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"St Lawrence of Google"
mcho writes "The Economist has a story about Google's co-founder, Larry Page, who " always wanted to change the world". The article attempts to make an arguement about the company's true intentions, amid all the rumors about potential Google products. "Google is already working on a massive and global computing grid. Eventually, says Mr Saffo, 'they're trying to build the machine that will pass the Turing test' -- in other words, an artificial intelligence that can pass as a human in written conversations. Wisely or not, Google wants to be a new sort of deus ex machina.""
Call me a 'naysayer', but I strongly suspect that if google does not focus on it's core business instead of spinning off a new-and-not-so-great product every 24 hours or so that someone will come out with an easy to use not loaded with ads search engine any day now.
MP3 Search Engine
This has to be one of the worst articles I've read on Google in a while. Summary:
- Larry and Sergey are passionate about tech (duh)
- People working at Google verge on the fanatical (duh)
- People erroneously predicted that Google would launch a product massively different from it's core search business (the $200 computer)
- Hey, now we're going to make a prediction that is even MORE far-fetched: Google will develop AI
This strikes me as a publicity-driven piece designed to continue the popular enthusiasm in Google and the perception that they can do no wrong. Maybe it wasn't intentional, but there is very little here other than the continuation of "Google as Media Darling" phenonemon.
They are not creating cold fusion, nor feeding the hungry. They index lots of stuff and release free cool software. That's all! I'm not saying there aren't big plans in the future, but for now it's just cool stuff. If you look at Microsoft and the Gates Foundation, they have done more to help the world by investing billions into 3rd world nations and convincing others to do the same. They are making the world a better place for many.
This Google bandwagon is just getting out of control!
http://religiousfreaks.com/Wisely or not, Google wants to be a new sort of deus ex machina.
And they would have gotten away with it too, if it weren't for you meddling kids!
Seriously, does the author of the submission even know what deus ex machina means (not the literal Latin meaning, I mean how it's used)?
If their business model is still selling ads, then I don't see much clutter in their model. Everything they've done so far is either to create things people want to look at so they'll see ads, to gather information to to better target ads, and to increase the number of people with access to their ads.
The brilliantly simple and useful software they crank out is just to get us in the door.
Yes, yes, very Interesting. But...
Hell, the other day I inserted a gibberish statistic in an article about a city
Why would you do that?
Creationist Textbook Stickers Declared Unconstitutional by CowboyNeal
Deus ex machina ?
:)
The Deux ex machina comes from theathers. It was stories with people getting stuck, and some god would come from above to solve the problem, and the god would be dropped on scene using rude and visible wires and mecanisms : this is why it is called deus ex machina (the god coming from the machine).
This so called journalist is obviously trying to use latin to make people think he's clever or educated.
He is not, obviously. And on Internet, it is better to be stupid and silent than to talk and remove any doubt about it
(if someone does know from who this famous quote comes from, please recall it to my faulty memory)
Spread Your Wings and Fly, Google.
Spread Your Wings and Fly.
God be with you.
becasue he is a sci-fi guy who isn't as nearly as smart as he thinks, but his ego is large enough to allow him to prove he is right in all things in his mind.
in short, he's an ass.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Maybe you don't read much but even non-fiction books disagree about things. Knowledge via democracy will not lead to a clearer understanding of anything. The problem is figuring out what is true and what is not and no amount of statistical analysis will tell you that.
Ingesting and indexing information makes it available, but it doesn't enable value judgments about it. There's plenty of inaccurate information on the Internet and in books (for instance--every fiction Web site or book), and I don't see how a cataloging system will be trained to make value judgments about it, or to synthesize it into new forms (as opposed to just present it).
Human children don't even tackle this process formally until they are about 4 or 5 and start school. And most aren't very good at it until they are over 20 years old. And they are directly trained by some of the best in the business--other humans. A system reading to itself for 10 years is probably not going to make it.
And even after all that, there is an unknown quantity of creativity or genius that is associated with advancing knowledge. Even with perfect understanding of physical data and theory in 1905, how obvious was deduction special relativity? The key to that breakthroughs was not encyclopedic knowledge and math horsepower, but rather the intuitive guesses Einstein made on assumptions and relationships.
Ultimately computer systems and living systems are different to their core--life systems at their core exist to propagate themselves at all costs, while computer systems at their core exist to execute commands at all costs. It's not your typical lifeform that will immediately cease its own existence at the slightest mistaken command from you. But every computer system will. Ultimately computers do what they are told and so will never develop free will, which is necessary for value judgments.
There'd be one question left unanswered, of course, the classic "Can entropy be reversed?." What would be really scary would be if G had an immediate answer.
We already have an answer to this, the answer is yes, it can be reversed, and that process is called life.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
"You could make the argument that the human brain is nothing but a very complex calculator."
People have made that argument, but I don't think it holds up. I think it is a very myopic view of the human mind.
I think for a long time, western science and philosophy were hung up wrestling with what exactly logic and reational thought were, mainly because your everyday person is so bad at it. Their goal was to have a totally rational, logical human being. Well, now we have that, sort of, in the computer. Except, we come to find out that a lot of human behavior has escaped the computer -- things such as face recognition, balancing, emotions. Now we have a rain man -- a powerful, totally logical mind, which can calculate the birth of stars, but one who can't even accomplish the simplest everyday things like guessing someones mood or walking to the mailbox to get the mail. Or even read handwriting.
So in the field of AI, we are able to do complex things that people are very bad it, but we don't even have a theoretical model for a lot of simple, every day things that people excel at without even trying. For example, face recognition. We do have a few techniques that computers use, but we have absolutely no idea whether or not those are the techniques that the human mind uses. We know where in the brain the actibity is taking place, but we have absolutely no idea what method or technique it is using.
I'm not exagerating, we're in total ignorance here. We can't yet peer inside the black box. We know what the eyes do when they scan a face, and we know where the optic nerve sends the data, and we know where the result gets sent to, but we don't know at all how that bundle of nerves is manipulating those electrical signals to recognize a face.
We don't even have a good defintion of basic emotions like anger within the brain. We know what it does to the body and the peripheral nervous system, we know how other parts of the brain respond to anger, but we don't have any idea or definition of what is actually going on in that little anger part of the brain.
So the problem in the western tradition is that these basic brain functions, such as emotion, have been totally ignored for the past several thousand years, in trying to find out what a totally rational, logical mind would act like. Turns out we are missing essential components of a useful everyday mind.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
Google is in the home. Many people would trust Google with their personal information. The trillion-dollar question is, would enough people trust Google to know what they purchase, on a person-by-person, item-by-item basis. Because if the answer is yes, the entire future of the retail sector depends on it.
Retailing is based on an information crisis: consumers don't know what exactly they want until they see it displayed nice and pretty on the self. What people have purchased is a good predictor of what they will purchase, and so retail managers do know what consumers want, but only it aggregate. But if any single concern can know a what a sufficient fraction of which consumers will want which goods, before the consumers themselves do, it is self-evidently more efficient to deliver the goods from citywide sorting centers to the consumers' door on neighborhood distribution routes (think postal service or trash pickup here), than for each household to send a representative to retail outlets to ponder the goods on the shelf, taking up parking space, aisle space, and their own precious time all the while.
The trillion-dollar question is not, can Google take on Microsoft, but, can Google take on WalMart?
"I'm no computer scientist or whatever, but I think the Turing test is dumb. My sig line says it all. Quoting Pablo Picasso..."
Disclaimers:
I am a Computer Scientist.
Turing is the God of Computer Science.
Picasso is the God of abstract.
First up you may think you understand the Turing test but you don't, this does not mean you are "dumb", simply uniformed. To pass the Turing test an AI machine must be able to convince people it is human (so convinced that they incorrectly pick the computer as the real human 50% of the time). In your particular case it would have to rapidly convince you it can "wonder" without ever having "met" you before. I belive if a machine can pass the Turing test then it has also passed us in "understanding" since it has the potential of understand that it is a machine but at the same time understand humans well enough to succesfully impersonate one.
The fact that the Turing test exists has already presented the human race with some very deep philosophical questions about ourselves that in my opinion are stranger than quantum mechanics. eg: If a machine can "fake" being human then what does it mean to be human, am I a naturally occuring universal computing machine? Is my "mind and soul" nothing more than an elaborate computation? Is life simply a spontaneous algorithim based on the geometry of certain molecules? What does it mean if more than 50% of people were to be fooled by a machine in a Turing test?
Picasso was certainly one of the great artists of the 20th century, (my art teacher cried when anouncing his death to the class). With apologies to my art teacher, the quote you are so fond of is arrogant and uniformed. To see what I mean, turn it around and imagine Alan Turing saying "Art is useless, it has no answers". Anyone with a clue about art would instantly realise Turing did not understand it. Since I do have a clue about computer science I can assure you Picasso did not.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.