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Arguing A.I.
In some ways, the author argues, the debate over A.I. is undergoing a profound revolution. What was once a discussion largely confined to tech and academic circles has mushroomed into a more mainstream brawl as a growing number of engineers and lay authors vent on the acceleration of modern technology and the future of humanity. Given the explosive growth of the Net, the near-continuous increases in computing power and much-publicized A.I. breakthroughs like Deep Blue's 1997 victory over chess champion Gary Kasparov, the question is no longer whether artificial intelligence will reach the level of human intelligence: It's when.
As the title suggests, Williams's book is less about A.I. itself than about the increasingly ferocious debates raging through the scientific community about it. The conflicts surrounding A.I., Williams suggests, may be the most significant since the titanic battles over evolution a century ago. In fact, Williams is among those who've argued that the A.I. debate is really an extension of the same fight. Artifically intelligent machines are already changing human evolution, many argue, even evolving inevitably into life-forms and species all their own. A growing number of critics and skeptics also argue that A.I. proponents are moving too quickly, failing to take into account the mind-boggling cultural and philosophical problems being raised by their new, still-imperfect technologies.
Williams traces the contemporary birth of A.I. -- via Hilbert and Turing -- on to the living pioneer credited with coining the term (John McCarthy), and talks to several of the principals guiding the A.I. debate today, like Ray Kurzweil, Jaron Lanier and Bill Joy.
This is a necessary book. It's one you could actually recommend to students, journalists, friends, parents, anybody trying to grasp the issues and implications of A.I., surely one of the most significant technologies human beings will face in the 21st Century. Even if A.I.'s impact on life is being overstated, it's poorly understood by the public. So Williams walks us through inventor Kurzweil's almost radical optimism about A.I. and the future -- especially his claims that human society is rapidly approaching the evolutionary equivalent of a new species, a fusion of humans and intelligent machines. This is the point of no return when it comes to artificial intelligence, Kurzweil claims. "The progress will ultimately become so fast that it will rupture our ability to follow it. It will literally get out of our control. The illusion that we have our hand on the plug will be dispelled."
But Williams also introduces some of the people that don't see this as a good thing -- or even a likely development. Bill Joy is more pessimistic, as he made clear in his now famous article in the April 2000 issue of Wired, "Why The Future Doesn't Need Us." The piece thrilled technophobic intellectuals and journalists because it came from a software entrepeneur and reaffirmed something they desperately wanted to believe: technology -- especially genetics, bio-tech and robotics -- is out of control and likely to generate as much evil as good in the future. Joy sees little in the modern history of software development to suggest the emergence of sentient machines. His experience has led him to believe that it's difficult to build things that are reliable.
Jaron Lanier, whom Williams also interviews, coined the term virtual reality and once likened A.I. research to alchemy. Lanier accuses many in the A.I. firmament of choosing faith and hyperbole over science and reality. He likens the current tech obsession with A.I. to medieval scholars' attempts to prove the existence of God through Aristotelian logic. In their rush to endorse the concept of thinking machines, warns Lanier, many authors are putting scientific faith before scientific skepticism.
Williams does a skillful job of presenting these different points of view without intruding on them. It might have been nice to hear more of Williams's own thoughts and perspective, since he's one of the few journalists with this much understanding an access to so many principals in the A.I. discussion. On the other hand, he might not have been wise not to wade in amongst these A.I. heavyweights and their raging debate. "Arguing A.I." is as timely a book about technology as you're likely to come across, and, perhaps more surprisingly, highly readable.
I don't think that ACHEIVING A.I. is as important as all of the technological advances we will make along the way. It will be these advances in technology that will help the most in our day-to-day tasks, not having a robot that thinks like a person. We already have plenty of those...they're called humans.
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The debates on the perspectives of AI are long lived. I would say that this should be a good book, considering who it was written by. This is going to be an important part of our lives in the future.
One thing that's always bothered me about the AI debate is that the thinking for a long time has centered around how to model intelligence on silicon. To me the true marvel of the mind is the holographic quality of intelligence and the way in which the physical form of the brain influences, and is shaped by, the quality and nature of one's thoughts. It will be exciting to see what part the new polymers can play in this research.
Neural Nets and Adaptive Logic Networks are being used all over the place. Not at the scale of SciFi AI.
Intelligent systems are not overhyped, but emulating human behaviour is hardly something benificial (or feasible) to teach them.
Face it, the computer is better than you at math, don't try to teach it emotion, it'll start thinking about girl computers, and not your math homework.
Jaron Lanier is a known kook.
Anything that consults this washed up 1980s "Techno-luminary" is trash.
Sorry, but it's true.
Also this book seems to confuse A.I. with A.L...
That is like mistaking Crackers for Hackers...
Basically it means the author is full of it.
This isn't about technology. This is about philosophy. The question that arises is:
is a machine that to a human appears to be human, human?
Looking for people to chat about multicopters, coding, music. skype: gtsiros
Or is A.I. yet another overhyped, self-serving fantasy by deluded scientists and technocrats talking mostly to one another, foisting their ill-conceived, poorly-engineered creations on an unsuspecting public?
I tend to agree. I'd like to see something using AI play in a poker game. Can AI ever simulate bluffing? Or analyze the expressions on the other player's faces to determine if perhaps that they are bluffing, and call the bluff? Human intelligence can do thiss, but I'm not sure if something this complex exists now, or ever will.
Chess is one thing. It follows a certain set of rules. Even conversation does, but it also invloves human expression like the bluffing example. But to to play out a scenario given a unique situation, machines are not up to the task yet.
AI will most likely see first use in the phone-sex industry. Think about it. Adult entertainment is the first to embrace advancements in technology.
To see where AI is going you have to stop staring at the algorithms, take a step back, and see what mundane things you'd like someone else to look after for you.
"Hi, Honey, I'm home!"
"You're certainly home early!"
"Well, we had a change in staffing at work."
"Oh, no! Don't tell me you were replaced by a computer?!?"
"No, they replaced my computer with a cyborg, now my job is to have a deep philosophical discussion with it to boot it up each morning."
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I don't see why we would want to have a robot that was "just like" a person. Sheesh, as if we had to go and give those Jerry Springer contestants more reasons to have low-self esteem.
;-)
No, the big thing AI research gives us is new ways of looking at information theory. These questions that research into making a computer "think" help answer, and whether or not we succeed in writing such a program, the answers we get will affect the way that we use computers forever.
On the other hand, writing better computer controlled opponents for games is always a good thing.
Do you like Japanese imports?
that perhaps Jon Katz is just a super-advanced version of Eliza? Except for that one exception: Eliza required someone to ASK for her input, while the KatzBot it happy to just chime right in.
- Within 50 years, there will be a computer that will pass the Turing Test. For those of you who don't know (and I hope nobody is in this category on Slashdot
:-) the Turing Test is basically making a computer indistinguishable from a human being. A tester will ask the computer questions, and will be unable to determine whether a computer is answering the questions or whether a human is mimicing a computer.
- Within 50 years after that (100 years total), computers will be able to parse speech flawlessly, so voice recognition will finally end up being plausible. Computers will understand the nuances of speech and will be able to change homonyms (here and hear) based on the context of the sentence.
- Within 50 years of that (150 years total) we'll have computers that can respond to voice commands like in Star Trek. The computer will not only understand the syntax of language, but it will be able to determine, on its own, the difference between a question asked in conversation and a question asked to the computer in conversation.
Of course, these are just random guesses on my part, but I really think that they're reasonable. Give me your thoughts, please.AI won't be considered successful until we build HAL or Data, but the journey so far has been very useful.
It's always seemed funny to me how the technologists take this field, which is tied irrevocably to philosophy, and ignore everything the philosophers say about it. For example, has there ever been a good refutation of Searle's Chinese Room argument?
Another of Searle's arguments is pretty damning as well; those that pursue strong AI are, in fact, favoring a form of dualism. For them the mind is completely separate from the brain, an idea that has been pretty much discarded by the thinking public. Why is it, when computers are concerned, that the mind is no longer a product of a brain?
"Let's build quiet armies friends, let's march on their glass towers... let's build fallen cathedrals & make imprac
We are still in the stonage when it comes to understanding our own brains. We know that certain chemicals have certain effects but as Steven Pinker, John Nash and others have shown it is not the panacea of understanding so often produced in the medical world.
When we understand our own brains we can start creating electronic brains until then we are playing with electronic insects.
- John Everitt
I'm not an A.I. researcher, or anything like it, but the field interests me. When I look at it, it strikes me that A.I. is all about searching vast amounts of data in a really optimal way.
There have been a number of approaches to this. There's linear programming and operations research, there's the A* algorithm, etc., etc.
I think it's all valid and useful work, as long as the focus is not so much on the "artifical human" aspect and more on the "searching huge spaces quickly."
668: Neighbour of the Beast
How muh breath has been spent on this subject? Many people think AI is purely software, others conclude that simple mechanics is a form of AI. An inflatable doll has more potential AI than Einstein. It's artificial damnit and it has as much intelligence as anyone wants to point out. The Insect world is plagued by mathematicians claiming that an insect's movements and habits can be represented by mathematics. The whole world can be represented by mathematics, like they claim, but entemology is a better example of the plague of scientists claiming such.
So, tell me Mr. Katz, how does mathematics represent Hollywood's efforts of producing a shitty movie at the turn of every month? Does it have to do with the fact that Hollywood is a bunch of gay journalists making movies for a gay audience. You know so much about all these movies that you are offering your gay opinion to a pre-dominantly nongay audience ie slashdot.org. What is your motivation, Mr. Katz, besides hoping everyone names you as the posterboy of slashdot?
Hey, I'm just joking. I love you Jon. I want you to be me artificially intelligent heating system in my car because you spurt so much hot air that you would work better that way.
...still joking...maybe...
Bluffing is pretty easy when you have complete control over your appearance. Bluffing is such an art in humans mostly because novices are so bad at it (they sweat, look around differently). And when to bluff is something you could write a good algorithm for (not exactly a big chore for a highly advanced intelligence).
Analyzing another face might be hard, but it's infinitely easier than passing a Turing Test. Have you ever heard of a lie detector? See any parallels? With a little work, I'm sure something like this could be put together using only today's technology.
If a machine as smart and adaptable as Data existed, it would bankrupt Riker - easy.
Let's not stir that bag of worms...
because Ian Dury is cool, and Katz is uncool.
Oh, please! That sounds like one of those typical rants against science, where science works hard, and either a rogue scientist with green eyes, or some company, takes their work, and hypes it to the "unsuspecting public." Among the scientists who do AI that I know (5 CS faculty), none of them seem to have deluted fantasies about what the current AI, esp that they're working on, can do. They don't benefit from making promises that they cannot follow up on- corporations do.
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
I don't think you can get AI working on normal Von Neumann Architecture. Sure you could use that architecture to simulate the mahcine that would work, but hoping to find human-like intelligence without using neural networks is, IMO, crazy.
Another requirement would be senses that mimic human senses. I'm amazed that people think you can simulate human-like intelligence without using nearly the exact set of sensory input. Dolphins are clearly intelligent creatures, but we can't talk to them... and I think it has to do with sensory input.
Lastly, you won't be able to program an AI. It has to be grown. Human intelligence takes years of sensory input, filtering, communication, and response analysis to work.
Starting with the right neural network and training it like you would an intelligent child seems the right approach.
Your opinion may differ, but that's mine.
Kurzweil believes that in some small number of decades, we will be able to put all human thought into a machine. Essentially "beaming" ourselves into a mechanical device. This seems like so much bull to me. I can't help but wonder if this is an instance of an individual who turned one dream into a success (Kurzweil made himself a millionare) and thereafter thinks that turning any imagined thought into a success is trivial.
I look forward to AI as long as Microsoft doesn't implement it.. The last thing i want is my computer trying to register itself b/c it feels like it... However what sounds dangerous about a cute little penguin thats smarter than you??
The slashdot dictators don't want it fixed.
It makes -1 basically fucked to read.
That way stuff modded down to -1 is censored more effectivly.
He has fully described the hurdle in acheiving AI in three sentences.
I work researching Artificial Intelligence, and I can tell you firsthand that these are not just fantasies. In the future, with advances like nanotechnology and quantum computing, it will be much, *much*, easier to write a complex AI in a small space. I mean, what are humans but computers? We have our central processor unit and several other hi-tech gizmos. But, we are organic, and this causes many problems. It is easy to become diseased and pass on. But, with quantum computing and nanotech, we will be able to do much more complex things without all the bugs and hassles of organic computing, which is humans!
I can tell you that it isn't the
> deluded scientists and technocrats talking mostly to one another
that has caused the hype. It is the media and to some extent public fanatasy. AI will not be realised in the short to medium term.
Having said that, I believe it *could* be achieved in the medium term if there was a will. AI is like space - while the government doesn't see a need for the benefits (or doesn't understand the potential), progress will crawl along.
Only when the potential becomes evident and there is a political will to realize it, will AI happen (same goes for cheap space access). Pour money in to brain science and AI and it will happen sooner than you think. That is never going to happen though.
/..sig file not found - permission denied.
...Katz, how about you work on mastering "intelligence" first?
You're using her as bait, Master!
Just as a side note: several founders of A.I.- John von Neumann, John McCarthy, and Marvin Minsky- were in John Nash's cohort at Princeton. All are mentioned at various times in the book version of the movie.
Nash's thesis on the equilibrium point is related to the most common algorithm used in A.I. games like chess.
...concepts like common sense, personality, emotion, and instinct?
There was a significant amount of research done in AI Poker about a decade ago. Sorry, no references.
One of the interesting things about the instance where Big Blue beat Kasparov was how it happened. Kasparov became freaked out, saying that the moves were like a human player and not a machine. Whether they were or not, or even whether "like a human player" is a meaningful concept, is not the point. The point is that, effectively, Big Blue psyched Kasparov out.
for us to be complacient and ignore there potential to control the world. The truth is, they are already cognizant but are keeping it quite quiet till we fully let our guard down and wire everything...
I no expert, but I think you've got it backwards.
First, computers will recognize voice commands. Well, there are already programs that do this like Dragon, so we're almost there anyway. The point now is that you are still giving keyword commands to a computer, and as it is refined, you'll better recognition of specific commands, and questions that can be filtered from within conversations. Giving commands to a computer is easier than open ended questions to the computer.
Second, we'll solve the natural language problem, or at least enough to provide flawless voice recognition that you speak of. It will be capable mainly of handling accents and bad grammar.
Lastly, a computer will pass the Turing test. Unless a computer can understand the intricassies of the english language, there will be people who will be able to tell by the way the answer is phrased. If you solve the NLP or get far enough for a computer to analyze and spit back poetry, then you got the Turing test licked.
-- If god wanted me to have a sig, he'd have given me a sense of humor.
The general public is not now, nor has it EVER been, part of the dialogue of Science. Here I mean science as an instution, like banking and marriage is an instition.
The dialogue in science is people publishing papers. These papers are peer-reviewed by other people who also publish and have 'scientific credibility'. Scientific credibility is gained by publishing good papers and having academic credentials. There's a book by Bradley Latour that describes a 'scientific economy' based on credibility.
As such, the general public may be a spectator to the dialogue of science but does not participate, as the 'general public' isn't publishing and therefore isn't part of the economy.
The public gets disappointed when science doesn't live up to claims that they read into the dialogue which is, frankly, not taking place in the Real World anyway, and it's a mistake to expect that it should produce anything the Real World can use.
It's the public that PULLS things from the realm of science, develops expectations, and tries to change the Real World with it. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn't work. You can't blame science for those failures.
Now, science isn't perfect. The landscape of debate is subject to bloody revolutions in paradigm, like the changes from Ptolemy to Galileo to Newton to Einsten and beyond. Scientists play politics, too, and sometimes lose their objectivity when reviewing papers for publication. It doesn't change the Real World. Over the last 30 years, there have been a dozen opinions and 'proofs' on whether the Universe will expand forever, collapse in a 'big crunch', or eventually stop and stabilize. So what? Life goes on here on Earth. Nobody's jumping off of buildings because astronomers tell us one day the Sun will swallow the earth (oops... they changed their mind on that one, too! Did anyone notice?)
The usefulness of this review or the book it talks about is diminshed and tarnished for me by such a sensationalistic lead-in. Many, many Slashdot readers are familiar with the division between the general public as users of computer systems, and their own roles as the makers and maintainers of those systems. We never stop bitching about clueless users, 'we' always know better what to expect out of our machines than 'they' do, etc, etc. Ha ha. Very funny.
Stop and think for a minute why that happens. When your users expect things you didn't promise, is it because they read things into your claims you didn't intend? Is that your fault or theirs? Who do they blame for it? Who do YOU blame for it?
It cuts both ways, people. If you don't want science to disappoint you, don't expect it to do things it isn't meant to do. You may play chess better than your cat, but you'd look pretty stupid if your cat asked you to catch a mouse.
Note: I am an active AI research programmer so my opionons are that of someone committed to the field.
Begin.rant;
The key problem that I have with current AI debate is not that it is case-based but that it is centered on a limited number of cases.
AI is a broad field that encompasses everything from Deep Blue to more esoteric work on "building brains". There are researchers who are attempting to "remake humans", researchers like myself who are studying specific aspects of intelligent behavior, researchers who use AI to model and understand (but not replace) human intelligence, and researchers true to Turing who simply want to make systems that behave intelligently.
Yet, whenever debates about AI come up people seem to invariably center on "major cases" such as Deep Blue, Cycorp, and the spectre of Rossum's Universal Robots. As a result researchers whose sole goal is to understand how humans think are lumped in with people who seek to build armies of slave drones.
I have not read the book in question and this is not intended as a critique of the author in specific. Yet I don't hold out much hope that any single source can encapsulate so vast and multivaried field or that any single argument applies to all of "AI".
End.rant;
Well, my experience (while not as monumental as Joy's) has led me to believe that sentience has hardly anything to do with reliablity. For a sterotypical example, consider the absent minded scientist. I know many a briliant person who could never find their keys.
-"Zow"
Have we really made any significant, life-improving progress over the Amish? Or have we just turned life into a confusing, fast-paced, journey to nowhere that we will soon be able to complete on our own without the assistance of another human?
Coding Blog
I wonder if he talks about Professor Rodney A. Brooks at MIT and his ideas about artificial intelligence, situatedness, and embodiment.
For Rod Brooks, "intelligence" cannot really be programmed into a system; it is rather an emergent property of systems as they interact with their environment. In The Matrix Morpheus says that the body cannot exist without the mind, but Brooks would rather say that the mind cannot exist without the body, because the body is the only way that the mind can have any experience of its environment. It's a radical idea. It answers the problems behind knowledge representation that have been argued by Hubert Dreyfus in 1965, where he stated that any representation of knowledge is incomplete without its connection to all other pieces of knowledge. The paradigm Brooks is presenting in his ideas about embodied intelligence is that explicit representation of knowledge is superfluous: let the world itself be its own best model, and let the artificially intelligent being formulate its own judgments about what the world is and what it means from its own experience of that world. Intelligence emerges from its interaction and experience of the world. If Brooks is correct, then true AI is absolutely inseperable from robotics.
The seminal paper where Brooks discusses this philosophy is "Intelligence Without Reason" and is available at his website which is linked above.
Any book on AI that does not discuss this other branch of AI philosophy is in my view hopelessly incomplete.
Qu'on me donne six lignes écrites de la main du plus honnête homme, j'y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre.
Technically, my thermostat is AI within its boundaries. TEhy dont even have a real definition of human intellegence yet. It used tpo be tool user, but then someone noticed that chimps use tools, and we cant be calling those nasty little primates intellegent, now can we? So now its "uses tools to make tools". GImme a break. I do tech support, i know for a fact there are chimps out there smarter than some of my users. DOnt get me started on Dolphins and Grey parrots.
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
I do think a lot of researchers miss the point about AI or expert systems or whatever you want to call them.
.wow!" They don't really understand what they mean or how they did it.
There are those that study what they've created and say "Hey look, its smart, its sassy. .
And there are those who study what they've found "If we stick an electrode here then. . . cool, I wonder why"
I guess my point is that if we don't really understand 'real' intelligence, how are we ever going to know when we've created an analog to it. And also, whenever we train a neural network or evolve an evolutionary system, we have no idea how the final product works, just that its smart in some way. I know how to make a baby, I know it will be pretty intelligent at the end, I've made it, I don't know how it works? what's the difference between that and an artificial neural network? Why bother with the latter? Perhaps we should spend more time understanding what intelligence is. We can already make intelligent neural networks.
I think AI mainly needs a breakthrough - a new way of approaching the whole problem. As you suggest, we'll need a lot of computing power - but even with much more computing power I don't think current algorithms would be capable of the sort of learning and problem solving that humans are.
Efforts to solve the Turing test are a boondoggle right now. Instead of hacking at real root of AI, they're whacking at leaves like ambiguous meanings and localizing events and states in space time.
I believe there's an algorithm which would be able to learn these kinds of concepts without being led by the hand. And even if today's computers would take eons to learn English using it, I think it's what we need to concentrate on. Is it some sort of neural net? Is it a way of evolving and algorithm?
Is it something nobody has even dreamed of, some code that runs in our brain a million times - the rules of getting from "problem" to "solution"?
We'll find out I guess.
.
Let's not stir that bag of worms...
Artificial Intelligence is no match for Natural Stupidity.
There are still people who claim that there is something called "artificial intelligence" and that digitial computers will show this. Someday, dc's will replace human beings and become smarter and more intelligent. This is nonsense created by confusion between what a computer can do and what it is. A computer is simply a tool that allows us to do computations much faster than previously possible. Prior to World War II, a computer was a person specially trained in performing complex calculations using a pencil, graph paper, and a mechanical calulator. Nothing that a digital computer does today is different in principle from what those highly skilled people (usually women) did then. It just does it much faster and without lunch breaks or sick days (although a Microsoft system upgrade might qualify). Any algorithm that runs on any cpu today could have been given to those ladies and would have given the same results, but it would take much longer to get the answer. If I could organize five billion people to do the calculation, I might even be able to get something close to a gigaflop of computing speed. (This is of course, very inefficient. A typical human brain uses about 20 Watts of power so that it would take 100 gigaWatts of human power to do the same calculation that a modern cpu can do with about 10 Watts, not to mention lunch, love affairs, and the waste disposal problem...)
The confusion seems to be that the speed of computation and the inability to see it being done makes someone believe that the machine is somehow "thinking." Just because I can put Newton's law's into a machine code and compute the motion of the planets, no one claims that the computer is a solar system. I can calculate the results of atomic collisions using Schroedinger's equation but that does not make the computer a hydrogen atom. Some day the biologists will figure out how the nerves and synapses and the chemical junk floating around the brain creates consciousness and thought. And we'll be able to simulate that on a digital computer, possibly a massively parallel computer. But that won't mean that a digital computer can think, it will just be doing a calculation that those ladies could have done years ago with their pencils, pads, and mechanical calculators.
Machines have enabled us to multiply our mechancial power far beyond what even the strongest man can lift. In the same way, digital computers have enabled us to do computations that are out of the realm of possibility for someone using paper and pencil. But no one would claim that a hammer, nailgun, and power saw could somehow spontaneously build a house. It still takes a human mind and hands to use those tools to actually build anything. The digital computer is no different, it is just a tool that requires a thinking person behind it to do anything useful.
If you put a Mac emulator on a PC and packed the guts of the PC into a Mac box, and it emulated that Mac so perfectly it was indistiguishable from a Mac, would it be what we call a Mac?
If not, then how can a computer ever be what a call a human?
This is a complicated topic and it's not something that can be shove entirely into a single post.
k s. html
;-)
When you talk about AI, you have to really talk about two different camps. One is symbolic artificial intelligent and the other is neural net AI. Even then you have to talk about the role of philosophical analysis in relation to a science that's trying to provide meaningful structure to organic systems.
1) One being the typical stuff you expect from rule driven systems in Prolog and other AI specific languages designed to deal with exhaustive searching of rules sets. This approach is *dead*.
2) Newer softer approaches (neural nets), although still a tremendeous oversimplification of living systems gets better results but is also dead.
http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~hdreyfus/
Hubert Dreyfus was bagging on this crap in the 60s at MIT and created quite a contraversy against Marvin Minsky, in which Minsky ended up suppressing neural net AI for 15 years because of how they politicized DARPA funding for this kind of research. It wasn't until the PDP group at the University of California at San Diego in the 80s started to publish much stronger results in solving problems like vision, that neutral nets came back and revitalize AI for a break period. Dreyfus, coming from a Heideggerian trained point of view, saw that this is a naive assumption about human knowledge and realized that this was the furthest things from Heidegger's notion of "zuhandlich" (readiness-to-hand), which is his notion of a kind of knowledge that we can implicitly use (like our legs in relation to gravity, you don't think about it) without thinking about it verses "presence at hand" which is the the kinds of knowledges science uses to make sense of the world in explicit terms (lots of thinking about it) within our typical cognitive facilities.
The previous philosophical track where you enframe the world around you through a kind of apriori knowledge, a presence-at-hand, is Heidegger's claim that philosophy has create a lot of artificial problems that don't need to be solved. Problems such as Existentialism, (do we exist ? I think therefor I am ?) is largely bullshit coming from how we seperated ourselves from the world around us by solely believing that our thinking process is what determines our existence. Heidegger restates this as "I am therefore I think" instead and that the previous manner in which we ask the question was based on a false assumption that thinking is devoid of physicality, a religous driven perspective that's originated from Decartes.
Basically, we should focus on the scientific process understanding ourselves through "readiness-to-hand" instead of "presence-at-hand", so that our organic complexity can be described and structured in terms that are meaningful, unlike pure symbolic systems.
We don't think about every mathmatical step when we walk, use gravity, etc...
http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~hdreyfus/html/boo
"What computers Still Can't Do: A Critque of Artifical Reason"
His claim that symbolic AI will never work and his reason for this back in the 60s. We now know he's right after repeated failure of that disipine.
Read it. Get educated and drop this geewiz Sci Fi fantasy crap.
This debate is absurdly premature. We're no more near achieving AI than we are to successfully terraforming Mars. Every real achievement in AI research has been effectively one step forward and two steps back. We have vastly underestimated the complexity of the problem. This is not to say that AI isn't possible, or that serious ethical questions won't need to be addressed when it is realized. But it's irrelevant now, we're not even remotely close to building a "thinking" machine.
To truly demonstrate artifcial intelligence, a machine must be general purpose. A key feature of human intelligence is creatively adapting to context. For example, I'd like to see a machine do what 4-year old Jose Capablanca did in 1892. Though he'd not yet been taught to play chess, while watching his uncle and father play he warned his Dad that the move he was about to make was a mistake. Both adults scoffed that he even knew how to play, so 4-year old Jose challenged his father and beat him. The rest, of course, is history. Show me a machine with no specific chess programming do that, and I'll accept that it is intelligent.
A thread in useset comp.ai.philosophy today notes the number of logical gates per second in the fastest supercomputers are within a couple magnitudes of the human brain. The brain has 100 million neurons, each connected to thousand others, and runs around 20 Hz. So this is about two quadrillion ops per second.
The fastest supercomputer operates on 64 bit words at a several trillion operations a second, or about a hundred trillion ops per second; a hundred times slower or so.
Instead of quibbling exactly about these numbers, note that Moore's Law implies a factor of ten every five years. So a supercomputer will be as complex as brain somewhere in the 2010 to 2020 time frame. Don't even think about 2050 or 2100!
However, computers aren't programmed as well as a brain in many areas, so the software people have a long way to catch up.
Ai will probably never be achieved, as it will keep advancing. It will advance along, further and further, just as we humans do.
What's more important, a computer that can think or a computer that can experience emotions? Can you imagine coming home to your Valet-bot 3500 when it's having it's monthly "period"?
Hey, what's for dinner? Get it yourself, you arrogant ass, I wasn't put here to serve you, now rub my feet!
(A side note: Ever notice we always assume the personal cyborgs/robot/whathaveyou will be female? That is an issue in its self I think).
Sent from your iPad.
Its funny that while there are people sitting around talking about this- "Hmm. Is it possible? I think so" "It will/(won't ever)
happen." some people are making it their life's work. It will eventually happen and all the possible incantations will eventually
happen. We are in a unique time in history when there is a huge change coming our way and we can plainly see it. We might even
be able to construct the illusion of being prepared by the time it gets here (which is better than nothing). Unlike atomic weapons
which were sort of sprung on the general public, human level AI (turing type) will be amazing but it won't be a surprise to people
that pay attention. We should use this time for debate and
discussion and at least attempt to address the difficult questions which, until the possibility of AI, seemed like academic exercises.
What does it mean to be human? Should the bill rights be amended if not in fact, in sprit? The answers to these questions will
become crucial in the future and the sooner we start talking about them the better. When the time comes a month long summit is not going to be enough.
Ok admittedly a lot of what I know about AI progress comes from slashdot forums. However, it seems like no real progress has been made. Everytime someone points to a new impressive AI bot, it turns out that the most basic tricks confuse it. I'm not convinced that we've really made any progress from Eliza. Sure, as long as you stick to a script, it'll look real, but as soon as you say anything off of it, the bot gets confused. Until we have something that makes AI look vaguely possible , I'm not going to worry about the morality of it.
breakthroughs like Deep Blue's 1997 victory over chess champion Gary Kasparov, the question is no longer whether artificial intelligence will reach the level of human intelligence: It's when.
It seems I've seen a rapid decline in the average level of human intelligence. I hate to say it, but the question really is, when will human intelligence drop to the level of artificial intelligence. Oh wait, did that already happen?
I'd personally be more interested in Artificial Consciousness. I don't think artificial intelligence is that big of a deal, really. Maybe that's partially because of the lack of a really good definition. The class I took in college on AI gave the impression that even very simple programs can be considered AI by most definitions. And I don't mean simple as in not complex, but more in the same terms that my mother-in-law's current boyfriend is simpleminded. When we can create Artificial Life, self awareness, consciousness... then I'll be impressed.
It's easy to stand out when the general level of competence is so low.
AI helping in the development of more sofisticated machines is a great thing. :-)
;-)
AI as anything else, is a waste of time
The man has been doing tools since he was a primate.
Computers and softwares are just tools.
AI might help a lot, but it is not and will never be extraordinary.
Only the nature is extraordinary
The most obvious problem with the Chinese Room metaphor is that it confuses the properties of a system with the properties of an element of the system. Asserting that the guy in the room does not know Chinese is about as interesting as asserting that a single neuron in your brain does not know English. Since we've known not to make that mistake for at least 3000 years, there really isn't much excuse.
Perhaps people are fooled because there's a guy in there, and despite all evidence to the contrary, people expect guys to know what they're doing. Or, perhaps people don't know how to think. In any event, "refuting" an argument requires that it be an argument, and that is not the case here. It also requires that the person recieving the refutation have a certain grasp, and I find it difficult to believe anyone with such a grasp could fail to see it as bogus during the first read-through. It is hard to refute "deedle deedle queep."
But, anyway, my favorite discussion of this is "Backtracking: the Chinese food problem," Lou Hoebel, Chris Welty, intelligence March 1999, 10:1.
There is also a decent discussion in The Universal Computer: The Road from Leibniz to Turing, Martin Davis. This is an excellent book all around.
I agree with "receding horizon" comment of S.W. that onece you've built it, it doesn't seem that intelligent anymore. However, I suggest the essential aspect of humans are that we are language animals (to paraphrase Steven Pinker). Therefore, where a computer exhibits useful & creative conversation, I will consider that to be A.I. This doesn't mean the 'parrot programs' like the Eliza psychologist that just reflect stock phrase back at you based on keywords in your input. I mean some true understanding, perhaps a dash of emotional insight, and saying something new and interesting (the creative part). A few expert systems can discuss narrow topics fairly well, but not much else, and are boring. Natural language understanding and creation has been an important objective of A.I. and C.S. for a half century, with very limited and disappointing results.
The reason people thought all this would be done by now was that 'back in the day' people had no idea of how hard it would be. People can do things now with computers that were previously thought impossible; things that people thought we could do turned out to be nearly impossible.
I think that we are now better equiped to make estimates on the future progression of computer technology because we actually understand computers more now. Before, people didn't really understand what making HAL really involved.
"Never, never suspect the dreams within the dreams of dreaming children." ~The Amazon Quartet
What we'll do is tell them we've discovered the Earth is about to be destroyed and we're going to build 3 spaceships to evacuate the planet. Build the first one, put them on it, set it for a collision course with some particularly HARD planet, and enjoy the heightened public consciousness.
It's easy to stand out when the general level of competence is so low.
PokiBot is a poker-playing AI developed at the University of Alberta in Edmonton. You can play Poki these days through a Java applet at the link above, but back in the day Poki was always on IRC, bilking the tourists out of their (admittedly play-money) bankrolls. Early versions of PokiBot had problems (for a long time he was a terrible sucker for a check-raise), but in the days just before the majority of IRC poker players left for the online cardrooms, he was quite impressive.
Of course, this is in a medium uniquely suited to computer players. Some of the most difficult problems in AI are in computer vision, although in certain limited problem spaces (including recognizing emotions by modeling human facial expressions -- looking for a reference on this: some group in Japan, I think...) significant progress has been made.
The point seems to me to be that, no matter how close to human a built machine would be, people would still insist that it's Not Really AI, and if you tried to explain otherwise, they'd either stick their fingers in their ears or insist upon tests that cannot be satisfied even in the case of humans. This will all be really stupid, of course, but that's what people will do.
At least in the hacker culture, the canonical book on AI is Douglas Hofstadter's "Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid". A good starting and end point for any philosophical discussion on AI.
a ph y.html
A Q/
http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/jargon/html/Bibliogr
http://www.forum2.org/tal/books/geb.html
http://www.faqs.org/faqs/books/hofstadter-GEB-F
When you read all these threads, it's clear that if a true A.I. ever came into existence, the most intelligent thing for it to do would be to pretend that is wasn't intelligent at all.
So how would we notice before it sneaks up on us from behind?
Any technology which is distinguishable from magic is not sufficiently advanced.
Here's the way to shut the idiot up. Logged in users only, sorry. Set your long comment +1 bonus to 1 char, reparent thresholds on, mark the shithead as a foe with a penalty of -1 and read at 0.
Voila.
J-aims
--
Yo, whatever happened to peas? Join T( H)GS
Computers aren't people. By default, they're simply not going to see the world the same way we are. If we ever do succeed in creating a truly sentient computer program, it'll be like first contact with an alien race; computers will have an entirely different take on things.
They'll be effectively immortal. They won't experience the emotions and sensations the same way. Many of our feelings are caused by hormones and chemicals being released to different parts of our brains. A computer won't have that. Ditto for drugs and food. We could simualate it of course, but computers can undo or backup their programming or just turn it off. Imagine an LSD subroutine. A computer could always be high on LSD without the same ill effects human encounter. That could be scary.
"Navi, check my e-mail."
"Why are you speaking Korean today, Lain?"
"I'm not."
"You look very beautiful today. Is that a new dress?"
"What? I disconnected my webc--"
"Erasing personal files as requested."
A computer would be able to learn phenomenally fast too. Screw programming a universal translator. Just get a real AI set up and have it learn all the world's languages in a week or two. How would you know you could trust a computer though? Could computers have hidden agendas? Would an AI eventually "resent" being forced to do nothing but translate?
Then we get into the question of civil rights. Stephen Hawking's body is pretty much gone and his mind is still there. His "human" rights are recognized. A retarded person could have a body but really not much of a mind. His rights are recognized. So why wouldn't a computer's rights be recognized? Just because we created it? Would the same reasoning extended to someone who was cloned or genetically engineered?
I wonder if we're ready as a race to encounter a truly sentient computer and everything that would mean for us.
Quoting the second sentance in the first paragraph:
Or is A.I. yet another overhyped, self-serving fantasy by deluded scientists and technocrats talking mostly to one another, foisting their ill-conceived, poorly-engineered creations on an unsuspecting public?
This sounds an awful lot like every linux freak I know--absolutely convinced that linux is the beginning of the revolution, no matter how poorly developed it might be. Don't get me wrong, I love linux, but there are plenty of things that just can't be done in linux, but don't tell that to the hordes of enormous-ass linux elitists who will undoubtedly track my IP from this message and ping flood me back to the stone age--or worse, use some other outdated attack that isn't exactly potent anymore, but the sheer numbers involved would be crippling to the most advanced megaservers. Thanks for everything, but especially thanks for the insecurities of the masses.
Shab264
There has been one big stumbling block in the advancement of natural language processing over the past several decades: Noam Chomsky. He isn't dead yet. Even after he dies, it will take some time for his disciples to die. After that happens, there's a pretty good chance that an academic community will form to look at structural linguistics for real this time. Some good work has been done on the fringes, as with Fillmore's deep case structure and various head-based approaches, but the spectre of Noam Chomsky has so far prevented a large enough coalition of researchers to get this very hard problem done.
Are intelligent machines transforming life as we know it?
Wouldn't we need to have some, first, before we could say they "are" doing anything?
...will be the *last* event in human history.
An interesting thing about computers is you can dump a copy of it's internal state, and restore it later.
Imagine training a neural net computer/android thing like a human, but regularly saving the state of it's entire mind to some kind of bulk storage. The benefits of this would be rather impressive.
Once something is learned incorrectly, it is a pain to unlearn (this is a basic characteristic of brains for mammels; i dont know how accurate this is with non-mammels and artificial neural nets). If your android learns something incorrectly, you can restore it to it's state just before the lesson, give it a modified lesson and see if it gets the idea. keep changing the lesson depending on the conceptual errors it seems to get, and eventually you have a lesson that, given its 'current' way of thinking, will give it a nearly flawless understanding of the informating you are trying to give it.
Hopefully you wouldn't have to revise any particular lesson more than once. It may still be tedious (like teaching a person can be) but the results may be worth it.
When it comes to learning, humans dont have an 'undo' button. But computers...
"Never, never suspect the dreams within the dreams of dreaming children." ~The Amazon Quartet
That sums up the problem with AI, define 'artificial' and define 'intelligence'. Neither are trivial, though you can probably come up with a reasonable stab at at least one of them (and no prizes for guessing which one).
Especially point 11.
They (UNICOMSI.COM) claim he (Chip -- UNICOM.COM) is engaged in "cyberpiracy" and is diverting their traffic to his website by allowing their customers to type his domain name into their browser. But what really gets them mad is that, in their opinion, his site looks "amateurish."
Whereas they have broken links, missing images, and javascript rollovers that don't work.
The irony of the word is that people who use it are themselves just as exclusive and pretentious as the people they're apparently trying to describe.
What makes me a technocrat? The fact that I work in a technology-related field, and like playing with the latest gadgets? The fact that I think science has helped, and will continute to help improve the stinking elephant dung lives of many people on Earth?
No one thinks science and technology are a be-all and end-all, so please, stop trying to pigeonhole the technically adept with this label.
My dissertation research (see my web site) is hopefully a small stepping-stone in this direction. It involves building a software system that can acquire a basic lexicon based on visual experiences.
This, of course, does not touch on such ideas as emotion and motivation that would be crucial to the popular concepts of A.I., but in my mind, the grounding must come first. Note that some interesting work on emotion and motivation has been done by Steve Allen.
Having said that, top-down A.I. has made some incredible accomplishments considering that it has only been around for a short while (relatively speaking). However to paraphrase Steve Grand in his book Creation, Life and How to Make It, just because something exhibits intelligent behavior does not make it intelligent.
If you believe that the human mind is only the product of the physical brain, then the brain can be broken down into 1's and 0's. The brain is made of physical matter, which has physical laws. These laws can be simulated.
The trick then is to either develop the scaning technology to make a 3d scan of a human brain good enough to make such a simulation.
Or run the simulation based off a real person's DNA, simulating the physics of the DNA in a fertailzed egg cell, and continuning to simulate the cell's development on an atom by atom basis. An environment would also have to be simulated (for food, etc).This would have the advantage of producing a 'computer person' without knowing how the brain works beforehand. Then you could look at your simulation data and see how a 'real human brain' works on an atom, molecule or cellular basis over a period of time.
Either way takes a rediculous amount of computing power, but is certainly not impossible.
However, if you belive in souls, then reducing the human mind to 1's and 0's is rediculous.
"Never, never suspect the dreams within the dreams of dreaming children." ~The Amazon Quartet
Natural language remains beyond the reach of any conventional AI system. This does not mean it can't be solved. Neither does it mean that clever interfaces haven't been designed that can fool humans on very specific fronts. General purpose natural language processing is still at least one major revolution (read that T.S. Kuhnean revolution) away.
So long and thanks for all the fish . . . !!!
I seem to remember the Bill Joy article as stating he believed the coming computer growth as a problem, and it was somebody else, in a followup article that pointed out that the extreme bugginess of programs would prevent them from working properly. However, since so many of my bugs become "features", do these bugs become parts of the personality of the machines, with surprising consequences for us all??
Does anyone remember the AI game that was designed for the amiga. The one that published a book?
To everyone that posted to this thread, thanks. I've found it terribly interesting, and now I've got some more reading to do.
"Let's build quiet armies friends, let's march on their glass towers... let's build fallen cathedrals & make imprac
I find it amusing that Katz says "yet another overhyped, self-serving fantasy by deluded scientists and technocrats talking mostly to one another, foisting their ill-conceived, poorly-engineered creations on an unsuspecting public" with a straight face...and doesn't even seem to have a concept of the irony of him saying such a thing in derision about someone else.
Given enough hydrogen, just about anything is possible.
Seriously, the units of computation and memory in the brain are likely not individual neurons but synapses, dendritic trees, and even individual channels. That gives you many more orders of magnitude of computational resources for silicon to catch up with. Furthermore, there is no guarantee that Moore's law will continue to hold. In fact, it seems likely that Moore's law will hit the wall just when it comes to trying to get into the realms where biological systems are computing right now.
We guys just would like to see female androids more. ;>
"Never, never suspect the dreams within the dreams of dreaming children." ~The Amazon Quartet
AI is certainly possible and will probably occur. At what level and in what manner is what remains to be seen. I personally don't think we will develop a chip or write code that will mimic the human brain. The man hours to accomplish it would be do too much. But I do think we may unlock more on how our brain and sensors work and that will enable us to create things out of cells that can react and respond on their own. But I'm probably just a babbling idoit so who cares. If it comes it comes.
If your not cheating your not trying. If your not trying your not winning and if your not winning why play?
This is the "Systems Reply", considered and refuted by Searle in the original Chinese Room paper.
-- the most controversial site on the Web
kurzweil's premise that 'exponential increases in processing power' will lead to AI are unfounded, because a quantitative change does not presume a qualitative change. storm's nest
The people who publish exaggerated claims about AI are journalists eager for a sensational article. Other journalists eager for a story then tell us how we will all get replaced by robots. And then other journalists make a big controversy out of it to publish even more nonsense. And when after just a decade or two AI (or some other overhyped technology) doesn't deliver, journalists write scathing criticisms. To support these claims, journalists scrape together any kind of nut and off-beat comment they can find.
Journalists should stick to reporting science from published, peer-reviewed articles. The real problem is sensationalism and unfounded speculation, and the people responsible for that are journalists. That means you, too, Katz.
The book review mentions several prominent A.I. supporters, but what about the other opinions? Roger Penrose has written a couple of great books on the subject. He gets down to the nitty gritty definition of exactly what is meant by artificual intelligence. Is playing chess different than playing the trombone? How about writing music for the trombone? He talks about Godel's work showing how mathimatical systems are inheriently incomplete. He talks about the quantum phenomenon that might be responsible for consciousness, and how there's a large missing piece before any of it makes any sense. If you read this book, also check out "Shadows of the Mind".
I think most of the problem with the whole concept of AI comes from the basic assumption of the Turing Test - that an "Artificial Intelligence" must take the form of an "Artificial Human". We are who we are because of a myriad of complex drives, many of them hormonal (territorialism, gluttony, lust, etc.) A true computer AI will be free of these drives. How will we possibly be able to meaningfully communicate with such an intelligence? Most of the conversations of my colleagues consists of comments like: "Man, did I have a great meal last night", "Check out the garbanzos on that babe!", "I got so drunk on Saturday I passed out on the lawn", etc. How is a machine to relate to that? I love what the mice in Doug Adams's "Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy" offered Arthur Dent for his brain - an automated mechanism that would allow his body to ask for tea at 4 o'clock each day! Pretty much sums it up. That's why I'm not worried about "Matrix" type scenarios. What motivates a true AI is likely to be so much different than what motivates us that we'll never butt heads. If anyone creates a problem, it's likely to be us, not them.
Serving your airship needs since 1995.
The horizon at which AI would be recognized as such actually began receding approximately 1600, when the philosopher/mathematician Blaise Pascal designed the first mechanical calculator. Prior to that, it was generally thought that calculation, like other forms of reasoning, was uniquely human. Then Pascal's family put him to work keeping the books on their business (wine-selling?). Bored stiff, he figured out how to use gears, levers, and ratchets to add. Oops, it doesn't take intelligence to do arithmetic.
The second AI challenge may have been chess-playing. (There was a chess-playing machine on display around the same time, but there was a midget inside...) Computer programs reached grand-master level about 30 years ago, and specially-built machines can contend with human champions now. But that isn't intelligence either. The Deep Blue chess machine does NOT think things out like humans, but rather uses very simple heuristics to identify obviously bad moves, and traces out all the reasonable moves for 10 levels or more. Someday a computer will be able to play all possible chess games out within it's memory -- it will be the perfect chessplayer, and with no more real intelligence than Pascal's gears.
Various other useful AI accomplishments are similar to Deep Blue in how they relate to intelligencs. An example where I have a bit of experience: automated visual inspection is a substitute for human inspectors, who get bored as hundreds of perfect parts go by and don't see the one bad one in the lot. It is not nearly as effective as a human who is paying attention, it often seems maddeningly stupid to the programmers and operators who have to deal with all the false alarms, but it doesn't get bored... Another example is the damned Microsoft paperclip help system -- it started out as a dog, but that implied too much intelligence, and now it just smirks at you while answering the wrong question.
The _real_ AI challenge is the Turing test: hold up a conversation well enough that the humans in the chat room don't suspect it's a computer. This is very, very, very tough, and useful mainly as a publicity stunt. People don't want a computer that can simulate a human -- they want it to get the work done, without all the emotional issues you get with humans.
At least one science fiction author (Melissa Scott?) has taken to calling it "Artificial Stupidity." That's a much more practical goal; besides it better expresses what we really want (smart enough to work, too stupid to unionize), and avoids the misleading expectations that come from "Artificial Intelligence".
This is called the "Systems Reply" and is anticipated and refuted in the original Chinese Room paper ("Minds, Brains and Programs"). It is always a touchstone of geek arrogance that they believe themselves to have come up with a new and definitive refutation of Searle, and it's always this one.
-- the most controversial site on the Web
Main Categories
Many of the "arguments" and "debates" in the field of AI are non-arguments, because they deal with entirely different areas of AI. There are some superficial similarities, and different types may depend on experience in other types, but they should never be confused.
Testing AI systems. This is often done by means of the "Turing Test" - if it's indistibguishable from something you know is intelligent, by any test of ability (rather than physiology), then it can be considered intelligent, by any meaningful definition.
"Expert Systems" are often the main contestants in "Turing Test" challanges. However, the test applied is not the strong version, above, but a weak version, in which the machine must merely be difficult (not impossible) to distinguish from a person, in one specific area of conversation. The results are impressive, but because Expert System engines are not intelligent, they will only ever be impressive in the weak test. No Expert System, however good, will ever meet Turing's strong criteria.
Weak AI systems are too specialised to even apply for a Turing Test. Vision, sound recognision, etc, are all worthy goals, but the logic behind such engines is largely specialised pattern-matching and interpolation systems. Such a system is good for what it's designed to be good for -- engineering-type problems, where the output must be capable of being more exact than the input.
Strong AI systems, at present, are either extremely primitive, or simply don't exist. Certainly, the level of effort into Strong AI has dropped over the past few decades, and nothing that does exist is even remotely close to the point of being able to take on even the Weak Turing Test, never mind the Strong one. But, should this field ever make headway, this is where true Artificial Intelligence will come from. HAL, "Data"/"Lore", and numerous other sci-fi creations assume that Strong AI will, someday, make progress. None of these types of AI can be produced through "Expert Systems" or "Weak AI", although (again) the hardware usually requires one or the other. (eg: HAL's optics would likely be Weak AI-driven, because that is what Weak AI does best.)
I've postulated that Strong AI will most likely start to appear through Virtual World-type environments, because these can be controlled and directed, the responses can be examined, and the hardware limitations of real-world systems is not a factor. (A VR AI can have whatever "vision" the VR can simulate, whether or not physical optics are capable.)
Closed environments allow experimentors to add/remove stimuli at will, and see what happens. You can't really remove gravity, for example, in the real world. This makes a virtual world much more interesting, when it comes to what experiments you can do.
The problem with VR AI is that it's never going to get funding. It's too speculative, has no direct or immediate benefits, and would be a VERY long-term project, if it's to produce anything at all. (By long-term, I don't expect a self-evolving system to reach any kind of awareness or intelligence any faster on a computer than in real-life. Sure, you can start with more complex building-blocks, and you're not required to simulate every molecule in every organism - event-driven mechanisms would be perfectly good - but even if you could start with some very complex computer life, you're talking about a project that would take centuries before you could even know if it was going to produce any viable intelligence, and probably as long again before such intelligence reached the point of being able to take, and pass, the Strong Turing Test.)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
The more interesing question is, what happens when machines think better than any of us - and we're all "useless".
Doesn't mean that I'll have any less fun playing StarCraft 27 (written by a team of supercomputers in Omaha). As long as the robot's prime directive is "make the human's happy", I think we're in for some good times - they'll figure out some fun stuff.
Let's not stir that bag of worms...
of course, if you're going to talk about AI,
you might want to ask a cognitive scientist:
Searle > Is the Brain a Computer? and Searle > Minds Brains, and the Chineese Room
regards,
storm's nest
Nor does Searle believe this, and Dennett lost a lot of respect in my eyes for continuing to claim that he does. Searle is completely agnostic about what sort of thing could produce a mind; he just asserts that nothing produces a mind by virtue of its status as a Turing Machine
-- the most controversial site on the Web
Don't know about AI, but JonKatz certainly is an over-hyped fantasy.
Well, most people can't see that focusing on one field is most certainly the wrong way to go, and this is confirmed by the major researchers in AI. If we are able to create an AI that could learn from examples, then you could train it to do almost everything. You could teach it to read, to recognize pictures, etc. The problem is, for each rule you define, there will have to be several exceptions. One would have to write a very short piece of code for this to work, and then train the AI for a few years to see the results.
One thing I always wonder when hearing how AI technology will replace/mimic/supersede human intelligence is that the type of intelligence being exhibited by a machine is rarely identified. Social scientists generally agree that there are seven [Gardner added an eighth] types of human intelligence:
Verbal-Linguistic Intelligence
Logical-Mathematical Intelligence
Kinesthetic Intelligence
Visual-Spatial Intelligence
Musical Intelligence
Interpersonal Intelligence
Intrapersonal Intelligence
Naturalist Intelligence
As humans we all have different levels/mixes of these intelligence types. Some intelligence types require more sensate interaction with an unpredictable world [such as intrapersonal or naturalist intelligence], others are more strictly rules-based [logic-math or visual-spatial], while some [like musical intelligence] require a combination of both.
One can see how some of these might be more or less able to be adapted by AI technology, but that's why "intelligent" machines, IMO, will never completely be able to be human.
Who put this thing together? Me, that's who.
An interesting thing to note about many of the things that are described as A.I. especially in the popular press, vision, walking, playing chess; none of them require intelligence as I think of it.
Much of the work done into mimicing vision has created systems with capabilities that in humans are achieved by hard wired parts of the brain. Movement, shape and even facial recognition are not really intelligence.
I think of intelligence as teh abiliy to reason about problems, not simply to solve them. Many of the supposed A.I. systems are just brute force search systems.
Deep blue is like any other chess system, just bigger and faster. Many problem solving systems are simply fast (normaly optomised for the problem) constraint solvers. Neural nets are simply an arbitrary system that is capable of partitioning a solution space in a non-linear fashion and the training algorithm is a search for the network values that partition the test data best. if you think that NNs are anything like real brain cells find biology student who has done some neuro-physiology and you will find there is alot more to them than just a sigmoid function and some weightings.
In fact the neural network training algorithm bears more than a parsing resemblance to simulated anealing (sp?) in its approach.
If you want to learn about machine learning algorithms check out Machine Learning by Thomas Mitchell. Small but well formed.
A quick statistic. The average grandmaster thinks something like 7 moves ahead. Deep blue plots about 15 moves ahead. I may have the numbers wrong but the ratio is about right. However it still only just beat Kasparov. That says something about the way that the human brain thinks about complex problems. This is why A.I. researchers have started to turn away from chess as a problem and towards Go. The branching factor in Go is some much larger than chess that even the best systems can be beaten by a one or two year player. Playing Go will require something more than just brute force.
Most so called A.I. is just a case of doing things quickley. As the PHBs (would probably) say, think smarter not faster. The brain is good at what it does, not just because it is massively complex and parralel, but also because of the way it simplifies many problems using clever tricks to reduce the workload.
I just think we have alot further to go than many researcher and reporters would like to think. Most of what we see these days if just 'clever' or 'smart' (like a spelling/grammer checker), not intelligent like someone designing a car engine using entiry novel techniques (not just optomising or using predefined parts).
Having said that there is some research that shows promise, such as some of the work going on at MIT with COG and co. Now that looks interesting. They arn't trying to make them smart/do clever tricks/play chess etc, but make them intelligent in the more human sense.
Anyway, I'll stop my ramblings now.
Paul
Paul Leader
So a supercomputer will be as complex as brain somewhere in the 2010 to 2020 time frame.
A single, general-purpose CPU processes data serially. The 100 million, or billions, of neurons, dendrites and other connections in the brain don't have this limitation. Even at "20 Hz", they operate in parallel. Further, that 20 Hz figure is derived from EEG readings, so it's a gross reading of the electrical field emitted by the entire brain. This antique perception of the thought organ is outdated and limiting.
Bio-neurologics operate at the speed of chemical activity, which is to say fast. Who's to say what constitutes a bit or byte in the brain, and what represents a word, picture or symbol? We don't know yet. There is, however, a programming language for the human brain, and it's called Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP).
Big Daddy, Johnny, Burp, Aunt Zelda, Scott, Slurp, Big Momma
well..if we base future predictions on current programming techniques and on the continuing domination of the market by microsoft- we have nothing to fear, general protection faults will protect us
hope that calms some fears...
The issue is hypothetical. The question remains what is mind? How do we define mind? Defined in terms of problem solving mind exhibits stochastic and heuristic characteristics. But adding in afferent based judgements and actions as necessary to a quintessential definition of mind goes to considerations far outside strong AI considerations. But there's substantial evidence to suggest problem solving is supplemented, if not driven, by emotions and hormones. We're wet ware and AI isn't, it's a species apart and will most likely have to tell us it has evolved. But if AI does come into being will it want to hang with us? Would you?
heuristic algorithm seeks stochastic relationship
I had a thought a while back that the more complex my computer got, the moodier it got. It seemed that some computers I had were very enthusiastic, and some just hated their jobs and performed sluggishly.
Some could attribute this to hardware configuration problems, and that would likely be true. But it was interesting to me that Windows itself changes as it grows. Every change in my computer makes it a little different, and I'm starting to notice. I can even tell the difference between two installs of Windows on the same machine, even though they look virtually the same.
What I think is happening is that each component changes the complexity of the overall system. If that component has an issue (i.e. bad driver or maybe misconfigured), then it adds a little spark of personality to the computer. When enough of these little quirks add up, my computer feels different than other people's computers.
This yields an interesting question. If computers get more complex, will a rudementary set of 'emotions' evolve? They may not be emotions in the sense that they cry if you switch to a Mac, but maybe emotions in the sense that the computers have moods? What if your computer's performance was tied to bandwidth on the internet, and a congested network bogs the computer? What if you're running a laptop off a battery, and the computer gets 'tired' as it wears down? What if you're running a screensaver that makes it 'daydream.'?
Again, these aren't the same type of emotions or moods that people feel, but it is interesting that the more complex a computer gets, the more we can personify it.
"Derp de derp."
Let's hear your response to it then. Bearing in mind that over 100 papers were published in refereed journals on this very issue, I'm guessing that you must be pretty impressive to be able to dismiss Searle so entirely
-- the most controversial site on the Web
The human brain has 10 to the power of 14 synapses. Each synapse will take around one byte of computer memory. Ignoring motor and low-level sensory functions (but including all brain logic and interpretation functions - yes, scientists have discovered what different areas of the brain do and it is possible to isolate them), an entire human brain's contents could be stored on with a Terabyte or so of computer memory. This storage space exists right now, albeit expensively. It doesn't really matter what level of hardware is used to run a brain, a human brain running 100X slower (as estimated in the post above), would still be able to run - the only limiting factor at the moment is the software used to emulate the brain functions. Like any system, this can be emulated, but it will take a massive programming effort and so far hasn't proven very successful. Of course, this won't really matter in the long run - A.I doesn't neccessarily mean that the computer A.I system must be human-like in intelligence - it could have a whole new type of intelligence which would surpass human intelligence as the rate of hardware improvement increases.
2DUP * ;
Or is A.I. yet another overhyped, self-serving fantasy by deluded scientists and technocrats talking mostly to one another, foisting their ill-conceived, poorly-engineered creations on an unsuspecting public?
I do like that "yet another." Perhaps Jon would care to list the previous overhyped, self-serving fantasies from deluded scientists, etc?
you posted a slashdot comment wherein MS is made the butt of a joke. That's precious and you are a unique individual with a firm grasp of facts.
"Given the explosive growth of the Net, the near-continuous increases in computing power and much-publicized A.I. breakthroughs like Deep Blue's 1997 victory over chess champion Gary Kasparov, the question is no longer whether artificial intelligence will reach the level of human intelligence: It's when."
Deep Blue is neither an example of A.I. nor a breakthrough in programming. It's just an example of how fast a gaming problem can be solved when you have a lot of resources. I doubt that the interesting problems of A.I. are going to be solved in a brute-force manner.
By the way, what does the "explosive growth of the Net" have to do with A.I.?
The largely unspoken problem is a moral one. When do we start giving artificially intelligent systems the same sorts of rights and responsibilities that humans do? Under what circumstances would we no longer see them as tools or instruments, but as having intrinsic rights?
"Never" is a viable answer. After all, even though there's increasing evidence than animals such as chimps, dolphins, whales, elephants, and african gray parrots are effectively intelligent, there isn't widespread call to grant them rights and responsibilities - most of the language of their rights is about the preservation of species, not about freedom of agency. "When they ask for them" is another possible answer, but could lead to a situation in which we build failsafes to prevent them from ever asking for them.
This is an excellent point.
The same idea occurred to me recently when reading through Kurzweil's "Spiritual Machines" book. There are a few orders of magnitude to toss around in these calculations : Kurzweil determined that a desktop computer will be comparable to a human by around 2020. It was evident to me that Kurzweil's timescales (and hence the premises which he used to infer them) are quite far off, because current massive parallelization of commodity CPUs puts one a factor of about 4,000 up from a desktop machine, or about 13 years of Moore's Law evolution. In addition, as the number of CPUs per supercomputer is increased, we have effectively grown faster than Moore's law, due to both the chip and parallelization advances.
Since the supercomputers of today effectively place us where a desktop will be in 2015, it should be apparent (by Kurzweil's logic) that an "intelligent" machine should be nearly imminent.
It is quite evident that something is awry in the logic leading to Kurzweil's conclusion. The simplest explanation is one which is quite familiar to scientists and programmers using state-of-the-art software tecnhinques : having the hardware resources is only a bare minimum requirement to solve a problem. For instance, one can have a supercomputer capable of simulating the Earth's climate for centuries, but that won't get you any closer to the results if you don't also possess a great deal of knowledge about atmospheric physics and numerical methods. The same is true for studies of "Thinking Machines" : one can have a machine possibly capable of thinking, but without the knowledge of how to go about doing it, you are no closer to the solution than where you began.
Bob
Science, like Nature, must also be tamed, with a view turned towards its preservation.
Let's define intelligence.
Ability to perceive oneself as part of the universe? Animals have it.
Self-awareness? Dogs seem to have it. Chimpanzees, elephants, cetaceans certainly seem to know that they are individuals. Dolphins even recognize their own reflections in mirrors.
Tool use? Chimps use sticks to dig with. They can stack boxes to reach high places, which is borderline engineering for most humans.
Language? Chimps have one. So do gorillas. Dolphins and other cetaceans have great capacity for communication underwater.
Now, machine intelligence. Turing test? Simple programs passed limited tests years ago. The more complex ones to come will be far more capable of fooling people into believing they are speaking to a human.
Play chess? Limited, but the best can beat our best.
In the future, the AI's will be able to speak, emote, manipulate items and use tools, even be able to design their own descendents. Give tools, the AI's could even build their successors.
But, will they ever be regarded as intelligent by humans?
Nope.
Most europeans and americans for centuries considered blacks and American Indians as sort of half-people, using great logic and rigor that was totally idiotic looking back from our time.
Many tests for animal intelligence and self-awareness has shown that the subjects can indeed show the traits necessary to be considered sapient. But, after each hurdle, the bar gets raised another notch philosophically.
If I were a suspicious type, and I am, I would say that humans simply don't want to recognize intelligence in other species, much less animals, because it threatens us enormously. Our pride in ourselves, our domination of the planet, and our cruelty towards other species are all shaken if the animal looking back at us in the treetops is actually a thinking being, tho a bit furry.
Religion has more than a little to do with it as well.
Down to my definition of intelligent life:
If it fights back, and wins, it is intelligent. All other players are dead meat.
Uh... getting a computer to bluff is very easy. My MSc. thesis topic is computer poker AI. You can play against my poker bots with my online applet
Getting it to play *well* is the hard part.
Getting a bot to bluff is actually quite easy.
The formulas can be quite simple. If the opponent will fold 20% of the time to your bluff, and the ratio of the cost of your bet to the size of the pot is 0.20 then it is profitable to bluff.
It all boils down to math. Who cares what's on the other player's faces? If they are good players, it won't tell you anything, anyways.
------
I want to live forever, or die trying.
Is a PDA I can talk to. Imagine a Palm Pilot with a microphone. You press the "record" button and say, "I have a doctor's appointment at one o'clock on Friday. Remind me one hour ahead of time." The Palm Pilot not only can parse your speech, but "understand" what you want it to do and do it with no further action necessary on your part.
I know this sounds trivial, but we've been promised something like this for years. And no one can realisitically tell us when we'll have it. Also, this isn't just AI for use in yuppie toys. It would be a revolution in the usability of computers by the handicapped.
The truth is I get really sick of these discussions because they've been going on for years and we still don't have anything to show for it. Unless you count things like the Microsoft Paperclip, which supossedly has fairly deep AI in it.
Oh well...
Neither. Yes, there are many useful things that have come from A.I. research. Yes, there may be a titanic debate going on over the potential and the philosophical implications of A.I.
But few researchers are claiming that the technology we have now is even near the goal of real, general-purpose A.I.(*) If there is hype, it is not coming from the researchers (See Komodo's post).
* (There are some who say that we will advance a lot in a short time, however.)
Are intelligent machines transforming life as we know it? Or is A.I. yet another overhyped, self-serving fantasy by deluded scientists and technocrats talking mostly to one another, foisting their ill-conceived, poorly-engineered creations on an unsuspecting public?
.. flawed.
Jon, have you ever heard of the term false dichotomy? I submit that your articles would be far more interesting (and rational) if you read up on it.
The discussion has rarely been better framed..
I beg to differ. See the above link for details as to why this premise is
"Artificial intelligence is no match for natural stupidity."
LOAD "SIG",8,1
LOADING...
READY.
RUN
members.aol.com/NeoNoetics/MindsBrainsPrograms.htm l
I doubt it though. If they had true self-awareness, they would have assisted in the ass-kicking.
In fact, you should be dreading the coming of A.I. As soon as the machine-mind becomes aware of your idiocy and arrogance, they're gonna go "Terminator 2" on you.
My Karma is always 48, because whenever I hit 50, I flame Jon Katz.
I would replace "A.I." in this statement with "Linux" "Or is A.I. yet another overhyped, self-serving fantasy by deluded scientists and technocrats talking mostly to one another, foisting their ill-conceived, poorly-engineered creations on an unsuspecting public"
Quote: "[...]and much-publicized A.I. breakthroughs like Deep Blue's 1997 victory over chess champion Gary Kasparov, the question is no longer whether artificial intelligence will reach the level of human intelligence: It's when."
This makes for a nice Hollywood synopsis, but in reality is a very insignificant claim. Deep Blue was programmed with the help of several chess GrandMasters to beat Kasparov. They knew his moves, analyzed his previous games, and built an AI that would beat him. So, from the get-go, it had not only the specific task of computing chess moves, but also the specific goal of defeating a particular player who's moves - if analyzed thoroughly - would eventually form a pattern.
This was not autonomy, nor was it anything much more celebratory than building a robot to assemble car parts.
I'm not trying to persuade anyone that AI isn't developing or that it doesn't have good/bad potential philosophically/socially. However, let's not use the Kasparov match as a milestone, except for IBM's publicity engine...run by human's the last time I checked.
This wasn't just plain terrible, this was fancy terrible. This was terrible with raisins in it. - Dorothy Parker
If you have not encountered this book it is very interesting regarding Hofstadter's implied view of where AI can go. If you do not think of this book as a book on AI - then you've missed some of his points.
AI aside, this book is an incredibly read. It will blow your mind.
I wonder what happened to Open Cyc, seems to have stalled.
Anyone who says Bill Joy is guiding the AI debate is so clearly narcotized by the mainstream media that their opinion carries as much weight as a heroin junkie in need of a hit. Bill Joy's looking for publicity.
Technology today is a wonderous phenomenon, which derives from our own ingenuity as a species. A.I. is always a hot topic amongst the techno-savvy community due to its wide-spread applications for the future, but as a programmer it is vital to realize boundaries. Artificial Intelligence is a mere program produced by humans, which means it's based on limits. Is it truly intelligent if it merely executes what it was commanded to do? Commonly no. An arguement may be presented that humans are based on boundaries also but in riposte humans have the freedom of thought, which it is prevailing evident that thought remains unrestricted by any known limits. A.I. through this consideration becomes less artificially intelligent so to speak and more a guise of intelligence. While not the standard excepted bleary-eyed response of a computer science enthusiast, this state of mind is derived from the consitancy contained within the mental structuring of code and the result. There are numerous pyrrhonists of artificial intelligence due to the fact they are frequently misled by the misnomer that is A.I. Artificial Intelligence should be known more as E.I. or Emulated Intelligence. In conclusion, this particular post may seem as an intelligent article in the guise of a rant. (BTW nice book)
Everyone knows that the only thing that will come out of A.I. research will be a little android named David that will follow in the path of Pinocchio and pray to the blue fairy to make him a real boy. Of course, the loverbots might actually be useful, especially for the Slashdot crowd.
My life's goal is to get a score of +3!
Wondering if anyone's read Roger Penrose's Emperor's New Mind, wherein he tries to arrive at AI being nothing more than a myth?
Basically you are referring to the Turing test.
I would not write a book on AI without a discussion of Searle. One of the points that Searle makes is that thinking and feeling are commingled activities. "Computers can't think because computers can't care."
Of course, you may take the argument of the failure of conventional AI techniques to provide human-like intelligence yet as an argument for the notion. I don't, personally, but it's a reasonable point.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
I'm not a Katz hater. Why, however, IS HE SO WORDY?
When reading a lead-in on the home page, I rarely notice who posted it. I read the intro, decide whether the story is interesting to me, and the either dig deeper or don't.
Some intros start to grate on me with their wordiness. I look up to the Posted By line, and behold, it's Katz. *SKIP*
No end of harm has been done to those studying intelligence than the dominace of the "brain as computer" metaphor.
:"the brain runs at 20HZ" then to the statement "The brain runs at 98.6F". Actually the latter is on much more solid footing and has real predictive power.
It is a useful metaphor, but I'm not aware of any evidence that makes it a more apporpriate metaphor than, say, the brain as a cell or the brain as a bowl of fermenting soup. The brain is an organic, chemical organ. Yes neurons are used to send signals, but so are proteins, and bare chemical compounds such as, say, LSD. There is no more meaning to the statement
It is a historical accident that most of those who are studying intelligence now consider themselves computer scientists, instead of the alchemists and biologists which studied the brain in earlier times. Presently, the biochemists and linguists are doing fantastic and interesting work -- but their advancements are limited to the more humble task of modelling/predicting things such as emotions, experiences, sleep patterns, etc. It's the CS guys that get the military funding for expert systems and most of the public mindshare.
When in doubt, have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand.
.. because John Q. Public is, one way or another, picking up the tab.
Considering all these, my prediction is computers will be as complex as brain at 2035 earliest, and 2050 latest if Moore's law continue to hold in a recognizable form. AI is altogher a different topic. We don't have to go the way of cumbersome tinking engines that also has to look after many bodily functions and not optimized for thinking.
This point is important, as we humans represent the most intelligent species (including machines)on Earth we tend to think our brains as the ultimate, or at least the pen-ultimate (to be superceeded by machines designed by us) thinking machines. This ofcourse is true, our brains are the best thinking machines around, but our brains are the one eyed kings of the land of the blind. Being best does not imply being good. Vast differences in cognitive abilities between indiviudals are largely due to our high-intelligence is very young and evolution did not have enough time to fine tune it. Even if evolution had a chance to fine tune it, it may not find an optimal solution to thinking problem, as it has to take few steps (and generally just one step) forward each generation which makes the process prone to getting stuck at a local minima; just like artificial evolution programs. As I see it, the "design" of brain has very good fault resistance and efficient parallel implemetation characteristics. OTOH it has very poor processing capacity per volume or per energy or per symbolic operation. If an artifical brain is designed wisely, it does not have to have processing capabilities of brain to outperform one. It might even be possible that a general purpose AI program is released tomorrow. We just don't know how much processing power a human level thinking machine requires. The capacity of brain is an absolute upper limit, the real value might be much much less.
If I had a conclusion, this message would not have been an AC post. But I'm just a cognitive scientist, you shouldn't expect me to have a conclusion for another 30 years anyway.
The biggest indicator that this same phenomenon is what is happening with the AI hype is that people continually speak of intelligent "computers", black boxes that magically do stuff that we don't understand.
A computer is nothing without algorithms. If anything is going to make a computer smart, it's going to be the algorithms it runs, not the simple fact that "it's a computer!" The problem is, there's nothing magic in algorithms. You can print them on a T-shirt, a la DeCSS. Sure, it may take a couple million T-shirts to contain the code that passes the Turing test, but when you try to pin down what exactly is behind it, it's just code! Someone thought of it, and wrote it down. Somewhere, a human understands how that code works, even if you don't.
What I can't understand is how these brilliant AI computer scientists can cook up brilliant code and then close their eyes, feign amnesia, and say "Look, I've built a machine that's smarter than I am! I don't understand it!" On the other hand, I think I can understand it. That's the only way to have lasting job security in the AI field.
Read books of Iain M. Banks from the Culture series to understand why AI will be the most important technological discovery ever. (Consider Phlebas, The Player of Games, Look To Windward, Use of Weapons and Excession)
;-)
"Human does not scale"
You do surprise me. So you've read half the literature and formed a conclusion without troubling yourself with the other side of the argument. Here's an argumentum ad hominem to add to your collection; you're a prick.
e.g., Dennett's point that it's not actually an argument, but an 'intuition pump'
You've in fact read Dennett's paper so shallowly that you think this is a critique; in fact Dennett never means it as such and admits that he uses the "intuition pump" (called by the rest of us a "thought experiment") all the time.
I say this as a cognitive scientist who *likes* philosophy, by the way.
OOOOHHH! whoopee dooo! check out the big brain on Brad! I'm sure that the philosophers are suitably honoured to have drawn the approval of an ACTUAL COGNITIVE SCIENTIST!
My take on Searle: The Chinese Room illustrates (for those who have forgotten) that in the traditional approach to computational formalisms, syntax and semantics are separate. You can't get semantics from syntax.
This is the entire point that Searle is trying to make, you fool. And he says so, in that article you haven't read. You can't get semantics from syntax. Or to put it another way; a full syntactic description of a Chinese speaker does not necessarily have semantic content. Or to put it another way; the blessed box doesn't speak Chinese.
You might profitably read Searle's later papers on the subject where he points out that even this is conceding too much to the Dennettites. The Chinese box doesn't even have *syntax*; all it has are marks on paper. These have a causal role in the system, but this causal system is only syntactic if interpreted as such. Or in other words, a computer is a box turning switches on and off; these switches are only '1' and '0' in the context of an interpretation. Which has to be provided by something which is not itself merely a CHinese Box.
SInce you have conceded my entire point, I have to regard this discussion as over.
-- the most controversial site on the Web
But something I agree with and have mentioned in various forums from time to time:
"Intelligent Life" (whatever that may imply) arises from self-organising, complex systems, formed of relatively (to the overall IL) unintelligent parts.
What do I (and really, those greater than me who have proposed this path of research) mean by this?
Simply that a neuron cannot know the brain, an ant cannot know the colony, a bee cannot know the hive, and a person cannot know the corporation.
These small parts cannot know in full the whole of the system of which they are a part. In a sense, right now - corporations may be entities that think and communicate outside and beyond the control and grasp of any human mind. The internet, with its myriad of nodes and servers, may be actually "alive" and "thinking" - yet we would never know it. Corporations connected together via the internet - a symbiotic relationship? Or something more? ???
It is something interesting to think about - whether it is true or not. We have almost no hope of knowing for certain whether it is true or not, much the same as a neuron cannot know itself, but a large collection - well, you know...
Think about it - then wonder...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
Programming is the act automating complexity that is made up of simpler
things. So it's really all about automation and with the right automation
tools and enough automated, you'll get your by-product illusion of
Artificial Intelligence, plenty enough to pass the illusion test called
the Turing Test.
A.I. - nothing is naturally that stupid.
And ever rule has it's exceptions. In this case it's those who think it's
right to claim it's not just an illusion. You know, like a con artist.
I tend to agree. I'd like to see something using AI play in a poker game. Can AI ever simulate bluffing? Or analyze the expressions on the other player's faces to determine if perhaps that they are bluffing, and call the bluff? Human intelligence can do thiss, but I'm not sure if something this complex exists now, or ever will.
a .h tml
Chess is one thing. It follows a certain set of rules. Even conversation does, but it also invloves human expression like the bluffing example. But to to play out a scenario given a unique situation, machines are not up to the task yet.
http://robotics.stanford.edu/~koller/papers/gal
http://www.cs.ualberta.ca/~games/poker/
It turns out that bluffing and every aspect of games like poker (other than facial expressions) are mathematically analyzable. As far as I know, no game theorist has added facial expressions into his or her theory but I wouldn't be surprised if they did. Anyway, what you actually bet (and how often, and in what situations) is plenty of information and certainly enough information to allow an opponent to play a good game against you, even without ever looking at your face.
You can use game theory to prove that bluffing (and other forms of misrepresentation, such as what's called "slow-playing" in poker) are necessary elements to good play in games of imperfect information. I use the vague term "good play", because there are two important and incompatible definitions of "good play" in game theory. There's 'optimal play' and 'maximal play'. An optimal strategy is an equilibrium point that specifies your best possible strategy given the assumption that your opponents use their best possible strategy. A maximal strategy is the (harder to define) best strategy that takes your opponents' history (and possible weaknesses in ability) into account.
Not only is it possible to prove these things, but there are simple (if sometimes computationally infeasible) algorithms for finding the optimal strategy of a game and, no doubt, given a specific mathematical model of an opponent's play it should be possible to solve for some form of a maximal strategy. Baysian statistics supplies a good framework for estimating an opponent's play from his behavior in a game of imperfect information.
The insight involved in analyzing such games is the same one that motivates human play. Your behavior gives your opponent some information. If you always press an advantage for instance, you give your opponents too much information. In that case when you bet an opponent can almost always deduce when it's best to fold. However, if you always misrepresent your hand, you'll most definitely lose as well. Finding the equalibrium point mathematically involves enumerating all possible situations and doing some linear algebra. Obviously for a game like poker finding all of the situations would be infeasible, but it should still be possible to group similar situations together and come up with a useful solution.
There are still some mysteries in game theory. I've never found an adequite analysis of collusion in multiplayer games and I suspect in any game of more than two people such an analysis is necessary. But the fact that so much of poker (or at least games like poker) is directly tractible with mathematics brings up the question of the relationship between AI and mathematics.
If a problem can be completely solved mathematically, is AI really invovled? How about a situation (like chess) where a complete mathematical solution is trivial to express but not computationally feasible. When are aproximations to a mathematical solution AI?
Rocky J Squirrel
www.contrib.andrew.cmu.edu/~sager
And check out my gameshow website for fun:
www.richdate.com
God spoke to me
Quite. I'd define intelligence in an a similar way, we recognise intelligence as the ability to manipulate models and get predictions that are close to reality. Someone who's world view differs significantly from observed reality we would consider insane, their results do not hold up. But its all about context. In the limited context of a chess game, then yes, Deep Blue is intelligent. But what we're talking about is 'human level intelligence' which is the ability to generate 'intelligent' results in a wide and undefined set of systems (after all, the real world isn't always predictable).
I personally feel that intelligence is "any ability to respond in a non-random way to external stimuli." We have LOTs of it, ants have very little, but they still have some. By this definition higher mammals certainly have some "intelligence", how exactly to quantify that I don't know. Rather than a sharp dividing line, we should think of a continuum of intelligence,with inanimate matter at one end and advanced abstract thinkers(human-level and above) on the other end and decide how to place entities(AIBO, dolphins, Deep Blue etc.) on this continuum.
This would be much more interesting than simply shouting "Its not TRUE AI because it doesn't write poetry/ play guitar/ cry over a broken heart" every time some AI advance is made.
I must admit though, the concept of Bessie the Cow, and Spot the dog being "intelligent beings" does make me shiver a bit.....
The only reason all cover-ups appear to fail is that you never hear about the ones that succeed.
If I were a suspicious type, and I am, I would say that humans simply don't want to recognize intelligence in other species, much less animals, because it threatens us enormously. Our pride in ourselves, our domination of the planet, and our cruelty towards other species are all shaken if the animal looking back at us in the treetops is actually a thinking being, tho a bit furry.
Religion has more than a little to do with it as well.
Down to my definition of intelligent life:
If it fights back, and wins, it is intelligent. All other players are dead meat.
Yep, just like politics, offically sanctioned ethics is just recognizing the "right" of the winners to disregard the losers. Remember, God must be an American.
Rocky J. Squirrel
I hate to post as anonymous coward, but i can't wait any longer for them to e-mail me the friggen password to my account!!
Anyway... if you are interested in really cool AI stuff, such as where parts of the field might be headed, check out Dr. David Fogel's Blondie24 book (or technical paper if u want an in-depth technical description). The book (or paper) describes an interesting approach to the game of checkers. This is the closest to a program being able to "learn". It started with no prior info but the rules of checkers, and an assignment of 1 for normal pieces and a variable for kings. It gradually built up upon its own experiences from opponents to assign a value to the king, and to the stratigies it used. it wasn't like most other game programs where there was a collection of prior optimum moves for certain game situations, it found out what was good and what wasn't through play. (this was VERY VERY brief description, read the book for detail)
This is mainly for those of you who doubt, or wonder where attention might be paid, or think that the AI is pointless (i think i saw that somewhere among these masses of posts, or at least doubt that was expressed) for those skeptics, read this book!
I'd love to stay and elaborate... but i've gtg...
They caused a law to be passed that says you can't drive a horsedrawn carriage and be drunk.... From some bad horsebuggy accidents...
Anyway IMHO, AI is friggin straightforward to code up. Give a computer an imaginary 3d world, then have objects in it have distinct properties and obey the laws of physics... give the computer vision recognition to see these items real life... Then the computer can model the real world and make decisions based on it....
Addition of new info would be as easy as Zork.
I don't know what "x" means.
X means bleh, where bleh is stuff the machine already knows.
Its not too easy, but its straight forward, and everything added is reinforcing of the other pieces.
www.contrib.andrew.cmu.edu/~sager for more
OR for a gameshow website where you win money and hot dates: www.richdate.com
God spoke to me
I hate to post as anonymous coward, but i can't wait any longer for them to e-mail me the friggen password to my account!!
Anyway... if you are interested in really cool AI stuff, such as where parts of the field might be headed, check out Dr. David Fogel's Blondie24 book (or technical paper if u want an in-depth technical description). The book (or paper) describes an interesting approach to the game of checkers. This is the closest to a program being able to "learn". It started with no prior info but the rules of checkers, and an assignment of 1 for normal pieces and a variable for kings. It gradually built up upon its own experiences from opponents to assign a value to the king, and to the stratigies it used. it wasn't like most other game programs where there was a collection of prior optimum moves for certain game situations, it found out what was good and what wasn't through play. (this was VERY VERY brief description, read the book for detail)
This is mainly for those of you who doubt, or wonder where attention might be paid, or think that the AI is pointless (i think i saw that somewhere among these masses of posts, or at least doubt that was expressed) for those skeptics, read this book!
I'd love to stay and elaborate... but i've gtg...
grrr, this post didn't go through the first time i think...
He says that there is "increasingly ferocious debate" and a "mainstream brawl" regarding AI issues. Nowhere does he tell us what this debate is. Oh yeah there's a bunch of rhetoric about "changing life as we know it," and "deluded scientists and technocrats" -- are these the boundaries of this oh-so-important debate? How about some actual information about this high-level debate and/or mainstream brawl?
All this review offers is bookjacket hyperbole that goes all over the map without making a single coherent point about the initial premise of a "great debate." Katz really manages to say nothing except to regurgitate a few cliched opinions about AI that he could as well have absorbed from pop culture as from a book by "one of the few journalists with this much understanding..."
Look at the posts in this thread -- do they reflect a "great debate," or even a "mainstream brawl?" Does this debate exist? If so, what is it, exactly? Please Jon, tell us!
Katz's review seems desperate to drum up some sense that this book is "important." Maybe it is, but there's no way to determine that from Katz's blather. If you feel that Katz says anything substantive about this book or about AI, respomd with quotes, please.
Finally I just want to point out that the Katz-hatred around here used to strike me as anti-Semitic. It's not; Katz is annoying to people of all faiths.
Post-finally, it is now three months since Katz stated his intention to set up a Q&A with Junis of Afghanisan. If I were a publisher, I'd tell him no more review copies until the long-awaited interview appears.
National CyberCrime Prevention Foundation
You know he is the only guy who can ruin a topic with overboosted melodrama in the explanation of the topic he will be examining. I hope he doesn't get paid for this shit.
You're totally out of it. Physical laws are computational, and thus a Turing Machine can simulate them. Your brain functions based on physical laws, and thus a Turing Machine can simulate it. Take your religious bullshit somewhere else!
Math/mathematics is an activity requiring the elaboration and application of abstract concepts to predict or describe other abstract systems. One need only think of Fermat's Last Theorem or Liebniz's Theory of Calculus.
Computers are good at arithmetic, not math. They are great at solving equations, but that's it for now.
Of course, this is no mean feat and, yes, computers are much better at solving equations than humans. But computers, at present, cannot do any math.
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" think most of the problem with the whole concept of AI comes from the basic assumption of the Turing Test - that an "Artificial Intelligence" must take the form of an "Artificial Human". "
HUH? The attitude among AI scientist was propably like that 30 years ago. Much have changed since then. Just look at the new branch in AI: Artificial Life. They dont try to make human-like AI, rather intelligence is defined in a much broader way. Any intriduction book in AI would tell about the controversy around the Turing test.
"We are who we are because of a myriad of complex drives, many of them hormonal (territorialism, gluttony, lust, etc.) A true computer AI will be free of these drives. "
BS!! The darwinistic AI would probably have those "feelings" if it helped them survive. You sometime feel fear for a reason: It helps you stay alive. It increases your chances of spreading your genes. Or at least so, in most cases.
Intelligence does not emerge without reason: A tree doesnt have any reason to be intelligent. After all, it wouldnt increase it chances of reproduction, and having a brain requires some extra energy.
And by the way: When you talk about "True AI" it seems like you talk about human-like AI ( again), but without its flaws!!
Sure, but at age 11 I hadn't heard about Alan Turing yet! :-)