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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.
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.
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.
- 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
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.
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.
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.
The programmers did nothing once play beganActually that's not true. Part of the controversy surrounding the match was that the programming team, including some grandmasters, were constantly tweaking Big Blue, even during games. In addition, they reserved the right to select from Big Blues top choices. The match was far from the Man vs Machine match that was marketed.
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.
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.
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?
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."
Who is the fool who moderated the parent post as "funny"??
It was actually one of the few post in this discussion to say some informative things, even if they are pretty straightforward if you know something in the field.
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 * ;
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.