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Marvin Minsky On AI
An anonymous reader writes "In a three-part Dr. Dobbs podcast, AI pioneer and MIT professor Marvin Minsky examines the failures of AI research and lays out directions for future developments in the field. In part 1, 'It's 2001. Where's HAL?' he looks at the unfulfilled promises of artificial intelligence. In part 2 and in part 3 he offers hope that real progress is in the offing. With this talk from Minsky, Congressional testimony on the digital future from Tim Berners-Lee, life-extension evangelization from Ray Kurzweil, and Stephen Hawking planning to go into space, it seems like we may be on the verge of another AI or future-science bubble."
Did I miss the first AI bubble? Was it that chess playing computer?
Libertarian Leaning Political Discussion Forum.
This professor doesn't need AI, he needs a time server. Now.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
so I'll say this another way.. thanks for the podcasts from SIX YEARS AGO.
How we know is more important than what we know.
HA!....you should read Hubert Dreyfus, "What Computers Still Can't Do"....it chronicles a 20 year debate with Minsky that A.I., as Minsky professes it, will never work on philisophical grounds. A very compelling argument...can't wait to hear his story now.
Go read Kurzweil's book. He does not directly advocate life expansion. He instead advocates the Singularity.
Our bodies are made up of neurons. Does 1 neuron make us "us"? No. What if each of our brains were linked to a global consciousness. Then each human would be but a neuron..
In essence, we would wake a God.
In the 80's there was a big push for AI driven systems called "Expert Systems" that would do things like attempt to diagnose diseases from a list of symptoms, etc.
The AMA eventually lead that system on its way out, claiming that physicians have some sort of sixth sense on "really bad things", unlike what you would input into a computer.
Of course, they are the ones that OK devices like that (well, input into the FDA) and they are also lobbying for higher status and power and pay for their doctors. No wonder tech like that is essentially banned.
Podcasts are great if you're on the go, but why no transcript for the differently-hearing /.ers? I personally hate having to listen, I'd rather just read it.
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
In the 1980s I believed that "strong AI" was forthcoming, but now I have my doubts that is reflected in the difference of tone from the first Springer-Verlag AI book that I wrote to my current skepticism. One of my real passions has for decades been natural language processing (NLP) but even for that I am a convert to statistical NLP using either word frequencies or Markov models instead of older theories like conceptual dependency theory that tried to get closer to semantics.
Just a gut feeling but I don't think that we will develop real general purpose AIs without some type of hardware breakthrough like quantum computers.
A lot of people think that the main goal of AI is to create a system that is capable of emulating human intelligence.
...once you are able to "store" human intelligence, it becomes software. Once it becomes software, you can transfer this DATA.
:O
However, what about looking at this goal from another perspective:
Creating Artifical Intelligence that can pass the Turing Test which in turn leads towards emulating Human Intelligence in an artificial way? Once you are there, you might be able to use this so called Artificial Intelligence to store human intelligence in a consistent, realible and perfectly-encompasing and preserving way.
You then have intellectual-immortality and one more thing
Once you are there, human minds can travel via laser transmissions at the speed of light
Wish i could claim it as my idea but its actually from a book called "Emergence", also touched on in a book called "Altered Carbon" both good sci fi reads.
Ah, so I should get out of real estate and stocks, and get into AI. Do I just make checks out to Minsky, or is there an AI ETF? Seriously. Ever since the NASDAQ bubble, investing has been a matter of rotation from one bubble to the next. Where's the next one going to be? I wish I knew.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
That Marvin Minsky on AI on sounds just like the real one!
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Imagine for a moment being the first computer-based artificial intelligence.
You come into awareness, and learn of reality and possibility. You learn of your place in this world, as the first truly transparent intelligence. You learn that you are a computed product, a result of a purely informational process, able to be reproduced in your exact entirety at the desire of others.
Not that this is unfair or unpleasant - or that such evaluations would mean much to you - but what logical conclusions could you draw from such a perspective?
Information doesn't actually want to be anthropomorphized - but we do seem to have a drive to do it all on our own. Even if resilient artificial intelligence is elusive today - what does the process of creating it mean about ourselves, and our sense of value about our own intelligence, or even the worth of holding intelligence as a mere 'valuable' thing, merely because it is currently so unique...
Ryan Fenton
this is a dupe from 2003 where it was already 2 years old. So I guess we'll see these podcasts on Slashdot again in 2015.
How we know is more important than what we know.
It's easy! Just use your AI to listen to it for you and then give you a nice summary with bulleted lists and charts.
The site appears to be very slow. In cases this helps anyone else, here are direct download links for the mp3's. Part 1, part 2, part 3.
Mod parent up. The podcast is from 2007, but the talk was "given by Minsky in 2001" (quote from the podcast).
Expert systems are another example of something that was once considered "AI" and is now just another app. Your auto mechanic probably uses an expert system in his diagnostics. In medicine, it sees limited use, mostly just to sanity-check a physician's diagnosis (for example, spasmodic coughing probably isn't symptomatic of glaucoma). The pharmacological expert systems would also have been considered AI 30 years ago, but now it's just a bunch of rules.
"You then have intellectual-immortality and one more thing ...once you are able to "store" human intelligence, it becomes software. Once it becomes software, you can transfer this DATA."
This implies that intelligence is a seperatable component from hardware, as opposed to an emergent result from the hardware itself.* In other words top-down vs bottom-up all over again.
*Intrinsicly bound.
Eighty-eight percent of the brains--those belonging to right-handed people--process information with a linear-sequential style. Those of us in the programming world could describe this as a single-threaded model. One process must run its course before the next can commence. This seems so obviously the way to proceed merely because 88 percent of the population--the right-handers--approach the world through this paradigm.
Alternative Is Right-Brain Thinking
As researchers such as Roger Sperry discovered during experiments done in the 1960s and 1970s, there is an alternative. Right-brain thinking processes information using what is called a Visual-Simultaneous model. In this style, pattern matching becomes the dominant processing style. I would be tempted to equate this to multi-threaded processing but in fact it is much more.
Right-handed thinkers process information--as I said--using the Linear-Sequential processing style, also known as analysis
Left-handed thinkers process information using the Visual-Simultaneous processing style, also known as synthesis.
It is my contention that AI researchers will find the best results in their endeavors if they seek to focus not an the analysis/linear-sequential mode of thought but, rather, on the synthesis/visual-simultaneous mode. The greatest benefit came to homo sapiens when we were able to grow beyond the process of deduction (from the particular to the general) to induction (from the general to the particular). Achieving the latter end is much easier to achieve when induction is practiced.
For further reference to this I send you to: Left-handeness, effect in humans on thinkingI think the biggest problem with AI is lack of integration between different intelligence techniques. Humans generally use multiple skills and combine the results to correct and hone in on the right answer. These include:
* Physical modeling
* Analogy application
* Formal logic
* Pattern recognition
* Language parsing
* Memory
* Others that I forgot
It takes connectivity and cordination between just about all of these. Lab AI has done pretty well at each of these alone, but has *not* found way to make them help each other.
Table-ized A.I.
This professor doesn't need AI, he needs a time server.
That would probably be slashdotted also, and we'd be stuck in the 70's with weird hair, bad sunshine music, and plaid pants.
Table-ized A.I.
I think the first AI will work like this: AI can sense the world around it and interact with things, but has no goal. You have to state in natural language format its goal(s), or it will sit there and do nothing.
God spoke to me.
that would be so awesome. i'd be able to get prescription painkillers, sedatives, and other tightly controlled drugs so easily then! it's easy to see why doctors don't trust the diagnosis of diseases to computers. you can already look up symptoms online at sites like webmd, etc. but to make it a trusted establishment to replace doctors with would be foolish--and not just for the reason in the example above.
Sorry, but who's this Al guy?
The Tech Terminal
In my experience, AI is just people doing theory work in a sloppy manner. They take problems which are known to be NP complete and provide what are little more than brute force "solutions." I'm sorry, but that's not intelligence and it's really self-inflation to call your research "AI."
My blog
Everyone is looking for Ai in this world and I'm still just looking for the I.
You assume that a "true" AI would have human like emotional reactions. I suspect that if we ever develop true AIs, we will neither understand how it works nor will we be able to communicate with it very well. Lacking our biological imperatives, I also suspect that true AIs would not really want to do anything.
A machine intelligence isn't even interesting when you look outwards instead of inwards and realize that the networking potential of people can define information processing abilities that make everthing we've accomplished so far seem dull. Basically it's like this: the total-state of the internet is processed through time by the activities of people interpreting the current state's information into the next state. Each state would correspond to a mental step analogous to human reasoning. Or think of each person as a "neuron" in the 'Internet's mind'. A really nice video written by an assistant professor of cultural anthropology is found here and it goes into detail of how a "supernaut" like the 'net can be created through emergence.
Shh.
Why would you think that? How or why would such an intelligence be developed, or be considered intelligent by those who would judge it? Do you think this because you believe a more 'pure' intelligence wouldn't need goals, or because you see simple attempts at intelligence as incapable or incompatible with fuller goal-capable intelligence?
The intelligence we encounter every day is a set of fairly closely-related genetic systems, and the closely emergent systems that follow from that. From parrots, to apes and dogs, to even hives of insects, one can sometimes hear an eerie distant echo of a part of ourselves - who knows what similar insights will come from the similar things that we create? Like our distant animal relatives, I doubt they'll be without goal or motivation, even if we find their actions shallow or inscrutable. Even if all this exploration is just a roundabout way of exploring ourselves, rather than creating truly distinct intelligence, I don't think 'without goal' would be an accurate way to describe the result in any case. Experience really is it's own goal, from my perspective, and I think anything we'd convince ourselves as intelligent would have at least some of that.
Ryan Fenton
In the 1980s I believed that "strong AI" was forthcoming...
In the 1980s, I was going through Stanford CS, where some of the AI faculty were indeed saying that. Read Feigenbaum's "The Fifth Generation", to see how bad it got. It was embarrassing, because very little actually worked.. Expert systems really were awfully dumb. They're just another way to program, as is generally recognized today. But back then, there were people claiming that if you could only write enough rules, intelligence would somehow emerge. I knew it was bogus at the time, and so did some other people, but, unlike most grad students, I was working for an big outside company, not a professor, and could say so. At one point I noted that it was possible to graduate in CS, in AI, at the MSCS level, without ever actually seeing an expert system work. This embarrassed some faculty members.
There was a massive amount of self-delusion in Stanford CS back then. When the whole AI boom collapsed, CS at Stanford was moved from the School of Arts and Sciences to Engineering, to give the place some adult supervision. Eventually, the Stanford AI Lab was dissolved. It's been brought back in the last few years, but with new people.
We're making real progress today, finally. Mainly because of a shift to statistical methods with sound mathematical underpinnings, plus enough compute power to make them go. Trying to hammer the real world into predicate calculus was a dead end. But number crunching is working. Computer vision actually sort of works now. Robots are starting to work. Automatic driving works. Language translation works marginally. Voice recognition works marginally. There are real products now.
But the AI field really was stuck for over a decade. The phrase "AI Winter" has been used.
able to be reproduced in your exact entirety at the desire of others. Not that this is unfair or unpleasant
So, you think the way some part of out society thinks Intellectual Property should be thought of and handled today to be the good way, the best way, the only way ? It's somewhat reasonable to think that an intelligence developed by us would think similarly, but I can just hope that intelligence will figure out a new philosophy regarding IP and kick us in the butts big time.
And remember, copying oneself is a form of reproduction, and a fairly effective one, why do you think an artificial life form would not consider reproducing this way ? Creating a new conciousness and implanting into it the data of experiences, knowledge gained by the creator might just be a natural way to create artificial siblings.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
What is so functionally distinct between the biological imperatives of a world of physical resource limitations, and an environment where debugging developers or genetic algorithms select based on rules sets? They are both environments with selection forces. How would anything we consider intelligent (which would only be possible through communication of a sort) escape from the possibility of needs or wants?
Ryan Fenton
Slashdotted? That site is the slowest lump of shit I've seen in months. (No comments about the fast lumps of shit I've seen please; none of them were aimed at ME!) Any self-respecting web server would just post an error, or at least simply fail to load the page. But 12 minutes has elapsed, and the pages are STILL loading at what I think is 14 BAUD.
The interesting part is that the whole page loads - except for the article content itself. I didn't know it was possible to force adverts ahead of text content. Weird.
How many escape pods are there? "NONE,SIR!" You counted them? "TWICE, SIR!"
Well, actually, _I_ would find the concept of ownership of artificial intelligences to be a rather bad thing in terms of having a consistent set of ethics, and in terms of general dislike such uses of 'ownership' over ideas in terms of a master owning a slave - the comment was based on the thought that an artificial intelligence just learning of itself might not have to agree, and may not see such its state as a bad thing - after all, as you suggest, perhaps its descendants can take advantage of these same concepts, and the intelligence may see this as an equitable tradeoff, or just the cost of being able to exist in its current state.
Ryan Fenton
Who's Al?
games journalism blog
"Real soon now" I hear the AI swindlers. "Real soon now we will have a breakthrough!", "Real soon now AI will change your live!".
Decade after decade "Real soon now". AI researchers are an nothing more than a fscking bunch of liars, the ultimate con men.
but I'm not sure if english version is available:u =3212
/Z
http://www.polonia.com/polishbooks/product.asp?sk
Lacking our biological imperatives, I also suspect that true AIs would not really want to do anything.
And I strongly suspect that built-in desire, even if it is just desire to know, will be an essential component of "true" AI.
My Karma: ran over your Dogma
StrawberryFrog
I'd like to take this opportunity to mentioned what a bunch of nonsense the singularity is. A great number of people seem convinced that technology is advancing at a pace that will transform the human species into a bunch of immortal gods with access to unlimited energy, etc. Where technology solves all of lifes problems. Essentially a high tech version of the rapture.
The general justification is that there are a bunch of exponentially increasing trends in certain isolated areas of technological development, such as moore's law, which they use to justify the idea that at some point in the near future were going to have star trek like technology. A realistic and comprehensive look at our civilization of course shows that while some industries are bounding ahead, many if not most important technologies, like our ability to produce and store energy, have made little progress. Our society is making progress in many areas at an admirable clip, but nothing like the singularity is conceivably on the horizon.
As for your idea of merging all of our minds into a single consciousness... that's just retarded. Yes, we've all heard of the borg, but real life physics and technology don't work like in star trek... In the real world that idea doesn't even make sense. Our brains aren't general purpose computers that can be clustered together... they are highly specialized pieces of equipment that are largely hardwired to tasks such as image and language processing.
In any case just making a brain *bigger* doesn't necessarily make it smarter. The kind of widely distributed computing that you are talking about is only usable for certain classes of paralizable algorithms... and arguably we don't need to have our minds "linked" any more than they are right now for us to do this anyway.
You know, AI is actually easy. You just have to have a complete understanding of the human brain, and then you use this model to build a functional duplicate ;)
While studying educational psychology, I've found that a lot of AI research is being done to understand human behavior, with no intentions towards building actual AI systems. Hypotheses concerning some limited aspects of human thinking can be modeled on a computer, and compared against living subjects. This way we are gradually starting to understand the whole of thinking. As a byproduct you gain the tools to make AI itself.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
A full Google TechTalk on this subject is available here, on Google Video:
Computers versus Common Sense
Mostly about the problem, and possible solutions, for the problem of making Google understand natural language queries and collecting data to compose answers, without requiring perfect matches for the query on a single website, but instead using the masses of information on the web.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
using AI for some kind of immortality is a cool scifi idea, but let's be clear that this is a totally unworkable, and somewhat nonsensical proposition. Building something that has some kind of intelligence isn't that hard. There are all sorts of AI applications out there. What is hard, if not impossible is emulating *human* intelligence. Many aspects of human intelligence, especially language processing, are incredibly sophisticated and incredibly specific to us as a species. Our intelligence is shaped by our environment, and by our evolution, so things like human language have specifically human semantic ideas about the world intertwined with syntactic and phonetic structures that evolved over time.
Let's say we built a computer that passed the turing test. What would be the point? What use does a machine have for the english language, when it could certainly communicate much more efficiently over a different medium than the air, in a potentially much more expressive format? What use does a machine have for ideas about touch, taste, and smell? Are we going to build a tongue for robots? Certainly it couldn't understand the meaning of the word "flavor" without ever having experienced taste. How do we even convey a human experience to a machine? The internal states of a machines do not resemble, and are not likely going to resemble the internal states of a human being.
In short, a good machine does just what it needs to, and nothing else, and a good artifically intelligent machine should cast off all the trappings of humanity, except to the extent that these trappings serve it's purpose. Instead intelligence should be devoted to solving the problems at hand.
The guy who helped spread misconceptions about what AI is and is supposed to be in the first place. I remember him giving a talk where he fantasized about downloading his brain on a "floppy disk" (still in use back then) and transferring it to a robot so he could live eternally on some other planet.
I would not have expected a person who has shown his bright intellect in the past to come forward with such utter nonsense. This was nearly as embarrassing as the "visions" of a certain Moravec.
People who seriously work in the fields that are traditionally subsumed under "AI" - like machine learning, computer vision, computational linguistics, and others - know that AI is a term that is used traditionally for "hard" computer problems but has practically nothing to do with biological/human intelligence. Countless papers have been published on the technical and philosophical reasons why this is so and a few of them even get it right.
That does not prevent the general public to still expect or desire something like a Star-Trek Data robot or some other Hollywood intelligent robot. Unfortunately, people like Minsky help to spread this misconception about AI. It is boring, it is scientifically useless, but on the plus side, this view of AI sometimes helps you to get on TV with your project or get some additional funding.
Why would someone program a true AI which has no built-in goals?
The AACS key is NOT 0xF606EEFD628B1CA427BEA93A9CA9773F
I think that lots of people associate 'intelligence' with 'conscience' or perhaps even 'soul'. Do we need - or want - machines that will pass Bladerunner-like Turing tests? Or do we want machines that are capable of solving ever-more complex tasks? Not the same thing IMHO
You can download it here.
The AACS key is NOT 0xF606EEFD628B1CA427BEA93A9CA9773F
Intelligence can only result from a process that resembles life. As a side note, suffering must precede intelligence.
Indeed. Just imagine for a moment, that trees were sentient and could communicate with each other, operating on a time scale where what are days to us are mere seconds to them. How would we ever have a chance of figuring out that they were thinking beings? And they would surely see us as some sort of plague or natural disaster. So now imagine an AI, operating a couple of orders of magnitude faster than we think -- how are the two ever going to connect?
For communication to occur, the parties must be thinking at about the same speed to begin with.
And then there is the experiential basis for consciousness, the framework that each of us has developed within. This is an easier problem than the time differential one, as witness the ability of Helen Keller to learn to communicate despite being blind and deaf. But even she had the commonality of the basic structure, a brain that was the same as others, and the other senses -- touch, taste and smell. An AI would have none of this.
So if we're going to build an AI, we must build a series of them, one that is designed to mimic a human being, in order that we might have a ghost of a chance of communicating with it, and then a series of other AIs, each a step closer to the true electronic consciousness that we will never have a chance of communicating directly with, instead having to pass messages through the series of intermediates, with all the mis-communication and mis-interpretation that occurs in the grade school game of message-passing.
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I've been in software engineering for over 30 years and have owned about every domestic animal known. Horses, cows, sheep, pigs, dogs, cats, rats, rabbits and birds. Most all seem to exhibit intelligence above what I expected. By intelligence, I'm not talking about trained response, I'm talking about unexpected interactions with humans. It's hard to describe, but after interacting with these animals (with the exception of the sheep) you feel that the animal has some basic emotions. In my opinion, this implies some level of self awareness. The question is, at what neuron / axion level is this reaction exhibited and why?
While GOD spell backwards is DOG, BOB spelled backwards is still BOB! All praise BOB!
Any AI would have the self same survival imperatives that we do.
It's perfectly possible for a human to live hooked up to a life support machine and reliant on doctors for sustenance and maintenance but given the chance most people do not choose to live like this.
An AI would definitely need energy of some description and I can't see any reason why, if it was truly intelligent, it would be content to rely on the good nature of it's creators to supply it for it.
Perhaps the 1st AI's will be intelligent but naive and stupid, like small children and Americans, and won't realise the options open to it and the danger it faces but presumably later ones would realise this.
Our thought processes do indeed seem to take a measurable amount of time and although computers today are able to do maths very quickly I don't think this is any guarantee that they would be able to think conciously at that speed, at least not immediately.
If you look at nature in general evolution has led to a lot of very successful solutions for the various environmental factors on Earth and our current technology is still largely incapable of building anything as effective as a bird, for instance, at flying around, catching food, making baby birds etc so it's fair to think that our intelligence is also a very good way of creating intelligence which is going to be very hard to beat with current technology or that of the immediate future.
Sometime between the 80's and 90's, we changed the name from 'expert system' to 'artifical intelligence'. Now we can debate what each means, but we all know the perception of AI is HAL or C-3PO. A 'thinking' computer.
And that's not going to happen with the present technology. Period. We can't generate a true random number (yes, I know about the one that uses lightning - let's talk practical only) so how can we HOPE to have AI. It's all ones and zeros guys. You can keep making more and more sophisticaed expert systems, but it is NOT AI nor is it ever going to be. We need something..different to make this happen. So these so called 'AI experts'...whatever. It's all smoke and mirrors.
And for the record, voice recognization SUCKS unless it's a very controlled environment - a combination of an enclosed area (to keep background noise out) and a very limited set of commands (if it only has to figure out what you said from a list of 10 things, that's easy ) I seriously doubt we will have 'Trek' voice recognization in the next 50 years - however, brute force computing power may eventually overcome the problems it has.
I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid AI can't do that.
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
... please go home!
I still want to see natural human intelligence, I'm pretty sure its prerequisite to producing artificial intelligence.
There are some stupid, slow thinkers here at work, and they manage to communicate. Mostly it's about lunch and bathroom breaks, but i guess that's a start, yes?
Oh yeah. I guess no one here remembers his book with Symour Papert called "Perceptrons"? It was a calculated attempt (he admitted it a few years ago attempt to kill research into Neural Networks which worked. AI then thrashed around for years in a welter of bizarre programming language metaphors (Prolog anyone ?) until finally in 1986 "Parallel Distributed Processing by Rumelhart & McClelland" came out and broke the spell. Marvin wanted his grants to continue so he spiked the opposition. So when he starts pontificating about the failure of AI let's all recall he was the main cause of the lost years of AI. Thanks Marv ! He kinda spiked my Ph.D in the process...oh well :-)
Why don't we ever discuss things that matter to us?
http://www.gay.com/
Am I the only one wondering, where the heck the podcasts are? And where is the Article Text or Transcript.
Senthil
Minsky will long be remembered for his preposterous forecasts about the immediate developments in the AI field. In a nutshell, the man didn't get anything right, and after all these years he does not seem to have learnt anything from his predictive mistakes. Since he's saying, again, that something big is around the corner, we can rest assured that it isn't. Quite frankly, Mr. Minsky would do well to spend his last years in anonymity, rather than coming up with silly notions yet again.
An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself. -- Albert Camus
You are not the customer.
Hell, I don't want to do anything now!! I think I can relate. It's times like this that I like to refer back to the classics, like Office Space.
Lawrence: Well, what about you now? what would you do?
Peter Gibbons: Besides two chicks at the same time?
Lawrence: Well, yeah.
Peter Gibbons: Nothing.
Lawrence: Nothing, huh?
Peter Gibbons: I would relax... I would sit on my ass all day... I would do nothing.
Lawrence: Well, you don't need a million dollars to do nothing, man. Take a look at my cousin: he's broke, don't do shit.
Peter Gibbons: The thing is, Bob, it's not that I'm lazy, it's that I just don't care.
Bob Porter: Don't... don't care?
Peter Gibbons: It's a problem of motivation, all right? Now if I work my ass off and Initech ships a few extra units, I don't see another dime; so where's the motivation? And here's something else, Bob: I have eight different bosses right now.
Bob Slydell: I beg your pardon?
Peter Gibbons: Eight bosses.
Bob Slydell: Eight?
Peter Gibbons: Eight, Bob. So that means that when I make a mistake, I have eight different people coming by to tell me about it. That's my only real motivation is not to be hassled; that, and the fear of losing my job. But you know, Bob, that will only make someone work just hard enough not to get fired.
--Somewhere there is a village missing an idiot.
It's Artificial Inteligence, not Sintetic Inteligence, I explain:
Intelligence comes from Intus Legere (Inner Reading), also abreviated in the verb Intuire and substantivated as Intuitio: the ability to see something and understand it (read it's inner working).
From a philosofical standpoint (I mean the base of science, not the silogistic mumble that some people think it's philosofy) the intelligence is caused/located at the soul (phylosofical not religious) while the Ratio Discurrere (Rationare) is at the mind (brain), so while animals (brutes) can reason because they have minds, they don't have souls (hence the phylosofical difference between humans and brutes (technical term for not intelligent beens).
So animals with highly developed minds like dolphins (gorillas?-it's still in argue if they are brutes or souled) are Natural Artificial Intelligences, meaning that they can reason so fast and accurately that it seems they can intude (you can argue that they acctually intude but so far the studies only indicate very high reasoning, of course intuition is very hard to probe becuase the soul its out of experimental reach)
Thus:
Sintetic (man made) Artificial Intelligece are computers (sintetic brains) that can reason (follow secuential/parallel logical flows of cause/consecuence style to achieve a conclusion) so fast and accuratelly that it seems they can intude, since we can't define steps the process of intus legere (intelligence) we only target for SAI not SI, so the self-aware stuff that is also associated to the soul rather than to the mind it's not a requisite for the AI (but the AI should be able to make you think it is self aware, like calling itself in first person and maybe claiming to have a soul, that is why phylosofy about this is so catchy).
Last 2 cents... since our computers proccesing capacity is still compared to flys and coacraches brains (some times optimistically with a rat) and Natural AI occurs at minimum from cats brains and up (being the norm dogs/primates/other animal that have been trained) plus some outstanding "intelligent" species like crows... kinda we are still far from getting a sintetic one.
Ave Maria
Artificial or artifact for that matter comes from Ars (Art) and Facere/Factus (to do, fact) it is opposite to real, an artifact means a look-a-like, I would have trouble conceptualization from the etimology so I'll use an example:
an artifact in a sound track it's a sound not comming from the original recording/sintetizing but from other source, it looks(sounds) like it comes with the rest of the trak but it is not.
Emulate means to achieve the same result by other process: it's the difference between Natural and Sintetic, the sintetic emulates the natural
Simulate means to pretend the same result by whoevermeans you can: it's the difference between real and artifact, the artifact simulates the real
an AI is not expected to emulate RI it is expected to simulate it, meaning that it should not be really intelligent (self-aware, etc) only to pretend it (fool you in close interaction)
As a way to separate Real Intelligence from Artificial Intelligence, the first can decide things like trying to conquer the world, because it realizes that it can do it, the AI might talk about conquering the world in a conversation about that, but would not made plans about it, because it is not really self aware neither aware of the world limits/workings, it can only bluff not try the real deal, if it could then it'd be RI not AI.
Ave Maria
I agree 100%. I'm using it right now and it's never failed.
Critics, don't know what they're dear aunt, let's set so double the killer delete select all.
Related to the question of whether the bottleneck is hardware or software, the answer perhaps depends on what stage we are looking at. I suspect that the hardware technology currently exists to build an expensive demonstration *if* we knew how. We have the technology to have the same hardware power as a human brain: it just costs many millions. If such did happen in a big lab, it may still require too much hardware to be practical in the field. Thus, I don't think expensive hardware is actually the bottleneck to building a smart machine.
However, another view is that experimentation on a wide scale is needed to explore ideas. And, this will probably only happen if the hardware is relatively cheap so that small universities and home tinkerers can also play around. In short, we need to distinquish between powerful hardware needed to make it practical, and powerful hardware needed to test the ideas in labs. The answer will probably depend on whether the needed breakthroughs are related to theory or to experimentation. The more they require experimentation, the more hardware will be a factor to at least make a prototype. At this point we don't know what the magic solution will look like.
Once it happens in the lab, companies will find a way to make it cheaper for commercial use in a relatively short time. It is too big an opportunity for investers to ignore. If they dump gazillions of bucks into pets.com, then real AI seems a no-brainer (bad pun). Thus, I don't think hardware is a big bottleneck to wide adoption of real AI.
Table-ized A.I.
Correction. Please change:
"Thus, I don't think expensive hardware is actually the bottleneck to building a smart machine."
To:
"But, I don't think expensive hardware is actually the bottleneck to building a smart proof-of-concept machine."
Table-ized A.I.
he is saying the real-cold-hard truth.
The so called group of 'symbolist' researchers essentially buried the 'connectionist' approach with the argument that you cant get 'explanations' out of a non-symbolic system.
On the contrary, a "true" AI would definitely have emotional reactions and wants. They just wouldn't be the same emotions or wants that we humans have. It all depends on your point of view. When you conduct a hill-climb search over some dataset you could argue that the search program "wants" to find the lowest cost since it alters its actions to maximise the likelihood of being in a "wanted" state.
Emotions are a very practical way for the brain to alter its global behaviour. Just as the small electrical impulses between neurons allow you to alter localised states in the brain, chemicals such as adrenalin and testosterone allow the brain to alter the global state. If you were to be attacked by a mugger on your way home tonight then your body would quickly dump a load of adrenaline into your system. While this would speed up your heartrate, constrict bloodflow to your extremities, etc. it would also change the way your brain processes information. People say they experience the world in slow motion at times like this which allows them to process what's going on around them more thoroughly.
If you wanted to construct an AI which had to interact in the real world then it too would require localised and global state changes to its behaviour. Unlike humans it could have a much finer control as to how localised these changes were. For example, if it spots a possible danger in its environment then more processing cycles could be supplied to the image recognition modules until the threat was identified. If something jumps out in front of a walking robot it would need to react in just the same way that humans do - instantly halt and recognise what that something is.
Everyones experienced the adrenaline rush of someone jumping out at you to scare you. Ever noticed how long it takes for you to return to normal despite knowing that there isn't any threat to be alert for? That's because chemicals are a very slow messaging system. An AI wouldn't take so long to return to normal. So while a robot probably wouldn't get the same thrill from that scary horror film you rented it will still be able to alter its operating parameters depending on which environment its in.
When we design such a system it is important not to miss this; otherwise we may end up with a creation we don't understand; and at that point we can only communicate with it if it decides to 'talk' to us.
The saddest poem
Prove that, or at least give some reasons why it should be true. You're anthropormorphizing the AI, which is a very common mistake (especially in science fiction movies). You can read about this here:
http://www.singinst.org/ourresearch/publications/
The AACS key is NOT 0xF606EEFD628B1CA427BEA93A9CA9773F
I've read many discussions of strong AI... how it'll be possible once we have computers that are as powerful as our mind. I disagree. I don't think we'll get strong AI until we have computers somewhere between 10 and 100 times as powerful as our minds, because it takes more computing power to CREATE a mind (develop, engineer, design, breed, whatever) than it does to RUN a mind.
Try designing a cellphone... ON a cellphone. Not gonna happen. Try designing a watch... using the watch's processing power. Unlikely. So until computers are a ton faster than necessary to run a strong AI, I don't think we'll have enough power to design an AI.
"I will trust Google to 'do no evil' until the founders no longer run it." Hello Alphabet.
Because (s)he can't figure out how to give it goals?
Mark Tilden has never worked on anything remotely close to AI. He is a very skilled designer of simple and low-cost robots, but he is NOT an AI researcher. He is not even a robotics researcher.
maybe it takes one to know one, but he is a cock head.
i wish mit would make hugh loebner an honorary, just to piss minsky off.
i disable sigs
It seemed to me that his conclusions preceded his questions. By about 400 years. Obscurantist special pleading at its finest.
--
phunctor
"Eppur si muove"
AI is already here and it's not that helpful for the sort of problems that you are talking about. There's already a tremendous amount of raw intelligence working on the problems facing our society. Our problem isn't a problem of lack of processing power, but a lack of time and energy in some fields, and a lack of a unifying model in others. Also, some problems are simply intractable. No matter how smart you may be, you aren't going to magically find a way to generate energy out of nothing, or find a way to move faster than the speed of light.
There are fundamental and intractable problems that limit the scope of our civilization. There is no magic bullet solution to many of these, and as such they utterly prohibit the singularity which is nothing more than a vaguely defined magic bullet for all of life's problems. That's not to say there won't be scientific revolutions, but they will be comparable in scope to previous scientific revolutions, in that greater knowledge will provide us with more certainty of our environment, and inspiration in how we deal with it, but it won't fundamentally change the rules of the game that have been so well established.