Artificial Intelligence Overview

spiderfarmer writes: "Well, it feels slightly odd to suggest one of my own articles, but here goes. I've recently completed a brief overview of the current state of AI. The article concept was focused on Cyc, but scope creep being what it is, I ended up doing an overview of the entire field. Some of the Slashdot gang were fairly helpful in pointing me towards experts who would talk to me and towards white papers and books I might not have otherwise found. So, I thought they might be interested in how I put all the information together."

Comments

Media and AI

[mellifluous]

Dr. Lenat and others in the field of AI research should know better than to make claims about consciousnes and morality in a public forum. Cognitive scientists don't even begin to agree on what consciousness is, let alone what it would take for a machine to replicate it. Some very respected individuals do not even think that human consciousness can be replicated within the forseeable future (e.g. Roger Penrose's The Emperor's New Mind). Like any other scientific discipline, these sorts of claims should be left to peer review. Claiming to have invented a conscious machine would be akin to a physicist claiming to have unified quantum with relativity, but without having submitted their findings to any publication.

Oh, NO!

[perdida]

"If you look at an encyclopedia, you'll see a great deal of knowledge of the world represented in the form of articles. Common sense is exactly not this knowledge. Common sense is the complement of this knowledge. It is the white space behind the words. It is all of the knowledge that the article writer assumed all of his/her readers would already have prior to reading the article -- knowledge that could be put to use in order to understand the article. Cyc is about representing and automating the white space." (I love that answer.)

Common sense is about representing and automating the white space?

I think these AI researchers need to talk to a few more sociologists. Human common sense is extremely culturally divergent and goes far beyond the simple, textbook logic cases that certain engineers in this field would probably cite. "Reading between the lines" involves not some native common sense that is wedded to intelligence, but a collectively evolved cultural contextualization. When we read an article in an encyclopedia, a lot of other stuff other than intelligence comes into play: x years of public school education, idiomatic constructs, varying by geographic location, that may or may not enhance or obscure meaning, and, of course, the double meanings and entendres inserted by bored or biased encyclopedia writers.

The entire postmodern project of literary criticism has been aimed at proving this point- at proving that there is no such thing as a standardized set of meanings, and that every meaning is contextualized. The Modernists wanted to rationalize and bureacratize speech, to restrict the number of meanings, and to leave what is unsaid in a narrow, predictable whitespace of a unified "common sense."

Of course, there is a language like this, developed in the first half of this century. It takes away as many English words as possible to restrict the meanings that we are able to THINK, let alone say. Of course, this language is called Newspeak.

Self-Aware != Human

[HiThere]

Don't make the mistake of attirbuting human motives to a computer just because it has a certain characteristic. I know that this can be tempting...

My wife talks of the car as "knowing the way to..." or "wanting to go to...". She doesn't actually believe this (I don't think she does), but she thinks I'm being silly to object to putting things this way. But when thinking about AI computers, this can be a good (and dangerous) model. "The car knows the way to the Japanese resturant." ... well, she's quite familiar with the way to the Japanese resturant, and has solid habit patterns that tend to lead her in that direction from some corners when she must move, and doesn't have a direction firmly in mind. ... Was I talking about the AI or my wife (or my wife's car)? Well, the car doesn't have that kind of brain. But suppose you got in the car and said, "Take me to dinner.", that might be a reasonable description. But my wife would do it because she wanted to. The AI would do it because it was a minimum effort solution to a common problem that had just been posed.

The difference is that the AI doesn't have the motives for initiating action. Now some designs have "super-goals" that probably will never get fulfilled, but a) they didn't choose those goals, and b) someone else gave the goals to them. Of course a car might well have built in desires to keep the tires safely inflated, to avoid running out of gas, to keep the battery charged, etc. But these are quite different from anomie.

Perhaps people would choose to build AI's capable of feeling lonely. But this would be a design decision, not inherent. Or perhaps they would feel something that would be translated into English as lonely, but for which super-goal frustration in the absence of actionable choices would be a better name. It might well not have the rise and fall pattern of human loneliness. Or it might. A hierarchy of needs might cause an AI to experience a similar rise and fall in level of frustration at incapacity for making progress in less important goals. As if a car with the lower importance injunctions to "keep your owner healthy" and "laughter is the best medicine" were owned by an asthma sufferer ... it would need to learn to avoid telling jokes. And it might find that quite ... disturbing? But to attribute any particular human emotion to the process would be .. misunderstanding. There would certainly be emotion analogs, but they wouldn't be close analogs to any particular human emotion. Or, if they were, it would be quite surprising. (They don't have the same "genetic" history determining their substrate ... it's much MUCH more reasonable to attribute similar emotions to cats.)