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An AI 4-Year-Old In Second Life

Posted by kdawson on from the currents-and-eddies dept.

schliz notes a development out of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute where researchers have successfully created an artificially intelligent four-year-old capable of reasoning about his beliefs to draw conclusions in a manner that matches human children his age. The technology, which runs on the institute's supercomputing clusters, will be put to use in immersive training and education scenarios. Researchers envision futuristic applications like those seen in Star Trek's holodeck."

4 of 234 comments (clear)

  1. Not even close by dreamchaser · · Score: 5, Interesting

    It's a simulation of a 4 year old and is NOT an AI with the cognitive abilities of a mouse let alone a 4 year old human. It's just a very powerful chatbot writ large. Sensationalism strikes again!

    1. Re:Not even close by hjf · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I have this 8-year-old neighbor girl, I know her from when she was 3. At 4 or 5 she used to talk to me for long periods. She tells things she's seen on TV, but she also invents stories and songs, which are total nonsense. These may have a meaning for her, but it's nonsense nonetheless. Of course, I don't say it's bad: it's how their imagination works, and that's a good sign because it means she has an active imagination.

      She's a smart girl: at 3 she could recite the vowels, musical notes, etc. She had this babysitter that taught her stuff. Their parents couldn't afford the babysitter so they hired this other woman who just watches TV and makes food -- nothing else. And their parent's are not bright (at all: she goes to school to learn, so they don't care. they didn't bother to teach her how to read for example). Now she's 8 and she can't even tell me the multiplication table of 1 or 2, and doesn't have a clue about what "do, re, mi..." means. It's sad to see how minds go wasted.

  2. It's the Experience, Stupid by amplt1337 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Look, the Turing Test is impossible to pass if the human part of the conversation is sufficiently motivated.
    Why? Because we don't judge others' humanity based on their reasoning abilities, we judge it based on common shared human experiences.

    Show me an AI that passes the Turing Test. I'll ask it what coffee tastes like, or what sex feels like, or what it felt when its mother died. Sure, somebody could program answers for those questions into it, but then it isn't an AI -- it's just a canned response simulating a human, incapable of having new experiences, incapable of perceiving the human world with human senses, and thus transparently lacking in humanity. At that point it's nothing but a computer puppet, with a programmer somewhere pulling the strings.

    --
    Freedom isn't free; its price is the well-being of others.
  3. Segmentation faults are murder! by Tatarize · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Even one messed up pointer could cause this child to die!

    Segmentation faults are murder!

    Honestly I wonder about the moral oddities of AI.

    --

    It is no longer uncommon to be uncommon.