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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.
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"?
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
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.
I 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 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.
The best test for true AI is perhaps detecting dupes.
Table-ized A.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.
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.
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.
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
So you don't believe brain emulation is possible? Because if it is, all the problems you said will go away.
The AACS key is NOT 0xF606EEFD628B1CA427BEA93A9CA9773F
You can download it here.
The AACS key is NOT 0xF606EEFD628B1CA427BEA93A9CA9773F
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.
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
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 :-)