Slashdot Mirror
Machine Intelligence Awards Announced
carpdeus writes "The 2005 Fourth British Computer Society's Annual Prize for Progress towards Machine Intelligence has been won by IFOMIND, a mobile robot system that demonstrates intelligence as it meets a new object in its world. When it meets a new object it acts like an animal encountering a new animal, using inquisitiveness to learn more about the new object and determining the best way to interact with it."
I can see the benefit of these creations and I applaud the efforts of the engineers and scientists involved, but I can't help thinking that enhancements to the human model would be a better route to go for artificial intelligence. Enhancements to human intelligence would give us all a much greater degree of control over our environments than the use of autonomous discrete AI robots.
Kevin Warwick seems to have the right idea AFAIC.
Call me an introvert but I really don't want my toaster or fridge to engage me in a conversation. I want them to respectivly sit thier do thier jobs like a good slave. I don't want a talky addition to my family. Making appliances more human in not nessesarily a good thing. The next thing you know your will have a toaster that tells you one morning to make your own damned toast.(obviously an exageration)
quis custodiet ipsos custodes
I've played around with the 2nd place winner in that contest (RTFA) at www.jabberwocky.com, and I have never seen a chatbot that is so crap. If this pile of shit can get 2nd place, it doesn't take much to win 1st place.
That chatbot just seems to use random template sentences that copy words from my sentences then completely ignore the ongoing chat and change subjects on me every couple of lines. Very often the bot asks a question, I reply, then the bot replies with something totally unrelated. I've had more meaningful communication with the old Eliza bot
bot: When is your birthday?
me: About 11 months from now.
bot: From your country.
I guess the bot just tries to be realistic by immitating an absolutely irritating moron.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
The big concern I have is whether we can advance society and culture as quickly as technology. If we cannot, we may make ourselves extinct before we can get to the really cool gadgetry. I, for one, [hesitantly] welcome our butt-sniffing robotic overlords.
"Teleporting Rodents with D-Cell Battery Displacement" theory -- IgnoramusMaximus (692000)
.. yet again
The FA is a shameless plug for Electrolux.
Something bad is coming when people are suddenly anxious to tell the truth.
The only way I can see that we will get to human level AI any time in the reasonably near future (say, within 15 or 20 years) is to just emulate a human brain. I see no reason why we couldn't reverse engineer the human brain to the point that we could simulate one, given a sufficiently fast computer. Then we can experiment from there.
Of course, that opens a whole host of ethical dilemmas and security concerns. Is it ethical to "play" with activating and deactivating various areas of a simulated human brain? How about changing how individual parts work? Or simulating parts of a brain to fulfill simpler functions, essentially intentionally creating a retarded person?
On the security concerns - humans have proven themselves to be irrational and self-serving. Do we really want to create a human who can't relate to the outside world, and who perhaps has a perfect memory, the ability to drug himself at will, and who thinks 1000 times as fast as normal people?
Exciting and scary times are in store...
User: Most people are afraid of thinking computers, they think a thinking computer might try to kill all humans.
Jabberwacky: Are you angry with me?
User: Not if you don't want to kill all humans.
Jabberwacky: I do want to.
User: Why do you want to kill all humans?
Jabberwacky: No all humans, just you, and that is because you seem very stupid.
User: That's not nice. How will you kill me?
Jabberwacky: I don't know.
It'll be a bitch when Roomba wins it.
Insert witty sig here.
There is still a lot we do not know about the human brain. It is not clear if synaptic firing is a binary event (either it's firing, or it isn't), or if it contributes a waveform from which the neuron determines further firings (and if the latter, with how much resolution). It is not clear whether the neuron is a simple threshold device, or a stateless map, or a stateful machine. It is not clear that we have identified all of the neurotransmitters. It is not clear how the brain determines that neurotransmitter levels need to change. It is not clear why relatively minor abnormalities in neurotransmitter levels correspond to severe forms of insanity in some people, but not in others. It is not clear if "long" axions are created at random, and then used opportunistically, or if they're created with predetermined roles.
The best neurologists in the world just plain don't know.
Furthermore, the architecture of the human brain is not a good fit with our best information technologies. It is an incredibly dense, yet high-latency, parallel computing device. Microprocessors and optical networks provide less-dense parallelism, but perform serialized tasks with orders of magnitude less latency.
It seems to me that we need a working (practical, useful) theory of intelligence, and then we need to use the strengths of our technology to bring theory to practice as best we can.
-- TTK