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Artificial Inteligence Common Sense Database
warren69 writes "Atari researcher/Stanford Prof. develops AI called Cyc, pronouced psych, based on "1.4 million truths and generalities". Allready this, umm application (linux fyi), has powered lycos search narrowing.
There is encouraging results, like Cyc asking if it is human."
From the article:
Cyc's programmers taught it that certain things in the world are salacious and shouldn't be mentioned in everyday applications.
What do you think about imposing our morality on an AI? Is it neccesary for any artificial intelligence we create to share _all_ our values?
If there is no afterlife for an AI and no punishment, what motivation does it have to be good?
yes i run a goth/punk/emo porn site.
Hmmm. I'm curious to ask Cyc if Linux is better than MS Windows, if free software is better than proprietary, if sharing music is stealing, and so forth. "Common sense" -- especially when collected in a database like this -- can't help but showing the biases of its creators. If this tool becomes as important as the linked-to article implies it will, let's hope it has common sense that fits with our agenda....
Well, I think we now know how the doomsday Terminator/Matrix scenarios evolve -- AI programmers too lazy to teach their pet about sex, religon and morality.
You can look at AI in two ways (or a combination of both, of course):
- AI needs to have its capabilities defined and data manually entered in, so that it can do what an AI needs to do
- AI needs to be able to learn, so that it can learn what an AI needs to do. A smart AI that 'knows' nothing is just a big paperweight.
Roughly, at any rate.
Both ideas have merits. Babies, for example, learn by association, and by occasionally trying stuff out and making assertions based on observations. However, they also come equipped with the hardware (wetware) capable of handling this.
I think that getting both parts right will be useful, so yes, it is (or might be) a big deal.
Lastly, what do you want to use the computation force for? Write down the equations and calculations now that will yield a successful AI, if it's that damned easy. You can't, because designing it is more difficult than throwing expensive hardware at it.
--
Try translating 'Mensa' from Spanish to English.
Consulting The Jargon File entries for
bogosity and micro-Lenat,
we see that the uLenat is the everyday unit of bogosity,
and that it is named for Doug Lenat, whose project Cyc is.
I tend to agree with Reid, myself.
ob book: For a literary treatment of a connectionist machine
that may or may not resemble Cyc,
see Richard Powers _Galatea_2.2_
Wait a minute. Didn't I say that on the other side of the record? I'd better check
Assuming that intelligence comes from interaction, I think it would be interesting if they set up two Cyc's, gave them a huge list of data and let them talk and rate each other's generated inferences. You could even let them build new rules on top of each other's inferences. I think the results might be interesting.
"The deluded are always filled with absolutes. The rest of us have to live with ambiguity." - Aristoi, Walter Jon Willia
For instance, they deployed the technology to an image library owned by a news company. The company had lots of images, all with different captions. The thing was, there was no fixed system for the captions, they were just english descriptions (short) of what was in the photo.
So Cyc analysed all the captions, and turned them into CycL (it's own logic language). It then used its rudimentary natural langauge capabilities to figure out equivalents, so if you asked for "frightened child" it would match to "girl with gun held to her head" even though they contained no equivalent words. Pretty clever stuff, though they're a long way from being able to make it formulate sentances itself.