Slashdot Mirror
"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.""
We regulars at slashdot have found seven questions that will cause every computer taking the Turing test to fail:
1. Will it run Linux?
2. Why isn't there a law protecting us from [insert gripe here]?
3. When will Duke Nukem Forever be released and will it support Copland?
4. How can I enhance my sex organ's size?
5. How can I write a DRM scheme that can't be broken?
6. How can I protect my PIN number when I send it over AIM messenger to use at the ATM machine?
and the hardest question asked on slashdot:
7. ??? (usually followed by "Profit!")
Poor Larry is just spinning his wheels...
GoogleNet == SkyNet!
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Society has traditionally always tried to find scapegoats for its problems. Well, here I am.
"There's no way we'll let Google own the Deus ex machina market space! I'll f***ing kill those guys!" {sound of chair striking Bateman print}
Rich And Stupid is not so bad as Working For Rich And Stupid.
A clean and uncluttered interface was the key to Google's search success as well as being the key supplement to their ad brokering business. I just hope "cluttering" up their business model won't have the opposite effect.
Forget about the AI rumor. It's just a rumor, the last sentence of TFA, unrelated to the rest.
More interesting is the following quote:
This somehow reminds me of Apple in the 90s. They were on a crusade. They had found the holy grail. They could not fail. They would bring their vision to the world.
They could fail. And they failed. It didn't destroy them, but put their feet back to the ground. Where they belong. Today they make great products while listening to their users needs. They have learned that even though they may be on a mission, missionaries usually do not change the world. Hard workers and creative people do, as long as they stay connected to reality.
Bill Gates from Triumph of the nerds:
Chriss
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Too late. Ann Coulter has already achieved that.
the minds at google have entered the same phase tesla's mind did post-ac power defeating edison's dc power
that is, trying to transmit electricity in the atmosphere and building a death ray
your basic mad scientist megalomania
google to announce the sharks with frickin' laser beams project in 3... 2... 1...
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I'm not exactly sure where a guy from a place called the "Institute for the Future" gets the nuts to call any organization pious, but he raises a point.
It's impossible to create a cathedral from a bazaar and still have it be a bazarr. You cannot suck all the resources out of the community and then declare yourself the community, which may or may not be Google's intent, but it certainly is starting to feel that way. They are chasing after every talented person around and positioning themselves in every market. Doing it better in some cases, not so much in others.
It's arguable, but innovation and competition seem to go hand in hand. We seem to produce better results when talent is spread around and several companies are chasing results, rather than one company gobbling everything up and amassing a vast fortune. I don't think Google is evil, but they may be too powerful for their own good. These massive projects they're taking on could have long-lasting effects in our community; I'd rather they were created in a consortium than in a star chamber.
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.
is that to build a truly self-aware computing grid, the LAST thing you want is for it to be distributed over the entire globe. The amount of data a system has to integrate to reach self-awareness is massive, and the further apart the nodes are the more latency you'll have. Once the system is up and running, then maybe you'd want to spread it apart to protect against natural disasters, but in the development stage you'd only be handicapping yourself needlessly. The writer's conclusion is based on an understanding of science that doesn't seem to reach past the Terminator 3 level.
Slashdot needs a "-1, Wrong" moderation option.
The Urban Hippie
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)?
this is an obvious conclusion. the next obvious step after point to the information is having it and understanding it.
note though - the popular definition of the Turing test (computers passing as humans) is not the initial or the only test Turing proposed. He proposed one in which an outside observer could guess the *gender* of a hidden respondant through bi-directional text communication.
there is a very important difference here. gender is an obvious splitting of context for what someone knows. males have an experience in the world as a male human and females as a female human. there are then very subtle differences in the context (scope and location of knowledge) for each type. there are no set rules for what any particular man or woman can or can't know - but on the whole, their context is different.
this is actually a much easier test than for one in which computers generally pass for humans. This test was about locating and identifying the context of a knowledge source, not about testing the complexity or processing ability of a system.
for people really interested in this -- go read the 1950 paper "Computing Machineryand Intelligence." by Turing.
what makes my SOOO frustrated is that 1.5 years ago I applied several times to Google to work on exactly this question and was never able to get an interview - and I have a PhD in Informatics
Whenever you see stories like this, and among other things if they start building new buildings, buy executive jets, if in Europe, CEOs get enobled, which is a particularly horrifying portent for shareholders, but if in the US start being treated as visionaries, then, buy long term puts. Especially when the brokerage community is telling you to buy buy buy.
Now, the great mistake in these matters is buying your puts too early, and I admit to thinking the time had come at 400. However, how anyone can lose in long term puts at this point defies belief. Is 500 possible? Probably. But I confidently expect to see 50 before we see 1,000. Friends, what we are seeing now is not part of the history of Internet or computing. It is a chapter in the history of hysteria.
Caution: this is not investment advice, and I am completely unqualified to give any. These are opinions offered to stimulate thought and discussion and of educational value only. If that!
Of the three definitions, I would say only 2 or 3 would make sense in the context that the phrase is used. So, the ultimate goal of the company is to have Google pop up unexpectedly and resolve conflicts in an artificial and contrived manner.
Sorta like Clippy. *ducks*
my pet machine
Please read up on what, exactly, deus ex machina is. It is a literary term, describing the way gods would be lowered on to stage with a mechane (machine) to solve otherwise unsolvable problems that came up during the play. Because the "gods" would come from the "machine," the term "deus ex machina" was used - meaning, literally, god from the machine.
People using the term to describe Google sound like people who overheard the term once, had no idea what it meant, so they translated it and decided to take a literal meaning to the thing. I'm reminded of people using the term "body of crime" incorrectly (once even on CSI... *sigh*).
Rob
Google is an advertising company marketing themselves through cool free software. They've found a niche, and it's a good one. The idea that they're going to start producing operating systems or desktops is asinine...although I'm sure they will continue to donate to innovative initiatives like MIT's $200 computer, as doing so is also an excellent form of advertising and allows them actively to "not be evil."
So Google's big project is scanning every single book and indexing them online. It's a great idea. Why just search the internet when you can also be searching every work of literature? It's an obvious advance for Google, improving the search engine in a small but obvious way that makes a big difference as far as real usability.
Here's the thing: indexing books online is an incidental benefit. Google's real goal is to create a working, statistical AI. They've been hiring top-of-their-field AI researchers for a while. Last summer, Google won a competition for machine translation. They translated from Arabic to English and vice-versa better than all of their competitors. They did this using a statistical approach -- just feed the computer thousands and thousands of already translated documents, and eventually the machine can start making inferences based on probability. Given enough data, it works.
The same idea can be applied in the generic case. Wouldn't being able to ask an AI any question and receive a correct answer revolutionize society? And, the sum total of world literature is probably enough data to do so. They could call it AskG. He would know everything. And, the way they could roll it out, is by launching, and simultaneously updating wikipedia. It's well known that Wikipedia is riddled with small errors. Hell, the other day I inserted a gibberish statistic in an article about a city, and it's still there. Imagine if Google AI launches, and then announces that it has fixed Wikipedia. If Google AI made 50,000 edits it would overwhelm Wikipedia's normal editors, but whichever edits were checked by humans would certainly be confirmed as correct.
And, a new age of humanity would be ushered in. It would we a new Library of Alexandria. We would end the Age of Information and enter the Age of Knowledge. The singularity has already begun, but no one has realized it -- the singularity began the day Google went live.
Would AskG immediately fix quantum theory? Given all the data about science published by researchers, could G form new conclusions that humanity's best and brightest haven't? Could G solve the logistical challenge of solving world poverty?
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.
See the best sci-fi short story ever written, Asimov's The Last Question, or a simple find and replace hack of that story, The Last Query.
The Turing test is more than holding up a conversation. It is causing difficulty for the testor to decide if room A has the human or room B. It is easy to imagine if the testor is unimaginitive, how this test might seem dull. Questions like: Do you like the Red Sox, how big is the earth, or where is the nearest Starbucks, can all easily be answered by a computer. These rely on standard data mining techniques.
Suppose, on the other hand, the testor asks questions such as: "What's the meaning of Life?", "Please compare Emily Dickenson to Thoreau", or "What do you dream about?". While specific responses might be able to used, provided the programmer has guessed in advanced what might be asked, to actually have a *conversation* about these, is not likely to happen any time soon with a computer near you.
More importantly, to answer your question, being able to converse about these questions, I will submit, *requires* a thinking entity. Why? Because it's dependent on creation of new material -- somehow taking your old data, and coming to new conclusions.
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)
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.
This is just platitudes and idiocy.
The natural state of matter is not consciousness. If it were virtually everything would be intelligent. As it is only a few animals seem to possess intelligence on one planet.
We know that consciousness in Man is the result of billions of years of competition among trillions upon trillions of organisms which are our ancestors.
The idea that a single entity, designed, but not designed to be conscious will eventually become intelligent is the result of too much bad science fiction. Trillions of organisms evolving for billions of years to produce even slightly intelligent animals vs. a single network with much less than a billion nodes and no evolutionary forces at work whatsoever.
AI will be developed when we unravel the secrets to intelligence or when we produce enormously fast computer simulated evolution, but it will not come about as a side effect of people surfing porn.
"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 guess I have another side to my point.
Well, if we come up with a device that passes the turing test, that doesn't necessarily tell us anything about the human mind. It could be that there is only one implementation of an intelligence or consciousness or whatever, or the machine we invent could be completely different from the human mind, yet achieve the same results.
If you don't care about how the human mind specifically works, that's fine. But my point is that if a machine passes the Turing test, that doesn't *necessarily* mean anything about how the human mind works.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
The original St Lawrence angered the Prefect of Rome who ordered him to be roasted to death on a grid-iron. Although, according to the sources, St Lawrence faced his death with fortitude and even managed a joke with the executioner - quite a feat, as Roman executioners were probably not known their sense of humour.
I hope that if Google ever do manage to construct a machine that passes the Turing test it will manage a joke instead of a sad sqwark as someone reaches for the Off switch.
Las qué passoun
tournoun pas maï
"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.