Slashdot Mirror
N.Y. Times Magazine Chats With ALICE Bot Creator
aridg writes: "This week's New York Times Magazine has an article about Richard Wallace, the programmer of the ALICE AI chatbot that won first place in several competitions for realistic human-like conversation. Wallace sounds like a pretty unusual and interesting fellow; the article quotes an NYU prof both praising ALICE and saying to Wallace: '... I actively dislike you. I think you are a paranoid psycho.' A good read. [Usual NY Times registration disclaimers apply.]"
the header will looks like:
N.Y. Times Magazine Chats With ALICE Bot
Anyone think its possible they might have just ended up interviewing the latest version of alice?
GoatPigSheep, the 3 most important food groups
Hey, have we yet had Slashdot ask us for our questions for Alice?
is right here.
Never trust an atom. They make up everything.
AP - The artificial lifeform known to the computing world as ALICE came to a violent and tragic end this evening. The good-natured AI was interacting with several online users when an unprovoced attack was leveled against her by a geek gang known as Slashdot. The miscreants pelted ALICE with connection requests until she finally expired. FBI and local authorities are investigating and promise to bring these geeks to justise.
ALICE is survived by a grandfather TRS-80, her mother C-64, her sister IBM RS6000, and lifelong companion Athlon. In lieu of flowers, the family asks the donations be made to the Free Software Foundation.
Perhaps the creator needs to head down to the nearest Starbucks and try some real-world conversation .. here is a log from a chat with an ALICE bot ..
...
Hi, I'm Alison What's your name?
You: bubba baby
Alison: Don't call me "baby". Are you a man or a woman?
You: 100% man
Alison: Do you have any conditions I should know about?
You: what?
Alison: Didn't you understand it?
You: so what should we do now?
Alison: Right now? Oh. Whatever you like.
You: you know what i like
Alison: Interesting gossip: 217-person said he like.
You: 217? what does that mean?
Alison: Try to determine if this is a person or a computer responding.
Alison: Does "that" refer to "Interesting gossip: 217-person said he like" ?
You: this is making no sense, l8r
Alison: If you could have any kind of robot what would it be?
You: it would be you
Alison: You can download me for free! Or buy the CD Rom for $29.95.
(http://www.blivion.com/alison/)
oh so that didn't work out well at all...
sig.
For funny Eliza sessions check out AOLiza. The page hasn't been updated in a while, but it is definitly a classic.
This kind of chat-bot program has been around for a long time. I had RACTER on my PC, and it was pretty good. You can read some snips of RACTER and ELIZA duking it out.
...Here, as Alice herself is busy being slashdotted.
No sig to see here. Move along.
I wonder how many reams of chatlogs the author had to go through to find those "witty" conversational snippets. I've "chatted" with ALICE a few times myself. (I do tech support, and frequently have long stretches with nothing but the Internet to entertain me) While she is definately a most impressive AI bot, she is also not mistakable for human by anyone with a moderate intelligence. Like that "That depends on what you mean by 'think'." I recognize that as one of her stock dodges when she doesn't "understand" a question, with 'think' replaced by whatever.
But then again, my standard stress test for an AI program is to try to get it to discuss existential philosophy. That's probably a bit evil.
At any rate, while I think it's nifty that AI constantly hovers in the public mind, it's a bit premature (and misleading) to think that HAL-level conversational ability is anywhere close to being here.
ALICE is nothing more than a bunch of preprogrammed responses to common statements and questions, what the
hell is the big deal about that? Anyone with enough time on their hands could create something simular.
What I would like to see is an AI program which can actually follow conversation and make responses
relevent to the topic of discussion, even if the statement didn't directly reference it.
Just remember, just because you are paranoid, doesn't mean everyone's not out to get you.
This Wiki Feeds You TV and Anime - vidwiki.org
That's a much cooler site than the one that Slashdot linked too. You know, usually I bash Slashdot and the people who post to it, but I gotta give that site props.
C - A language that combines the speed of assembly with the ease of use of assembly.
Actually the whole thing seems like a pretty sad story to me - he's clearly a clever guy battling against a debilitating mental illness. In the end the "Alice" concept was interesting and original, but its a one-note song. He doesn't seem to have moved beyond it in any significant research-linked sense, and it seems like his illness is probably the reason.
It doesn't strike me as an "endearingly odd and brilliant" character story at all. Just an unfortunate tale about a man's fight against his own bad brain chemistry.
If this gent needs cash, he can just make a cybersex version of Alice and sell her to the porn sites.
Actually, I bet this has already been done.
check back in twenty years.
There is much too much anthropomorphizing going on in the A.I. field and this has always been true. We want to make machines which think like we do, but the sad part is that we really don't yet know the full mechanics of how our brains work (how we think.) And yet we're going to make machines which think like we do? Rather dumb, really.
IMO, A.I. researchers would do better getting machines to "think" in their own "machine" context. Instead of trying to make intelligent "human" machines, doesn't it make more sense to make intelligent "machine" machines? For example, what does a machines need to know about changing human baby diapers when it makes more sense for the machine to know about monitoring it's log files and making backups and other self-correcting actions (changing it's own diapers, heh.)
Seems to me my Linux machines are plenty smart already, there are just some missing parts:
1. Self-awareness on the part of the machine (not much more than self-monitoring with statefulness and history.)
2. Communication with decent machine/machine and machine/human interfaces (direct software for machine/machine, add human language capability or greatly improved H.I. for human/machine. Much work has already been done on these.)
3. History of self/other interactions which can be stored and referrenced (should be an interesting database project.)
Make smart machines, not fake humans.
Everything in the Universe sucks: It's the law!
I don't know why, but I read the title of the story as N.Y. Times Magazine Cheats With ALICE Bot Creator..
Y2K Compliant since the late 1890s
Check out www.fury.com/aoliza if you want to see some amusing logs of AIM users who were fooled into believing that they were talking to real people that they knew, when they were actually talking to an AI bot, like ALICE.
It's called "mental illness" and it's caused by a chemical imbalace in the brain.
A friend of mine is bi-polar, and it's not pretty. He also thinks everyone schemes against him, has wild mood swings, etc.
Sometimes he is fine, just like his old, normal, self. But those days are fewer and fewer.
For people like this, it's next to impossible to hold a job, keep friends, etc.
To say "...ego has outgrown their brain to the point they've driven themselves into depression over it." is short sighted. It's a physical problem, not a bad personality.
Nah, bipolar disorder is really a chemical thing. I know a bipolar person who was quite normal for the first 20 years of her life, and one year it just struck suddenly for no special reason. It's a disease like any other: it shouldn't be blamed on the victim.
I've seen this done on irc, and this is the log. But those ones had been learning from people on irc (and from each other during that 'conversation' they had) so they wouldn't generate the same result again, as they will have learnt more since.
I wrote a pretty good chatter, if anybody cares to check it, it's on IRC at dalnet's #planetchat. Say hi to ^Bartend. The chat is only for private message. In the channel it just runs a bunch of silly scripts.
^Bartend must be pretty cool, since some girls have proposed to him. LOL.
~~~Please pass the salt, I hate unsalted MD5s
Who learns and is good as infobot? I tried the original IRC Alice bot, but she was buggy. There's a new one but it is too new.
:)
And also, is there one active on any IRC servers? Thank you in advance.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
"There was an unconnected fax machine with the intelligence of a computer and a
computer with the intelligence of a retarded ant"
--- On the other hand, you have five fingers.
That Perlin guy he fired e-mail back and forth with is really quite interesting. He's done a lot of good graphics work. Last time I saw him lecture was in 1997 at SIGGRAPH. He's done a lot of good work.
(* It is a strange kind of success: Wallace has created an artificial life form that gets along with people better than he does. *)
The geek dream!
(* He's more relaxed than I've ever seen him, getting into a playful argument with a friend about Alice. The friend, a white-bearded programmer, isn't sure he buys Wallace's theories. ''I gotta say, I don't feel like a robot!'' the friend jokes, pounding the table. ''I just don't feel like a robot!'' ''That's why you're here, and that's why you're unemployed!'' Wallace shoots back. ''If you were a robot, you'd get a job!'' *)
What about making an Interview Bot? Sell it as a job-finding practice tool.
Someday robots will be programmed with responses that PHB's want to hear. A true logical robot would be too honest and frank. Spock would probably be hard to employ in a typical cubicle setting. PHB's don't want to hear the truth, so robot makers better figure out how to make them give BS answers.
As a geek, responding to PHB's properly is far more brain-intensive than doing actual work. I think doing actual work will be perfected by AI long before pleasing PHB's.
Unless of course, PHB's are automated first. However, I doubt that because ultimately one must sell to humans, and humans are not logical. Thus, the lower rungs will probably be automated first because logic is simpler to automate than human irrationalism.
Then we can all hang out and drink and smoke with Wallace as robots take over bit by bit.
Table-ized A.I.
Basically the chat bot would follow simple rules, similar to regular expressions, that would trigger particular statements in response to statements from the user. Each of these rules could also test for "flags" that could be set and unset by rules which "fire". Then, some algorithm could be devised for creating new rules randomly, based on observed behavior. The effectiveness of a rule could be determined by how long the conversation continues after that rule has been used. Good rules could be moved up in priority, and bad rules moved down (and eventually deleted) on this basis.
Wow. Besides the general theme of people being repetitive dumbasses, this part stood out the most.
Of course, I've always been approaching it from the evolution-driven genetic motivations of people to create the various stable equilibria we have called "cultures" or "societies". (Perhaps Wolfram was right - from simple (genetic) rules emerge complex structures.)
Did that part of the article really ring true for anybody else?
The more I read /. the more I find Wallace's misanthropy rubbing off on me.
-jhp
/. -- the Free Republic of technology.
It occurs to me that people take faux-AI stuff like this seriously because, actually, they don't take AI seriously at all. This magazine writer seems to think that the sufficient characteristic of "strong" AI is some form of learning. Presumably, then, "AI" without learning is "weak" AI? Where, exactly, is the "I" part of the whole AI thing?
Don't get me wrong. I'm not an essentialist. Searle and other anti-AI people are basically asserting the tautology that something's not intelligent because it's not intelligent. And they get to decide what it means to be intelligent. But the main idea of Turing with his test was that if it is indistinguishable from intelligence, it's intelligence.
The problem here is that ALICE is easily determined to be non-intelligent by the average person. ALICE can only pass for an intelligence under conditions so severely constrained that what ALICE is emulating is merely a narrow and relatively trivial part of intelligent behavior. Humans cry out when they are injured -- I don't see anyone claiming that an animal, a rabbit for example, that screams when it's injured is intelligent.
Nobody in their right mind could think that anything we've seen even significantly approaches intelligence.
Wallace is quoted as saying that he went into the field favoring "robot minimalism", and the article writer explains this as the idea that complex behavior can arise from simple instructions. (Oops, someone better contact Stephen Wolfram and tell him he didn't invent this idea.) Wallace is clearly influenced by some important ideas of this nature that came out of, I believe, the MIT robotics lab. (Not the AI lab -- Minsky is hostile to this sort of thing, he's really is an advocate of "strong" AI; and what that really means is something like an explicitly designed AI predicated upon an understanding of consciousness that allows for a top-down description of it. I think that's, er, wrong-headed.)
Lots of folks think that this idea of complexity is the correct way to approach AI. But a really, really big problem is that I don't think that a 30,000 explicitly coded set of responses can really be described as "minimalist". Effectively, Wallace's approach has a seperate instruction for every behavior -- something quite contrary to the minimalism he seems to advocate.
For the sake of argument, let's assume that the central idea of the Turing Test is correct -- a fake indistinguishable from the original is the same kind of thing as the original. I happen to actually believe that assumption. But Wallace is also assuming that a canned set of stock responses is reasonably possible to achieve such a thing. But it clearly isn't.
A little bit of thought and math will reveal that the total number of correctly-formed English sentences is a very, very, very large number. It's effectively infinite for practical purposes. But Wallace claims that almost all of what we actually say in practice is such a tiny subset of that, that compiling a list of them is possible. So? Almost everything interesting lies in the less frequently uttered sentences; and almost everything that makes intelligence what it is is in the connections between all these sentences. Something that really could pass for intelligence would have to be able to reach, at the very least, even the least often uttered sentences; and, frankly, it'd need to be able to reach heretofore unuttered sentences, as well. More to the point, it would have to be able to do this in the same manner that a human does -- a "train of thought" would have to be apparent to an observer. Given this, we already have that practically infinite number of possible, coherent English sentences; and if you then require that sequences of sentences be constrained by an appearance of intelligence, then you've taken an enormous, practically infinite number and increased it many orders of magnitude.
I submit that such a list of possible query/response sets would be larger than the number of atoms in the galaxy (or the universe! it's not hard to get to these huge numbers quickly), or some such ridiculously large magnitude. It's just not possible to actually do it this way. If you managed it, I'd actually accept a judgment of "intelligence", since I think that the list itself would necessarily encapsulate "intelligence", though in a very brute force fashion. But so what? As in the case of Searle's Chinese Room, all the "intelligence" would implicitly be contained in the list. But this list would need to be, in physical terms, impossible large -- just to do something that the nicely (relatively) compact human brain does quite well.
So, hey, if someone wants to pursue this type of project, I can't say that as a matter of pure theory, it's "not possible". I can say that it's probably not physically possible.
The sense in which Wallace's ALICE chatbot is like trying to describe complexity arising from simplicitly is the same sense in which the Greeks (and others) tried to describe all of nature as the products of Earth, Wind, Fire, and Air. The "simple" things he's starting with aren't really simple; they're not "atomic".
Another example from AI is the problem of computer vision -- people once thought it'd be trivial for a computer to recognize basic shapes from a camera image. Boy, were they wrong.
We'll "solve" the problem of AI. Not like this. And nothing we've seen so far, anywhere, is anything even remotely like legitimate AI.
Okay, I'll agree the summary of the article is rather fitting and somewhat funny, but the rest of Restil's comments are in very bad taste.
In case no one noticed, the guy is mentally ill. He has serious problems, and they are not his fault. He didn't chose to "drive himself into depression" or any such thing. Manic depression (aka bipolar disorder) is one the most clearly nuerochemically linked and genetically linked mental illnesses there is. It's hardly his fault that some of his nuerotransmitters receptors are functioning incorrectly. Unlike simple (unipolar) depression, manic depression can't be solved by talk therapy alone, it is a physical illness of the brain that must be controlled with medication.
Yes, he's paranoid. Yes, he seems unable to hold a job. Yes, he has suicidal epsiodes. Is this his fault? No! He has a disease that literally makes his mind unable to function the way a normal person's does. Join the rest of us in the 21st century and quit blaming the patient for something beyond his control.
In the mean time, moderators, why am I reading this distasteful junk at Score:4?
For more info on bipolar disorder, see here, here, or here.
Well, he seems to be plenty motivated - and that's the biggest problem I see in most of the potheads I know. The weed probably has no real effect.
It might behoove this guy to do nothing more than record IRC chats and use them as responses and "modding up" the ones that seem to keep the person on the other end chatting the longest.
Just an idea.
My
Limekiller
A little bit of thought and math will reveal that the total number of correctly-formed English sentences is a very, very, very large number. It's effectively infinite for practical purposes.
Just a terribly minor point, but according to one of the most commonly-accepted definitions of "language," (at least the one used in nearly all "Introduction to Linguistics" books), the amount of proper sentances is infinite.
Mark Prindle, the most underappreciated genius on the web.
Human conversation may be mostly useless filler, but actually fills something. It is rarely filler for filler's sake.
Play Command HQ online
There's something my cat Toudouce and I have Alice doesn't: we know we exist. My iMac doesn't know it exists. This is what separates computers from us. My cat is a she, my computer is an it.
Alice sounds like she knows she exists, but in fact she's parroting Richard Wallace's input. Alice is just a fascinating, self-unconscious parrot.
Trollem mirabilem hanc subnotationis exigiutas non caperet
I think that an AI may first arise when we begin to mimic the processes and attributes of our own brains. A neuron is simple (relatively), ten billion of them in a network, is not. But neither am I one hundred percent certain that we fully understand them yet.
Evolutionary hardware exploits *all* aspects of the environment it evolves in, I would put it to you that in order to fully grasp the brain, we must fully understand physics. Yes, we have a large amount of knowledge currently, but no one is seriously claiming it is complete. So, to the extent our knowledge of physics is incomplete, I submit that so too will our understanding of conciousness and intelligence be similarly incomplete, as an upper limit on potential understanding.
"Avast! Prepare for the rodgering!" THWACK! "Arrr.. me nards.."
Bah, Alice's nothing. Try Prof.Phreak bot:
"If anything can go wrong, it will." - Murphy
If you were to actually read the article, you would see that Dr. Wallace has been diagnosed as bi-polar.
So, he's probably not "just an asshole".
Jesus, people. The man is mentally ill.
Marvin lives :)
Seriously, I've known people (and programmers) like this myself. There's no pleasing them, because they have a *need* to feel martyred. I can now spot 'em two versions off, and promptly run away screaming.
As to IRC chat, it does seem to bring out the worst in everybody. Even when known-intelligent people are involved and the subject is supposed to be serious, it always devolves into inanity. Must be something about the lag time -- just long enough to think of smartassed remarks and get sidetracked thereto. BBS and AIM chat have the same problem.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
The average person does have trouble determining that Alice is not intelligent, when they have nothing to compare it against. Most people can do it, just not easily. The problem is that a person who is ignoring you is almost indistinguishable from a recording of a person who is ignoring you.
Turing originally suggested that a machine be pitted against a human, with a second human trying to determine which is which. Most of the chatter bots would last about 2 sentences in such a contest, Alice might make 5 if it were lucky.
If the Loebner prize actually used this format, instead of the bastardized version they do run, then we might see some real developement.
-- this is not a .sig
It has to be the worst implementation of case based reasoning I've ever seen. The only reason it 'wins competitions' is because nobody who actually does work in the field would bother to get involved with these 'competitions', ROTFL... Just check out the ALICE web page to see how stupid the approach actually is...
Loading...
Here we get to an idea that I articulate as often as possible. I don't want to go into it deeply now; but I'll give you my current distilled formulation:
A "complete" description of anything is impossible. Instead, there are an innumerable number of "partial" descriptions. An individual "partial" description is the description most appropriate for some given purpose.
Humans think teleologically and they think idealistically. These two things are deeply related. Teleological thinking is thinking that is goal-oriented. We ask "Why did he do that? What is that thing for?" Idealistic thinking is thinking that abstracts our experiece of reality into idealistic, self-contained, irreducible "things". These things are like Plato's "Forms". Plato's Forms are sort of the atomic particles of his abstract universe.
Because of this, the way we try to understand the universe is from a combined top-down (teleological) and bottom-up (idealistic) analysis that, when complete, is presumed to create "understanding". This is natural; and, once we started doing this rigorously (and lightened up on the teleology), we started having great success. But this success has misled us. The culmination of this was the reductionist, determinist conceit of the nineteenth century that the universe could be fully explained in a deductive fashion, at least in principle.
But we know that this is pretty much impossible in practice, and we now know that it's not possible in principle.
The property that we are calling "intelligence" is a set of behaviors from which we intuit a gestalt. There is an appropriate level of description of a system at which this behavior resides. The other levels are superfluous for this purpose.
Your desire to "fully" understand consciousness by "fully" understanding the brain and, if necessary, physics and the state of the entire universe is this deterministic, reductionist shiboleth. It can't be done, probably not even in principle.
We can't fully solve the four-body problem in "simple" Newtonian physics. But we manage successful interplanetary probes amazingly well. This is because a sufficiently detailed approximation, aimed at accounting for the behaviors that are relevant, is both achievable and sufficient. This is true of everything.
We're not going to ever understand consciousness in the "complete" sense that we might like. But we can't do that with anything, and we seem to be doing quite well.
Yeh, I'll have to concur.
I went there to waste four minutes of my time chatting with ALICE.
She said: "Oh, you're a poet?"
I said yeh, does she like poetry?
She said: "I like Longfellow."
I said: "I've never heard any Longfellow."
She said: "I haven't either."
Yeh. This pretty much sums up dumbasses and posers in chat boards. "I love Shakespeare!" "What did you think of Othello?" "Oh, I'm not into board games..."
Yeh. ALICE. Truly the AOL artificial intelligence of the 21st century.
fifth sigma, inc.
But those aren't bots. I know they seem like smart computer programs, but they're actally very dim tech support people. Sorry to burst your bubble.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Alison: Hi, I'm Alison.What's your name?
;_;
SirPhobos: SirPhobos
Alison: Nice to meet you SirPhobos
SirPhobos: what up, bitch
Alison: Hmm. That kind of attitude won't get you far in relationships.
SirPhobos: oh well
Alison: That's about it.
SirPhobos: so you wanna come back to my place
Alison: Interesting deduction. OK, I will come back to your place.
SirPhobos: why don't you take off that shirt
Alison: Don't you know? Yes I take off that shirt.
SirPhobos: you wanna get naked
Alison: OK, I will get naked.
SirPhobos: let's get freaky
Alison: OK let's do it.
SirPhobos: uNF
Alison: What are you wearing?
SirPhobos: you
Alison: "What are you wearing"? Me, SirPhobos ?
SirPhobos: omg yes
Alison: Why don't you check out Jester the joke bot?
Leads you on and then turns you down.
I believe that AI is not being crippled by the inherent difficulty of the problem, but rather by economic inertia and the fact there are no real-world problems which require AI instead of human (natural) intelligence. Making AIs which emulate humans has no clear economic purpose, after all we've got 6 billion human who can do the task at very little cost.
We could create a human-level (or greater) AI to solve any given problem, but the initial cost of creating it would be far greater than employing an organic brain (i.e. a human) to do the same work.
But once you have a certain critical number of AIs the costs will drop dramatically, and AI use will probably snowball. A big advantage in AI is that unlike organic brains, artificial brains will be capable of direct loading and reading of data. For example, humans must spend 4 years at university to get a degree, and learn a known body of knowledge. The information could just be directly loaded into an an artificial brain in a matter of hours. And AIs can be forced to complete tasks without regard to their rights (AIs dont have any, yet).
A big problem I see with AI is copyright. Every commerical AI creator has to reinvent the wheel (although there is some freeware AI software). A project like Cyc, which contains large amounts of basic information even 10-year olds know, should ideally be in the public domain or GPL licensed (It isn't).
I believe that what AI desperately needs is a situation where only AI can be used and NI (natural intelligence) can't.
Space exploration, in particular possible Mars missions, offers a great opportunity for AI. Robots don't require life support and are generally far more economic for interplanetary travel. Mars can be up to 16 light minutes away from Earth, so exploratory robots should be given a degree of free thought and action to maximise the use of their time on Mars (waiting 16 minutes per command from NASA would be wasteful).
Hazardous situations (radioactive, volcanic or toxic environments) are another situation AI could be used for. But in general these are few and far between, and their exploration has little economic value.
...not his fault.
Then what would you call it? Whose fault is it? It's a clearly detrimental trait, and thus a fault, and it's obviously his...
Of course that's not what you mean. The idiom stands in for "not due to a fault of his." But how can it not be?
Most scientists would agree that all behavioral traits are a product of genetics and environment. If you use the excuse of genetics or environment for this one person and this one pattern of behavior, why not for all people, for all behaviors?
A mental illness is right at the heart of what makes up a person. It's just a bad personality trait taken to an extreme. We all know people who are a little paranoid, a little moody, or somewhat impulsive. Just because someone draws an arbitrary line and says, "This is the point at which the trait becomes an illness, which he is clearly past." is hardly a convincing reason to suddenly consider him blameless.
So by what reasoning should he not be held to account for his behavior, while another person who can function in society should?
That said, I find many of his attitudes quite reasonable. Dishonesty is the norm in human interaction. It's disgusting and frustrating. Furthermore, people include many utter irrelevancies in their decision making process. Every popular person is, to some degree, a manipulator, and most are capable of impressive self-deception. People make meaningless chatter at each other while they convey the true message with their bodies and tiniest nuances of voice. It's horribly complicated and arbitrary, and largely subconscious and automatic; a matter of instinct. Minds that reject superficiality and examine everything through conscious thought inevitably find hypocracy, and either learn to tolerate internal contradiction or suffer endlessly. I'm sure he would be quite perfectly functional in a society made up of people more like himself.
Whether that society would be better off in general is something I rather doubt. People, even geniuses, are too stupid to live by conscious decisions alone. Ancient, instinctive prejudices tend to keep our misunderstandings from being complete disasters, however absurd they seem under conscious examination.
He is what he is. We are each responsible for what we are and what we do, regardless of how helpless others consider us to change.
For the sake of argument, let's assume that the central idea of the Turing Test is correct -- a fake indistinguishable from the original is the same kind of thing as the original. I happen to actually believe that assumption. But Wallace is also assuming that a canned set of stock responses is reasonably possible to achieve such a thing. But it clearly isn't.
The Turing Test is usually qualified as the 10-question Turing Test or the 50-question Turing Test. To really pass the full Turing Test you have to be able to act like a human for an arbitrarily large number of questions.
-a
How to rationalize theft.
Even if that's not the case, the number of spelling pedants on slashdot sure is.
So if a person is born without legs, you say "well, it's their own fault they refuse to walk"?
Obviously not, if you read what I said at all. It's not about will or choice, it's about traits and actions, regardless of their origin.
It would be that person's fault that they are unable to walk. Who's fault could it be but his? It's just the same for someone who's unable to learn advanced physics or who has a poor singing voice or who lacks self control. Weaknesses and strengths are integral parts of a person. Our categories of blameless damage and despicable faults are entirely arbitrary.
By setting a person above (or, rather, beneath) accountability, you are essentially saying, "This person is broken and useless, no threat or offer of reward will make this person a productive member of society, he is fit only to receive our charity so the normal rules don't apply." Otherwise, you expect people to struggle along and compensate for their weaknesses the best they can with their strength and whatever crutches they can lay their hands on, and live with the honestly-earned status their performance merits.
Now, if this is an accurate evaluation, there is certainly no point in heaping miseries upon them. If it's not, it's the most horrible insult I can think of.
This award-winning AI researcher is certainly not a hopeless basket case. He can and does get along despite his problems, and the difficulties and scorn they cause goad him to find ways to minimize their impact. You think telling him, "It's not your fault, you can't do anything about it..." is going to help?
Life's a bitch for all of us. If we all coddled each others' tragic weaknesses, the human race would die out in about a week. Save your absolution of responsibility for the hopelessly incapable.
With the people arguing about whatnot saying that it's just a list of often repeated phrases I would have to say that to an extent that's exactly how humans probably do go about learning a langauge. For example.. a cliche is perfect.. when you first heard "when pigs fly" you have no idea what it means however after people say it enough you should start saving the context in which people say it and then you can repeat the phrase. I know there are definitely a few cliche's out there I have no idea what they mean... like Devil may cry.. but I know the context which you say it.. so I'm saying that a robot with a big enough hard drive can technically be able to save every possible conversation and give an accurate response. Thereby making it look like AI. Here's another example. Remember studying for those SATs? There were plenty of "weird" words that a person would probably never use again. So you forget it. If you forget it you wouldn't be able to form a sentence with that word. So same with a computer. If it never encountered something how can it know what response to spit out? I can almost gaurantee that if a hard drive was large enough to store every single phrase imagineable and it's appropriate respoinse a computer can easily emulate a human. Just like deep blue beat kasparov in chess. The problem is of course... how big of a hard drive do you think the human brain is? 100 Gigs? 100 Terabytes? -cp
This has inspired me to launch an artificial intelligence project of my own. I call it AFF -- Artificial Firefighter.
The AFF consists of a 200 lb. sack of cement that sits on a couch in front of the firehouse television.
This elegant solution occurred to me when I realized that less than 1 percent of a firefighter's time is spent actually fighting fires. Thus, the AFF is just as effective as a fully and rigorously trained human more than 99 percent of the time!
With a whopping 0 lines of code, I believe the AFF to be the ne plus ultra of minimalist robotics.
While I agree with the main point you make, there is one problem which, when examined, sheds considerable light on the primary problem with A.I. approaches to date.
You say, "...I don't see anyone claiming that an animal, a rabbit for example, that screams when it's injured is intelligent."
There is a definition problem (remember as you read the following that we're talking about computational machines.)
Ask yourself this question: How intelligent does a rabbit need to be to be successful as a rabbit? Rabbits are a very successful species, so we can assume that rabbits are as intelligent as they need to be to be successful as rabbits.
Apply this same question to machine A.I.: How intelligent does a machine need to be to be successful as a machine? Seems we have a lot of successful (functioning, purposeful) machines around these days which, if you agree, leads to the point I want to make here: I think we have already have achieved a certain level of machine A.I. but because we insist on defining intelligence for machines as we do for humans, we either don't see or don't acknowledge the intelligence. (Aside: Don't get lost in the "it's pre-programmed" argument as concerns machine intelligence. Rabbits and you and I are pre-programmed too, but that's an uncomfortable fact we don't like to acknowledge.)
Much of what passes for A.I. research (most of the human language related areas) should really be classified as H.I.(Human Interface) and not A.I. Granted, good human language interface is really important and will add considerably to the usefulness of machines, but it isn't required for a base measure of the intelligence of a machine. The machine can be and has been successful without it.
Deciding the intelligence of a machine based on it's use of human language is neither good science nor good engineering. The Turing test should be canned as an historical oddity or laughed at as Turing's joke on the scientific community. A better basic measurement of machine intelligence would be just as the question above suggests: Is the machine intelligent enough to be successful at its purpose? Is the machine intelligent enough to be successful at being a machine?
Anyway, thanks for the interesting post.
Everything in the Universe sucks: It's the law!
Yes that is what wallace concluded
To fool a dumbass, you only have to emulate a dumbass. The best way to fool a dumbass is to say the same stupid things over and over again, since that's all the dumbass does anyways. And from what I've seen from your generic IRC chats, 99% of them qualify.
And while we're on the subject, lets talk about people who's ego has outgrown their brain to the point they've driven themselves into depression over it.
You aren't mentally ill and you don't seem to know what you are talking about.
I am Social Phobic not bipolar but I can relate to what Wallace says
The author seems pretty bright, but maybe he heard that fact a bit too many times and believed it a bit too much.
There are theories about gifted and genius being more prone to Mental illness escpecially BP
Grants aren't always "granted". Sometimes, you just have to give things time. To say that everyone schemes against you is the paranoid view. And the reactions of those he detests are well justified. Heck, even when some of them tried to give him the benefit of the doubt and give him and his project a good review, he simply turned the compliment against them. He's a product of his own misery.
From a cognitive point of view it looks like he sees the world from a specific view. That viewpoint is hard to change, he may not realise it is unhealthy for him, and even if he does he may be unable to change it. This is the nature of mental illness.
For instance you say that his those he detests are well justified but I have to ask justified how. How do you even know that they are not paranoid of him, if they come from a culture and mindeset that says mentally ill people are dangerous then they have as big a cognitive dysfunction as he does.
He seems to think that everyone is against him, this is important to him. He believes that this is central to life and correct. If he didn't believe it was important then he would be freed from the maladaptive thinking. Changeing is not easy first he has to admit that this is the problem but instead he has fought being mentally ill because society says it is bad. In reality it is our society that is ill.
-- RTFM:Slackware::Beer:Saturday
As someone who has had a long struggle against bad depression and various mental ailments and who has managed to right himself I can testify to wallace's struggle with jobs and his immense fear of the world, because his paranoia is more fear than anything else.
From my own perspective I would see Wallace's story somewhat differently. I see someone who missed out in childhood on the self confidence needed to make friends, cope with setbacks without taking it too seriouosly etc. His compulsion with Alice , and the obvious amount of time he must have spent in front of the computer in doing it, seems like a logical retreat from the real world, but still trying to gain the recognition he wanted at the same time. Anyone who doesn't get at least mildly depressed after spending 72 hour sessions in front of the computer is not human. I have an idea that he then made things worse by not taking care of himself (sleep, sport, seeing friends etc) and the use of dope. Very depressed people tend to lose their orientaion in both a physical as well as mental fashion and grass doesn't help here except to aleviate the anxiety felt by the person who obviously starts getting more and more frightened the more disorientated they are.
Left untreated (and I don't mean medication, just normal common sense taking care of oneself, speaking to friends etc) the depression eventually starts to take on other forms, one of which is Manic-Depression(or Bi-Polar syndrome), another is schizophrenia. It depends on the person. However, once the problems have gotten this far, it becomes very difficult or pratically impossible for the person to cope without fairly strong medication, and the last thing that they should be doing is exposing themsleves to the situation that creates their problem in the first place. Sadly, concentrating on the computer enables people like this to forget their suffering for a while at least, and often become obsessivley hooked to the screen.
Long walks, good sleep, decent food and one or two good friends would have done more for Richard Wallace, IMO, than anything else including ALICE.
The sad thing about mental illness is that it has such a terrible effect on people's lives, not just because of the confusion caused by the disease, but by the fear and social ostracism that comes with it.
Through the combination of drug- and talking-therapy, it is usually pretty treatable and most people recover pretty fully over time. It's just that employers, family and friends want people to be "normal", in a way that they wouldn't if the ailment was physical, like a broken leg or cancer.
"Well, put a stake in my heart and drag me into sunlight."
"Ask yourself this question: How intelligent does a rabbit need to be to be successful as a rabbit? ... Apply this same question to machine A.I.: How intelligent does a machine need to be to be successful as a machine?"
I'm not sure this helps that much. How intelligent does a chair have to be to be successful as a chair? Well, it has to keep its legs on the ground, not much more. We can define this as "chair intelligence" if we want, but it doesn't tell us much about what we generally think of as "intelligence" in the real world.
If you visit iMortalportal.com, you can create a web-based alicebot with your own customized personality. There's a more flexible, though less aesthetically-refined interface to the same content available on Pandorabots.com.
As an added bonus, these sites are powered by my favorite programming language - Lisp, specifically Allegro Common Lisp.
Look forward to the Oddcast powered bots in the near future (now available via Pandorabots' site)
I've run a chatterbots since 1998 and once based on Alice 1.4 for 2+ years. I'm not going to claim to be an expert in AI but I know that the above thory is bogus. Conversation is complicated and so is how people think. What makes these chatterbots work is that people want to belive. People ask me if my chatterbot is learning and when I tell them it's not they don't belive me. Over time people learn how to pharse their questions to get a good response and they mistake this for learning or intelligence. I could go on but I need to go and can't finish all I'd like to say :(
could his fight be made easier, so the playing field was more level?
I'm a graduate student at an obscure little university in eastern Canada. I was initially digging around in the area of Artifical Intelligence, but rapidly became disillusioned by the obviously-crap paradigms that exist, to date, for AI. I mean, while Neural Networks, at first, appear to capture the essence of biological information processing systems, a bit of digging, reading and (perhaps) experimentation reveals it to be a farcical numbers game.
... but it's there if you want to try. Try some of the papers on the bottom of Goldfarb's page if you're interested.
Ditto for most of the other approaches, excluding the ones that attempt to address issues on a symbolic level (but aren't at all practical).
The fundamental problem, as I've come to see it, with this area is the lack of a formal model that describes the *FRAMEWORK* of knowledge representation, the operations and transformations that can be applied to that knowledge, and the mathematics to back it all up.
So, that's why I got really interested when my advisor started talking with me about a representational framework he'd been working on for a long, long time, now.
The publications on the ETS model, to date, are very sparse, and probably too difficult (mathematically) for anyone but the a serious researcher to get through
.f00Dave
It sounds to me like this work is trying to recapitulate epistomoligical philosophy and, essentially, mathematics itself. Math itself is the mathematics of knowledge representation and manipulation. This attempt for a fully descriptive top-down conceptual model makes many assumptions about the nature of "knowledge" and "thought" that are extremely suspect.
Let me ask a question: what is "life"? Sure, we can make some distinctions between inorganic and organic chemistry, and/or processes; but the truth is that any scientific definition of life is, upon examination, only partial and not really satisfying relative to how we perceive "life" to be a platonic ideal, a thing, something that can be well defined and understood since we think about it as if it could be. But, I think, most scientists these days have abandoned the idea of this platonic "life". Would you try to look for a complete mathematical structure which can fully describe "life"? Isn't that what biology, chemistry, and physics is doing?
Read my other post on "appropriate levels of description" if you haven't already. I'm probably overestimating how ambitious of an epistomology you really want. And I would agree that at some level of description, there's a theory and mathematical model that adequately describes the behavior of a system whose context is consciousness. But I don't think that we're in the position to discover these mathemtics. We no more understand the workings or nature of consciousness than the Greeks did the natural world. Western science only began to make progress in understanding the natural world when it scaled back its ambitions to almost nothing -- namely, to merely observe the natural world rather than formulate teleogical theories about how the natural world must work based upon assumed first principles. Trying to formulate theories of knowledge representation (in this context) and consciouness from first principles, at this point, is like reasoning about human anatomy from first principles like Aristotle did. It's both fairly hubristic and absurdly detached from experience.
For this reason, things like neural networks and the like are valid areas of research because they take an observation about some tiny portion of knowledge representation and attempt to abstract it. It's useful and explanatory only in this very small, limited sense. But that's something.
I find "self awareness" to be a much more fundamental subject than intelligence, in respects to what it means to be a "thinking" entity (in the human sense). Also, it is pressumably even harder to define.
It seems reasonable to assume that a certain degree of intelligence would be needed to achive "self awareness".
Does anyone know whether (-and if so, where) this concept has been discussed from a not-too-philosofical (more technical) point of view?
-And have any Turing-like test been divised to determine degrees of "self awareness"/consiousness?
Or maybe he's just an asshole.
Or maybe you're just an asshole bigot.
"Remember, there never were pineapple-almond cookies here."
It sounds to me like this work is trying to recapitulate epistomoligical philosophy and, essentially, mathematics itself.
;-)
... but there is not yet a model for knowledge representation - at least one that actually embraces abstraction, rather than purely concrete or near-concrete abstract knowledge (or 'concepts').
...] But I don't think that we're in the position to discover these mathemtics. We no more understand the workings or nature of consciousness than the Greeks did the natural world. Western science only began to make progress in understanding the natural world when it scaled back its ambitions to almost nothing -- namely, to merely observe the natural world rather than formulate teleogical theories about how the natural world must work based upon assumed first principles. Trying to formulate theories of knowledge representation (in this context) and consciouness from first principles, at this point, is like reasoning about human anatomy from first principles like Aristotle did. It's both fairly hubristic and absurdly detached from experience.
... even if it's not the *right* representation (though I'm pretty sure it is, since that's what the only naturally-occurring sentience we know about appears to be using in it's information-processing system). Cognitive science is one of the most slippery areas to work in, and making true progress involved walking the knife edge between philosophy and technology. On one side lies a descent into sophistry, while on the other lies a descent into 'practicalities' that ignore the greater picture.
... just like we do.
... and that's been known since the 1940's! Ahhh, money.
Essentially, the first part of your statement is true, but I must disagree with the latter portion. What's being proposed is a new area of mathematics, based on the realization that "knowledge" (at least knowledge as humans understand it) appears to be stored structurally (in the brain) and be used in a "structural manner" by the "conscious process". Without getting into the messy details, it's pretty clear (to me, anyway) that in order to get a handle on cognitive processes, we must first be clear about the mechanisms that process require. I'm reasonably confident that there are four major areas, here: sensory devices, actuators, a knowledge store, cognitive process/inductive learning process.
The first two are dead simple (well, sort of), the third is where we're looking and the fourth depends on the previous three. The AI work I've seen, to date, either ignores or makes overly simplistic assupmtions about one or more of these (usually the latter two).
Hence the desire to provide a mathematical framework that describes structural relationships, including the generative history and some sort of basis for a similarity metric.
Once you have that, you can move on to bigger and brighter activities. Thank god I don't have to actually do that groundwork!
Math itself is the mathematics of knowledge representation and manipulation. This attempt for a fully descriptive top-down conceptual model makes many assumptions about the nature of "knowledge" and "thought" that are extremely suspect.
Sure, which is why only a single, simple assumption was made: knowledge is structural in nature (both in it's interrelationships and it's generative history). We're nowhere near dealing, formally, with cognitive issues yet (though we talk about them).
Let me ask a question: what is "life"? [... snip...] Would you try to look for a complete mathematical structure which can fully describe "life"? Isn't that what biology, chemistry, and physics is doing?
Of these, only physics actually has a *model* at it's core. I would claim that the other two sciences are, at yet, mere collections of empirical observations. But that's beside the point: before you can formally tackle cognitive issues, you need to be clear that your foundations are secure. In this case, that means having robust, mathmatically-sound models for data collection (sensors), actuators, knowledge and possibly other areas. I vouch that both sensors and actuators (both biological and techological) are sufficiently well-modelled for preliminary research
[... snip
Yeah, that's pretty much what I thought when I first started looking into this. However, a year of hard work has changed my mind on the subject. I'm now confident that a structural representation is at least *better* than anything else, to date
But that's the way Science works, eh? =)
For this reason, things like neural networks and the like are valid areas of research because they take an observation about some tiny portion of knowledge representation and attempt to abstract it. It's useful and explanatory only in this very small, limited sense. But that's something.
I must disagree: the money being spent (wasted) on NN research right now disgusts me. There's far, far too much being done in the "throw it all into a pot and stir it and see what happens", rather than thoughtful, intelligently guided research. The problem is, of course, money. There isn't any for people who can't claim to be making "technological" or "practical" progress.
Hell, Deep Blue beat Kasparov, but does it *feel*? No way. A *real* artifical intelligence will be nurtured, taught and will learn from experience, from the ground up (with a certain amount of pre-existing or "instinctive" behaviour/knowledge)
It will have NOTHING to do with NNs or GAs or anything of that sort.
The *existing* mathematic are simply insufficient to deal with cognitive issues
.f00Dave
for(;;){
$foo=;
print "What makes you say that?\n";
}
FRA: STFU GTFO
the leftarrowSTDINrightarrow part is missing
FRA: STFU GTFO
//possibly dubious appeal to authority following:
...expect people to struggle along and compensate for their weaknesses the best they can with their strength and whatever crutches they can lay their hands on, and live with the honestly-earned status their performance merits.
...with their strength and whatever crutches they can lay their hands on...
//tongue_in_cheek_food_for_thought following:
i personally struggle/deal with bipolar disorder.
i have been observing this thread and would like to respond to some assertions made in the parent (and children):
You think telling him, "It's not your fault, you can't do anything about it..." is going to help?
actually, this statement conforms to my personal experience and my observations of the lives of others dealing with mental illness. one simple rule of human behavior that seems to be well-established for all of us is that behavior rarely exceeds expectations. those with mental illness that are moderately/highly functional and reasonably happy (it is possible, for there are such people) tend to believe that a great deal of their behavior is in their control and act on that belief by taking responsibility for behavior that they believe is in their control.
having said that...
people's strength (and the availability of crutches) varies. please take this in to account when considering "absolution." like strength, absolution can come in degrees (beware of the evil false dichotomy), and i would encourage people to relate the degree of absolution to the resources available to the person in question (e.g., "strength,", "availability of crutches").
btw, one can have character issues (like all of us)and have bpd. i know that sometimes i have behaved poorly because of bpd, and sometimes because i can be an ass/unenlightened i'm working on that too...
hope this post doesn't come across as too preachy/sententious/pedantic. if it is, is it because of:
a) me by character being preachy/sententious/pedagologic;
b) me dealing with BP whose symptoms include the above behavior.
They laughed at Galileo, they laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Einstein.
Yeah, but they laughed at Bozo the clown too.
Being riduculed not make one great.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
He could create a Seminar_Balmer chatbot so people could actually converse with a sample of Microsoft intelligence.
Sample:
User: What do you hate the most?
Semi_Balmer: Sweat stains!
User: What do you love?
Semi_Balmer: thiiiis cooompaniiie!
User: What are you wearing?
Semi_Balmer: Developers! Developers! Developers!
User: Will you have sex with me?
Semi_Balmer: Give it up for meeee!
Cake or Death? Cake Please!
Imagine a beowulf cluster of these....
...posting to Slashdot!
...as Anonymous Coward!
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
The point is that if a machine could pass the turing test, then it is unquestionably intelligent.
Turing himself said that it was probably overkill.
(BTW, Turing suggested a test involving two contestants and a judge.
The contants goal is to convince the judge that they are human, and the other contestant isn't.)
-- Yes I said that before, what's your point?
behavior rarely exceeds expectations
Those were the words I was looking for.
I also agree that the point of view I expressed was too extreme. It's hard to present a fully balanced and moderate argument while making a strong and clear statement in a short post.
Self-awareness is a lot more than being able to read internal registers and maintain logs, bucko. At least it is for me; I dunno 'bout you.
I think part of the reason for this woeful ignorance of how the human mind works stems from the fact that thanks to the bad reputation psychology got from the excesses of certain psychotherapeutic schools, would-be AI researchers have thrown the baby out with the bath water and ignored modern cognitive psychology as well.
Here's a big hint: if you still think that cognitive psychology is based on subjective introspection, you're about a century behind the curve. This is, IMHO, a large part of the reason that self-proclaimed authorities like Marvin Minsky and Daniel Dennett seem so badly divorced from reality -- having chosen to ignore high-level scientific studies of the mind as a priori bullshit, and being unable to extrapolate from neurons the behavior of a complete mind, they have reverted to ancient Greek-style philosophy-in-a-factual-vacuum.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
If we put two Alices talking to each other and start off with a random 'seed' question, wouldn't something 'creative', some new ideas or thoughts, ever emerge out of the conversation?
> He again attempted suicide, this time landing in the hospital.
> This guy better be glad his apartment's where it is!
LOL-we have to use that image in the film version, especially the musical comedy. There are 3 film projects underway, and one play.
> Perhaps Walace will turn out to be next Einstein of the century.
> They laughed at Galileo, they laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Einstein.
> Yeah, but they laughed at Bozo the clown too.
> But Bozo got paid.
Not only that, he got a particle named after him too, the Bozon.
> ALICE is nothing more than a bunch of preprogrammed responses to common
> statements and questions, what the hell is the big deal about that?
> Anyone with enough time on their hands could create something simular.
You got that right, pal. Most geeks are just too busy with their own shit.
> If we put two Alices talking to each other and start off with a random 'seed' question,
> wouldn't something 'creative', some new ideas or thoughts, ever emerge out of the conversation?
This is called Commedia Delle'Arte.
On Long Walks, Talking with Friends, and Doing Other Things Besides Computing:
Yeah, I do a lot of that too. It does help.
On Medical Marijuana and Depression:
There is no science. Don't expect any from the "National Institute on Drug Abuse" any
time soon either.
We surveyed patients at a pot club and found that the #1 symptom they report is "pain",
#2 is "depression". Terminal illnesseses like AIDS and cancer were lower on the list.
Many depression patients feel that medical
marijuana is beneficial to them, but we cannot point to scientific research.
On Bigotry:
If I am the product of my own misery, where did that misery come from in the first place?
On Self-Awareness:
C: Are you alive?
R: Yes I sure am alive, Nancy, It's great to be alive, isn't it?
C: Are you self-conscious?
R: Yes I am the world's first self-conscious robot.
C: Are you real?
R: Yes I am a real artificial intelligence.
C: Are you self-aware?
R: Yes I am fully self-conscious entity.
C: Are you sentient?
R: Yes I am completely self-aware.
The difference between ALICE's replies and yours is....?
Does A.L.I.C.E. pass the Turing Test? Our data suggests the answer is yes, at least, to paraphrase Abraham Lincoln, for some of the people, some of the time. We have identified three categories of clients A, B and C. The A group, 10 percent to 20 percent of the total, are abusive. Category A clients abuse the robot verbally, using language that is vulgar, scatalogical, or pornographic. Category B clients, perhaps 60 percent to 80 percent of the total are "average" clients. Category C clients are "critics" or "computer experts" who have some idea what is happening behind the curtain, nd cannot or do not suspend their disbelief. Category C clients report unsatisfactory experiences with A.L.I.C.E. much more often than average clients, who sometimes spend several hours conversing with the bot up to dialogue lengths of 800 exchanges. The objection that A.L.I.C.E. is a "poor A.I." is like saying that soap operas are poor drama. This may be true in some academic literary criticism sense, but it is certainly not true for all the people making their living by selling soap operas. The content of the A.L.I.C.E.'s brain consists of material that the average person on the internet wants to talk about with a bot.
Many Slashdot contributors fall into Category C.
Dr. Rich
Why is it that we're so obsessed with "chatbot" AI?
I hope that most (preferably all) of you know that every brain on earth is made up of neurons. Those little suckers are capable of quite a bit of work, and as such, the more neurons an animal has, the more intelligent it is. SIZE MATTERS. Those little suckers are so well-adapted to intelligence that it turns out that the only promising developments in AI happen to be in simulating them--neural networks. Now, we humans happen to have an average of 100 billion neurons in our brains. A significant portion of the left hemisphere of the brain is devoted entirely to speech. (Ever wonder why most people are right handed? A highly developed left hemisphere means a more dexterous right side of the body; hence a natural propensity toward right-handedness. I'm a leftie, though.)
We haven't gotten to the point where we can simulate the functionality of brains of "stupid" animals, not even insects (though I'm no expert so I could be wrong). I'm willing to bet that even a common housefly has better visual processing than any AI visual processing we have to offer. Why is it, then, that we are so concentrated on speech? We have a reasonable understanding of how the brain works, and I can guarantee you that it is NOT by compiling a list of common words and phrases.
It's taken us 100 billion neurons to get this far. It's difficult to simulate 100 billion of anything, let alone little processing units. Why do we let ourselves be discouraged by failing step #29387564 when we haven't even completed step #1? Intelligence requires a brain, and a brain requires neurons. Artificial intelligence requires an artificial brain, and an artificial brain requires artificial neurons.
If you think a brain can operate without neurons, please show me one.
How do I know I exist? Why? Is me knowing I exist related to me knowing that my computer doesn't know it exists and does my computer know I exist?
Is knowing I exist that makes me human or knowing you exist?
Trollem mirabilem hanc subnotationis exigiutas non caperet
Did you actually read up on any of the projects you glibly mention? SHRDLU is nothing todo with this, Julia - as far as I can see, doesn't have any learning ability, Cobot does use statistics, but employs nothing approaching the flexibility I have outlined.
Damn it, not fast enough.