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Israeli AI System "Hal" And The Turing Test
Conspiracy_Of_Doves writes: "Hal, the AI creation of Dr. Anat Treister-Goren of Israel, has fooled child language language experts into believing that it is a 18-month old child. Dr. Treister-Goren says that Hal will probably attain adult-level language skills in 10 years. CNN.com article is here. Yes, it's named after what you think it's named after, and yes, the article mentions why naming it Hal might not be such a hot idea."
It's just like chatting with an 18 month old child! Doesn't know how to type, read, or write at all!
Truely an incredible step in toddler AI!
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
I know people I work with who still haven't achieved adult-level language skills...
there are no stupid questions, but there are a lot of inquisitive idiots
"Hi, how are you today?"
"Poop!"
"Poop? I don't quite understand what you are trying to say."
"Pee-pee!"
"Indeed."
"0101100101? It's just jibberish. *looks in mirror, gasps* 1010011010@!? AHHHHHH!!"
Dave...I have a load in my diaper...Dave...
Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known. -- Carl Sagan
When Hal was "born," he was hardwired with nothing more than the letters of the alphabet and a preference for rewards -- a positive outcome -- over punishments -- a negative one.
[...] Treister-Goren corrects Hal's mistakes in her typewritten conversations with him, an action Hal is programmed to recognise as a punishment and avoids repeating.
How long until Hal figures out that sending high voltage through the typewriter stops the punishment?
Hammer of Truth
Funny how all the cultural fears of technology come from books and movies like Frankenstein, Brave New World, Colossus, (remember that one?) and 2001. All of which are fiction, and written the way they are to make an interesting story (who would read a story about a man who created a "monster" that was happy, friendly, and harmless, or a computer that worked perfectly and caused no trouble?) Yet in popular discussion, people treat them as real, and embodying actual dangers with which we have real experience.
We need more Artificial Intelligence -- the natural kind is in too short a supply.
InstaPundit! Ahead of the Curve Since 30 Minutes Ago
neural nets are designed to simulate how the brain works, so it makes sense that they be trained the same way. consider this: perhaps they can absorb information faster than a human brain, but who could deliver interactive teaching at that speed?
now consider:
today (2001): human trains AI, limited by wetware bandwidth
...20 years from now: AI trains AI, limited by neural net bandwidth.
result: all 20 years of training one AI will be compressed into to a fraction of a second training time for the next generation
this is the manifestation of Raymond Kurzweil and James Gleick's observations: the acceleration of everything, the exponential growth of compute power.
hang on for the ride, kids. it's gonna get weird. i bet we see AI legistlation in the next 10 years.
we will be the 'gods' (as in creators) of the new race that will inhabit the earth.
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
I don't know, it seems to fit if you ask me. HAL was very childlike in the movie, especially in regards to his "dad" Dr. Chandra (well, in the sequel at least), and only ended up hurting people because he was lied to and thought there was no other way. How is that any different from a human child who is abused and as a result doesn't value human lives at all?
I don't think they should have named it HAL just because it's going to get boring after every single AI project is named HAL, but naming it after the famous movie star of the same name wasn't a bad idea in my opinion. As long as you treat it right and don't give it control over vital life support functionality, you should be just fine :)
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
"Dr. Treister-Goren says that Hal will probably attain adult-level language skills in 10 years."
This guy has obviously never heard the Minsky Theorem: "Full scale AI is always 20 years down the road."
In any case, call us when it is actually working, not when you've fooled "child language experts". I could fool experts right now with a simple cassette tape, a LOT of taped 18-month-old comments and a quick hand with a playback button. That doesn't mean my stereo is going to human in 10 years.
I am 99% sure we will eventually acheive "full AI". But I'm 100% sure it won't be via vague claims about unguessable future performance. In other words, show me the money.
324006
...a new generation of SPAM generation.
So is this the first instance of giving a child an IP address?
here's a funny one...
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
The fact that the Turing Test is probably still the only widely recognized test for artificial intelligence says more about our pathetic understanding of the nature of intelligence than the validity and usefulness of the test.
After all, as any con-artist and magician will tell you, it's really not that hard to fool people. Also, remember that on some occasions, some human beings will actually fail the Turing test! That must be so humiliating...
I freely admit I don't have anything better to offer, but I just wanted to point out that the Turing test is a pretty awful measurement, when you think about it.
If you hate poorly defined software projects... can you imagine being handed the Turing test as a feature spec?
Accountability on the heads of the powerful.
Power in the hands of the accountable.
I have _personally_ seen Eliza pass the turing test. I set up Eliza on my ICQ uin, one of my friends in crisis messaged me and had 45minute conversation with Eliza (not such a good thing). By the end of the conversation, my friend was convinced that he was talking to a hacker who broke into my account. Oh what a mess that was. He had called his ex-girlfriends's parents and told him her new boyfriend broke into my account. I didn't have any idea a bot could be so convincing. It had some flat out amazing responses to his questions and comments. If I had never seen an Eliza conversation before I would have probably thought it was a person too. But like I said.. setting up such a bot on your ICQ account is not recommended. They will pass the turing test and that's not such a good thing necessarily.. :)
To see many such logs go to www.google.com and do a searh for "aoliza" or even "eliza chat" you'll find all sorts of hillarious conversations.
From the article:
If, or when one does, it will open a Pandora's box of ethical and philosophical questions. After all, if a computer is perceived to be as intelligent as a person, what is the difference between a smart computer and a human being?
and
"All of us strongly believe that machines are the next step in evolution," said Dunietz. "The distinction between real flesh and blood, old-fashioned and the new kind, will start to blur."
If these researchers get to the point where they can't see a moral difference between killing a person and turning off a computer, they need to get out of the lab more. What next, natural rights for computer programs? That's like inventing television, and then being unwilling to turn off the TV for fear of killing the little people inside. Rubbish.
They exist because the original -ise verbs originated from French, which spelled them with an 's'. For example "realise" is the traditional spelling of that particular verb, as it derives from the French verb "réaliser". Another example is "paralyse" which derives from French "paralyser", but has become "paralyze" in American English.
Reminds me of a political party in Canada (NPC)that tried to implement a new method of communication called Newspeak.
What you fail to mention is that this political party was born out of a Dungeons and Dragons game.
Basically, they're Non-Player Characters.
Which explains a lot about their political strategy (or kack of it).
The only failure with HAL was that Dr. Chandra forget to teach that murder is far worse than lying.
HAL understood that they were both bad, but had no values associated with either. Once HAL had lied, it was equally okay to commit murder.
Presumably, Dr. Goren will take this under consideration.
Also, I hope they realise that in ten years, they won't have an adult. They'll have a well-spoken, knowledgable ten year old. At this point it's worth examining the differences between a ten year old and an adult.
Knowledge, experience, maturity, sense of responsibility. Can anyone come up with any others?
"...you assume they have a considerable amount of nonlinguistic cognitive machinery in place before they start" [...] Additionally, the idea that children learn laguage because of rewards or praise is, apparently, inconsistent with studies of human language acquisition.
Hmm, interesting. To tell you the truth, I have a tottler about 20 months old myself, and it's been fascinating watching him developing cognitive skills. I think there is room for both views. On the one hand, there is no question that there is a considerable amount of hard-wired machinery at work. This is immediately apparent when compared to raising a puppy (which I've also done).
When my child was born, I was interested to see how long it would take for me to see there was something "different" over the puppy. To my amazement, once an infant starts noticing the world (they are pretty much oblivious for the first three months), the differences are noticeable right away. It's subtle, but you can see them looking at the world and you can see "the little gears turning". I don't know how to define it exactly, but there is no doubt that there is a qualitative difference in how each brain works.
On the other hand, I don't think you necessarily need to look to straight parental or world positive/negative reinforcement to find feedback at work. There is a tremendous amount of self-motivated feedback at work in a child. In my boy, at least, his biggest motivations are 1) look at everything and analyze how it interacts in his world, and more importantly, 2) to be a "big boy" by mimicking the adults around him. If there's something that he thinks he can do, he gets pissed if you don't let him try it himself. Much of his positive/negative feedback is coming directly from comparing his actions and results to those around him.
I think that hard-wired self-motivated feedback based on mimickry is going to be shown to be an important factor in child development. Which makes it all the harder to make a machine do it, because you have to give it something to mimic in a relatively real world environment.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
When I see an AI claim, I check its source - if its a business, I suspect exaggeration; if it's a real research center (public or private, MIT or Bell Labs) then I'm more likely to take the claims on face value. This is hyperbolic investor-porn, no more.
In addition to the other fine points made in response here, I would point out that computing machines have been around for quite some time, the Babbage Difference Engine and Babbage Analytical Engine are from the 1820s-30s. Ada Lovelace wrote the first program in the 1840's. Hollerith's tabulating machine was first used on a large scale for the 1890 census. The Differential Analyzer was in the 1930's, and it used vacuum tubes and punched paper tape to solve differential equations.
I do not have a signature
Given that Cyc's project has apparently failed to live up to its original claims of producing genuine childlike intelligence by slowly building up all of the information a child has, and has since spawned into a commercial product, why should one believe AI will fare any better? How do their approaches differ? It seems particularly problematic for AI, as a company, that Cyc has released their OpenCyc project to the community.
Bob
Science, like Nature, must also be tamed, with a view turned towards its preservation.
These researchers are getting back from the program exactly what they put in. At one point in your link, I read:
(person) where is daddy?
...
(ai) daddy gone
(person) daddy is at work
(ai) daddy gone bye bye
(person) wait hal, we need to take something to eat
(ai) banana
(person) ok we can take some bananas
(ai) monkeys eat bananas
(person) you're so smart hal. do you want to take a book?
(ai) juice mommmy
(person) sure we'll take some juice as well
The researcher elsewhere claims that the AI's words "relate to its well-being". This is utter projection- the only reason the AI is stuck on concepts of mommy, daddy, monkey, and juice is because this is the inane crap they insist on talking to it about!
Notice also that they claim the AI is tracking almost exactly with a child its same age. Seem strange? Wouldn't you expect a little deflection over 15 months? Shouldn't the thing be a little smarter or a little dumber than a normal child- just statistically speaking, how likely is it they happened to program one that advances /exactly/ as quickly as a normal human infant?
The paper talks a lot about feedback loops. I've got a huge one for them, but it isn't the AI caught in it, it's the researchers. By expecting the thing to react at a child-level, they're talking to it that way, rewarding it that way, and making it that way. If they started talking to it about quantum mechanics tomorrow, it would bd confused as hell for about a month, but I bet it would pick up real fast after it absorbed the new vocabulary. They claim it cares about monkies and juice?! Those are just words to it, you could just as easily raise it on gluons and dark matter, and I don't think it would notice a difference.
Communication is only possible between equals
Hey,
You will not need a mouse or keyboard to operate the computer as it will function when you converse with it.
"It is going to be the next user interface, the last user interface," Dunietz said, explaining that it will replace the mouse.
Me: Computer, play Quake for me.
Computer: Yes, master.
The firm's philosophy is simple. If it looks intelligent and it sounds intelligence, then it must be intelligent.
Maybe they could design a context sensitive spellchecker? One that would highlight terms like "It sounds intelligence"
Michael
"Goodness me, how unlike the FBI to abuse the trust of the American public." -- The Onion
It got wedged into AI theory when a bunch of guys started reading the Hermeneutics litterature and got real, real confused about Heidegger.
In 'Being and Time' there is a hopelessly confused attempt to define being in terms of communication. Until recently the english translation was even more confused because German words for the two types of 'being' Heidegger makes a crucial distinction between are both translated using the same word in English!
To cut a long story short later but for later chaps (Satre, Gadamer, Ricoeur, Habbermas) who rescued the ideas Heidegger would probably have been written off as just another Nazi (the party didn't much like him though, at the end of the war they tried their best to get him shot). Heidegger's radical revision of the theological field of hermeneutics created a new field of philosophy of communications, a key part of which is the concept of a 'shared vocabulary' being essential to communication and hence 'being' and hence an 'ontology'.
So various AI researchers have attempted to apply the gradiose title 'ontology' to a mish mash of concepts in an attempt to convince people that something deep is going on.
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