only index up to 4 billion some items.
Aftering playing with Excel, I figured we need at the minimum number of bits per address is 50. But because it's faster to work with bits divisable by 8, we'll use a 56 bit addressing system.
So, to connect a synapse to two nuerons, we need 14 (56 / 8 * 2) bytes, for atleast 60 trillion nurons.
Required Memory for synapses: 840 terabytes.
Now, you're job is to write a program that enumerates 840 terabytes of memory, one thousand times a second, performing calulations along the way.
"Communism is like having one [local] phone company " - Lenny Bruce
Actually I heard that there are 10^12 neurons in the human brain that are able to perform 10^3 pulses per second (leaving us with 10^15 tics/sec or a petaflop). This is what John Koza (Mr. Genetic Programming) calls a Brain Second (or 1 BS).
Interestingly he has found in his research that there seems to be a problem convergence in his evolving of circuits where the processor time needed to evolve a circuit takes roughly 1 BS computation.
He's worked his way up to a 1000 node Beowulf cluster for his work over the years and has seen this 1 BS ratio maintained (i.e. the faster his computative guns, the lower the total evolution time for an optimal result).
He charted the growth of his testbed and found that in something like 2004 a 1 BS per second should be achievable in industry and privately available by 2010.
All in all very interesting stuff. Actually it should all be lain out in his upcoming book (appropriately titled Genetic Programming IV) and should make for some killer reading...
What is music when you despise all sound?
For those who want to see the current state of AI you might want to try Alice Bot. It's very good and I tricked one of my friends into thinking it was a chat room....
A good ChatterBot site is The Simon Laven Page. It has listings of interesting ChatterBots. My favorite is NIALL. It learns from what you tell it and comes up with some very funny responses.
--Volrath50
Yes, the Sun guy did write on exactly this subject. He wrote a long and elaborate article, but people listened to it largely because it got published in a well-circulated magazine. If no one published it, no one would have gone searching for it and not many would have listened.
But psychosis and intelligence have no correlation. You can be stupid and psychotic (Son of Sam) or intelligent and psychotic (Hitler). Alan Turing, in his days, was considered crazy - homosexual and forcefully injected with hormones - and yet we still regard him as a genius.
---
Developers: We can use your help.
According to AI (the movie, not the technology), the machines that look good and are good in bed are saved. The old servants and cleaning machines will get melted by acid. Anything that satisfies our sexual needs come first. The rest are scrap metal. Personally, I just need one good-lookin' machine to cook, clean, and give good head. And I wonder why I'm not married...
---
Developers: We can use your help.
"If you take all of today's computers and sum them together you will end up with the equivalent intellectual power of 1x1017 flops/sec, which is what one human brain is capable of processing.
Sounds like we humans are in good shape from this perspective, right?
Wrong.
With computer power increasing exponentially and doubling every 18 months or so, computers are catching up quickly. At the current rate, it will be approximately 2021 when computers will have the equivalent processing power of all humans on this planet combined!"
Artificial Intelligence, Today and Tomorrow Chris Moy
I do kind of have my doubts about how to measure the capacity of the human brain, considering we aren't even too sure how it works- -- ---
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No sig. today thank you.
I think the very nature of intelligence, as we associate it with artificial intelligence, eliminates it from the "tool" category. With Artificial intelligence we give a machine the ability to learn, adapt, and ultimately create.
A tool by definition is:
something (as an instrument or apparatus) used in performing an operation or necessary in the practice of a vocation or profession- Webster
A computer that can create and apply its creation on its own, is not a tool, for it does not require assistance, it is not being used. I believe you are associating human created analysis programs with the concept of artificial intelligence. A monitoring program, a data analysis program (even an adaptive one), and a state machine based response does not ultimately qualify as AI. AI, as in the Spielburg movie, revolves around a "consciousness", or a cognitive ability to create and conclude.
Furthermore, imho when AI is achieved, it will eventually rise to a role as a member of society. Whether or not this is to be a feared conclusion, I will not attempt to guess.
Often wondered... why not put a weight switch (like 50 lbs.)in the seat? Then the airbags would be leess likely to squish the kiddies.
How sleepless is the egg, knowing that which throws the stone forsees the bone.
Imagine if you could take a set of web services that could:
1. Maintain an online stock trading account
2. Maintain its own application hosting account at an ISP
3. Pay the ISP with proceeds from the stock trading
5. Create an altered version of its core settings and code
4. Copy all of its altered software capabilities to an other ISP when it has made enough money to do so. 5. Create a new online stock account for the "offspring".
Is this mechanism intelligent? Maybe not. Could this eventually cause trouble? Sure could.
Don't judge the words by the man. Ideas stand on their own.
Reality is indistinguishable from any sufficiently advanced fantasy.
As for my contention about the (non-)feasibility of AI with current technology, it's impossible to prove a negative. The burden is on the other side to prove that it is possible. I have yet to see examples or evidence based on current technology of true intelligence of the sort that Katz says we should be worried about.
None of your examples are evidence enough for me:
You can certainly disagree about what constitutes "intelligence"; like I said, there is a great deal of healthy debate about this. But I have yet to see evidence of anything that looks like the kind of A.I. I would worry might take over the world as Katz describes.
Just because a person is wrong about a single thing does not invalidate all of his ideas. And anyway, I was citing Searle as an example of one person who is more skeptical in this debate, not as the utmost authority on the topic.
Clearly the trend favors the notion that one day we will have intelligent machines.
Well, we have also been able to build faster and faster vehicles. So by your reasoning, "the trend favors the notion" that one day we will have faster-than-light travel. I admit it's a bad analogy; what I'm trying to say is that just because computers are completing tasks that appear more and more like intelligence to observers, but still fall short of true intelligence, doesn't mean that one day machines will actually attain true intelligence.
However, I was not claiming that we will never, ever have intelligent machines. I said that given today's technology, intelligent machines are so far off in the future that they are not a matter for practical debate, as Katz claims they are.
If George Bush starts talking about how we need to have a worldwide dialogue on whether the machines will take over, we will really know he has gone off the deep end.
Actually, I think you meant to say it's people using technology to abuse other people, not just tech itself. So an AI 'girl' that you hook your friend up with in the future in a chat room as a prank, then tell him that she isn't real, well, that's damaging to his ego at least. It also deals a blow to the trust in your friendship. So although computer's may one day be able to display emotion like characteristics, they'll never have true heartfelt, irrational, wild mood swings like a human does. Sometimes us humans do things that go completely against our 'programming', such as risking one's life to save another's life with no regard for the outcome for yourself. If you program an AI machine to want to preserve it's life, it certainly isn't going to go against such instructions as it has no reason to love someone. I seriously doubt us humans could accurately (or even approximately) model unconditional love into a machine.
All you who hold democracy as God (as opposed to freedom) just wait until the people who are mostly machines start winning elections. They don't need food, so you will start to be portrayed as using up resources needlessly that could be much better used supporting machinery and what-not.
That vegetarian needs an acre of FARMLAND to survive for a year?
Nah, that will never happen. People without implants will simply be left behind, marginalized and slow-witted.
I am for the complete Trantorization of Earth.
> Ted Kaczynski predicts that humanity will easily
> drift into a position of such dependence on
> intelligent machines that it will ultimately
> have little choice but to accept
> all the machines' decisions.
The "breads and circuses" understanding of Democracy predicts that humanity will easily drift into a position of such dependence on massive government that it will ultimately have little choice but to accept all the power hungry politicians' decisions.
I am for the complete Trantorization of Earth.
Think about this just a little bit. People start putting pieces of machines in to replace failed/worn out or just plain better parts. More and more people more and more powerful machines. At some point in time natural selection takes over. The question is "who" or "what" is going to be selected.
Neck_of_the_Woods
Neck_of_the_Woods
#/usr/local/surf/glassy/overhead
Personally, I think humanity went into the chamberpot when we started knapping flint tools. Why, quartz was good enough for our australopithicine ancestors, it should be good enough for us!
Anybody who doesn't see the sarcasm in the above comment will also miss the irony in people making their living off the internet by scaring people worldwide about technology.
The Independent: Reverend Spooner Arrested in Friar Tuck Incident - ISIHAC, Historical Headlines
AI is a tool, and nothing more. I think that it is just like any other tool that has revolutionized the way humanity has lived. The printing press, the Internet, the phone, the wheel, and musical instruments have all changed mankind. At each stage of something new, someone has always come forward and said, "This will be the end of humanity." This is the very definition of FUD.
AI is a tool. Humans will use it as such. To run things in an oversight capacity, or to work when humans can't. To check human decisions for rationality. To be alert to problems we would never see and to automatically address them. And so on.
AI is a tool. Humans will probably integrate themselves with machines. The artificial heart transplant is a step in this direction. Humans will retain consensus, but machines will help us process the information, and to let us know when we our bodies are in trouble. Most people are reluctant to see doctors, so AI can be used as a tool to let us know when we are ill and we don't know it. AI will help replace our worn out minds with parts that won't wear out. AI could help automatically regulate blood pressure and regulate 100 other functions we are totally oblivious too.
AI is a tool. Like every other tool that has come before it, there are those who will say that *this* is the tool that will dominate us and take us over. I just don't see that happening. AI will be used to solve our problems, just like every tool before. Perhaps AI will be able to solve more of our problems then any other tool has been able to. But then it would just be a great tool. Humans are too selfish to let something else dominate them anyway.
Lawrence Lessig is my personal hero.
There will undoubtedly be a critical point at which machines improve themselves. This will mark the start of a runaway process of evolution. The same, by the way, goes for Man.
Hmm... 50/50 odds... not bad. I'll say... Truth?
I think that more or less, our society is already dependent on technology. For example, the Y2K issue which surfaced caused a certain amount of panic, as we began to realize exactly how much of our world is driven by technology.
As we move forward, technology becomes such an integrated part of our lives that we forget how to live without them. Who today can survive without the telephone, without our cars, without computers, our dishwashers, and hell, without condoms? The belt on our dryer broke this week and my parents couldn't do the laundry all of a sudden. Forget what people did for millennia -- my family needs the machine or we're helpless. The dryer has since been fixed, and it's business as usual. God forbid we ever lose electricity for a week.
As new things come out onto the market we increasingly use them for their convenience, and we forget how to do without them. As we become dependent on artificial beings to take care of the mundane daily tasks in our lives, we will soon realize that we cannot live without them.
Should the damned thing ever become smart enough to plot to overthrow me behind my back, or to steal from me, after months or years of faithful service I would have been trusting enough to let the thing do whatever it wanted. Because I never would have expected it.
Anybody else see 'The Score' last week?
You can accomplish anything you set your mind to. The impossible just takes a little longer.
Hey, that's something good A.I. could do for the race...if you can't SPELL, you can't talk to the computers! Syntax would sweep Bush under the evolutionary rug, which in turn might save us all.
Moron politicians and their incisive grasp of technology aside, my main worry is the Environment: Computers seem to prefer cooled, regulated, hospital-colored environments swarming with hunched-over CTS victims. Not sure I want the whole planet to look like that...
-S.T.
I'm more worried about how people will abuse technology rather than how technology will abuse people. Computers and technology will always serve people. Which people is open to debate.
Disconnect your television. Do your own research. Draw your own conclusions. They're probably lying. Don't be a sheep.
We will be assimilated. Kurtzweil's point is that their will be a physically symbiotic relationship between man and machine that will only draw the two closer as time goes on. The line will blur. Evolution has found a way to speed itself along - create a creature that can control its own evolution. It will happen and it will be wonderful.
Push the envelope. Watch it bend.
...come up, I rely on my instincts.
/. and I'll keep you posted.
I think the anwers is 42, however I am still waiting for the ultimate computer to figure this out.
Keep on reading your
DocWatson
MessEdUp
#/var/www/v
When we try to convert our Napster .nap files to MP3's, call the new app KReader and have Adobe arrest us for breaking the DMCA after we've given our talk about our app at DefCon, I think oppression by machines would be a welcome replacement.
"Anonymous Coward" is for whistleblowers, not unpopular opinions.
Personally, I believe that merging the AI and artificial organs into the human body is a good thing. Don't people want to live longer, be stronger, faster, more mentally accute, and connected to the internet? (implanted IRC!!) Hopefully we can come to a point (as in 2001: A space oddyessy) where we don't need physical bodies at all.
Self-replication is an interesting problem, but one that can be overcome a number of ways. Human beings have certain instinctual, deep-brain behaviors - and we also have deeply-embedded routines for avoiding certain behaviors. Nature provided them, and while not perfect (suicide still happens, etc), I like to think we could build similar rulesets into our machines - and since we have the added benefit of conscious, rational, structured means->ends thinking, we can make them much more rigid and reliable. We could say, for instance, 'Sure, go ahead and make more, better copies of yourself, but these certain rules are to be built in, as well'. Tricky, but one possible solution to an odd and dangerous problem.
As for integration being a stage of evolution, I completely agree that it is a very real, and very probable concept. Humans don't have big muscles or sharp teeth, so we used what we did have - the brain - to produce artificial versions to enhance our abilities. From hammers and knives to shoes, eyeglasses, and automobiles, on up to space shuttles and automated HelpDesks - we have always enhanced ourselves. Integration doesn't seem so weird when you place it alongside dentures, deodorant, or any of the other things we've created and use daily to extend ourselves and/or fix our flaws.
think for yourself, you won't like the results if others do it for you.
good point. that was then. this is now. we, in general, lean much more toward classical liberalism, aka 'libertarianism'. these days we dislike gov't and all other controlling bodies much more. notice our screeches about icann, the u.n., etc
think for yourself, you won't like the results if others do it for you.
Yes, these 'thinking machines' will develop quickly. Yes we will rely on them for many many things. The new IBM HelpDesk system is evidence of that. Yes, many dark futures may await us.
But in the end, it will be us who make the choice of retaining superiority or handing it over to machines. They are still our products, they will still only have the abilities and functions that we give them. Some may say that the essence of AI is learning by experience, thus enhancing the subject's own abilities - but we still, at this point, and will for some time to come, retain ultimate control over what these things are capable of. We have to make a choice. They will not exceed our own abilities unless we make the choice to either give them skills or give them skills without limits which would have prevented them from developing past a certain point. Of course, no vote of humanity could be taken and no laws could be passed that would be effective - it is a choice the engineers themselves must make every time they sit down to some code or some circuitry.
I'm not anywhere near skilled enough to do that kind of work, but I can say this with some fair amount of certainty: geeks love pushing technology, but are generally fiercely protective of their freedoms and liberties. I don't see many of them choosing to invalidate their own existence.
think for yourself, you won't like the results if others do it for you.
I know Jon regularly 'sees the light'
but filing this story under enlightment is maybe a bit off...
or is it just me?
Humans and tools (computers) have been fused for most of human history. Anyone use a PDA to augment your memmory? It doesn't matter if the hardware is in your skull or not, your ultimate actions are a combination of what your "natural" brain decides and what your mechanical augmentations supply. Somebody explain to me how a chip implanted in your brain is really any different. When was the last time you terrified a general studies major by showing off your TI-95?
I think that reflects more on the poor quality of conversation in chat/rooms than it does on the state of ALICE's A.I. Imagine having a conversation with ALICE on the phone (say, with a human speaking the responses, to eliminate the poor quality of voice simulation); do you still think you would be fooled? If so, you need to spend less time in chatrooms. My friends can speak eloquently on a wide variety of subjects. To fool me, I would expect an A.I. to have access to a large database of subjects, from current movies, music, and TV, to news and world events, to technical issues, and to be able to reply appropriately to what I say (if not start topics on its own). Heck, even Google has better context-sensitivity than that little chatbot.
Not so much a link as an address. But I digress...
Carl G. Jung
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Carl G. Jung
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"With one breath, with one flow, You will know Synchronicity" -La Policia
Hmmmm... well I'd have to lean towards integration then moving into total domination, considering we have our first true cyborg
Personally I'm looking forward to losing my consciousness in a warm data flow... hummmmmmmmmm....
We'll never be ruled by machines - that's why we've got the three laws of robotics, right? Right? ..gulp..
working Ray Kurzweil Link: http://www.kurzweilai.net/
In the context of this discussion, Asimov's The Feeling of Power makes for interesting reading. I recommend those who have not read it to look at it.
s/Spielberg/Kubrick and Spielberg/