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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.
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?
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.
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.
I'm a sysadmin. Duh. But let me tell you, Skippy, I bite those machines back HARD.
Techno-hype.
Problem solved.
Honorary Member of Jackie Chan's Kung Fu Process Servers
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.)
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
As long as the dominant operating system is a Microsoft product, I have no worries about "smart" machines.
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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
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
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.