Slashdot Mirror
An AI 4-Year-Old In Second Life
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."
In this episode, Eddie's AI gets put to the ultimate Turing Test when he's approached by a Gorean pedophile! Tune in for the laughs as Eddie responds with "I'm sorry, I don't understand the phrase 'touch my weewee, slave!'"
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Imagine if you were born and raised by furries who attached enormous genitals to their bodies and watched simulated porn all day long.
The poor kid never had a chance.
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/03/13/1914251 yesterday!
Bring back the old version of slashdot.
But if you are letting you AI out into Second Life and comparing it to intelligence there, surely you are setting the bar rather low?
First test: could a 4-year-old rascal recognize a dupe?
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!
My 4-year old son seems to have no end to the string of "Mom. Mom. Mom. Mom. Dad. Dad. Dad. Dad. Dad. Dad. Mom. Mom...." when he's trying to get our attention. This occurs, of course, while we're already talking to someone else, or busy in some other respect. Sometimes even while we're talking to him.
Therefore, the role reversal that Eddie AI is going to get after this slashdotting provides me with a bit of delicious irony that only another parent would understand.
Maybe I should introduce my 4-year old to Eddie.
Rule #1 -- Politics always trumps technology.
If they have a four year old on the main grid doesn't that violate the SL terms of service? :)
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.
TMM: How are you?
Eddie: Does that question interest you?
TMM: Huh?
Eddie: Please go on.
TMM: Um..."go on" about what, exactly?
Eddie: Does that question interest you?
TMM: Never mind. I hear you're an AI.
Eddie: How long have you been an ai?
TMM: No...*you're* the AI. I'm a real live boy.
Eddie: Does it please you to believe I am a real live boy?
TMM: You're not listening to me.
Eddie: How long have you been not listening to you?
TMM: That's it. I'm done.
Eddie: Does it please you to believe I am done?
TMM: AAAAAARRRRGGGHHHH!!!!
Eddie: Please go on.
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
If you need to have the behaviour of a four-year-old boy in Second Life, the obvious solution is to get a four-year-old boy to play Second Life. If cost is a factor you can get a cheap one from Africa (or, indeed, from many places around the world) for far less than the price of a supercomputer. You could even get several to provide redundancy.
That's the trouble with programmers: no common sense. Sometimes a technological solution just isn't necessary.
Just yesterday, it was in the news that Joseph Weizenbaum, the creator of the first such program, Eliza, had died. Eliza's interaction with real people troubled many.
News article at http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23615538/
Imagine a beowolf cluster of four year olds!
What's that, you teach preschool? (shudder)
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
Oh come on, it's a chatbot not an AI. I did my Computing degree, I know how AI on computers is supposed to work and it's seriously laughable for anything more complex than extremely primitive, less-than-insect intelligence. You'll see AI "geese" flocking, you'll see AI "ants" making a good path, planning ahead and fending each other off but none of it is actually "AI".
AI at the moment consists of trying to cram millions of years of evolution, billions of pieces of information and decades of years of "actual learning/living time", from an organism capable of outpacing even the best supercomputers even when it's just a single-task (e.g. Kasparov vs Deeper Blue wasn't easy and I'd state that it was still a "win" for Kasparov in terms of the actual methods used) - let's not even mention a general-purpose AI - where just the data recorded by said organism in even quite a small experience or skillset is so phenomenally huge that we probably couldn't store it unless Google helped, into something that a research student can do in six months on a small mainframe. It's not going to work.
Computers work by doing what they are told, perfectly, quickly and repeatably. Now that is, in effect, how our bodies are constructed at the molecular/sub-molecular level. But as soon as you try to enforce your knowledge onto such a computer, you either create a database/expert system or a mess. It might even be a useful mess, sometimes, but it's still a mess and still not intelligence.
The only way I see so-called "intelligence" emerging artificially (let's say Turing-Test-passing but I'm probably talking post-Turing-Test intelligence as well) is if we were to run an absolutely unprecedented, enormous-scale genetic algorithm project for a few thousand years straight. That's the only way we've ever come across intelligence, from evolved lifeforms, which took millions of years to produce one fairly pathetic example that trampled over the rest of the species on the planet.
We can't even define intelligence properly, we've never been able to simulate it or emulate it, let alone "create" it. We have one fairly pathetic example to work from with a myriad of lesser forms, none of which we've ever been able to surpass - we might be able to build "ant-like" things but we've never made anything as intelligent as an ant. That doesn't mean we should stop but we should seriously think about exactly how we think "intelligence" will just jump out at us if we get the software right.
You can't "write" an AI. It's silly to try unless you have very limited targets in mind. But one day we might be able to let one evolve and then we could copy it and "train" it to do different things.
And every chatbot I ever tried has serious problems - They can't reason gobbledegook properly because they can't spot patterns. That's the bit that shows a sign of real intelligence, being able to spot patterns in most things. If you started talking in Swedish to an English-only chatbot, it blows its mind. If you started talking in Swedish to an English person, they'd be trying to work out what you said, using context and history of the conversation to attempt to learn your language, try to re-start the conversation from a known base ("I'm sorry, could you start again please?" or even just "Hello?" or "English?"), or give up and ignore you. The bots can't get close to that sort of reasoning.
how large Eddie's memory requirements had become? I'd like to find out more about the programming and backend logic/memory requirements/usage. Interestingly, a cockroach can survive on it's own (small brain), but a 4 year old human cannot. AI of this level is hardly a life form. So, even an experiment that would die if not looked after takes a 'super computer' ?
Perhaps not a good way to put things, but 4 years old is not very interactive on a pragmatism scale.
Eddie has to know very little about locomotion and physical world interaction for SL, not to mention that whole zero need for voice recognition. People type pretty badly, but it limits what they say as well, thus bounding the domain of interactions.
This story seems to indicate that even minimal success with AI here requires HUGE memory/computational capacities, and that is not very promising.
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Would't having a bunch of simulated 4-year olds actually raise the average maturity level of the SL userbase?
Here is a link to the RPI article that talks about this. Credit where credit is due. Not credit for an article by "news.au". Honestly, this *is* interesting... but is it too much to ask the Slashdot editors to check for original links for stories?
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Humans start lying to protect themselves at 3. They start lying to protect others around 5.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
There has been this story a long time ago, in a galaxy far a... err... on Slashdot, in which one reasonably intelligent human couldn't pass an impromptu Turing test. Someone had put his IM handle on a list of sexbots, and from there people just would not accept that he's _not_ a bot. Some stuff asked could have pretty much been the subject of a philosophy paper, and a simple "no idea, I've never thought about that" didn't seem to satisfy the questioner.
Your own questions, well, at least two out of three, I have no idea how I'd give a good answer to those.
- What does sex feel like? Well, I have had sex, but fuck me if I know how to describe a sensation. It's like having to describe "red" or "sweet".
- What did it feel when his mother died? Heck if I know, mine didn't.
Now probably I could think of some wise-arse pseudo-answer, given a little time. But if someone came up with something like that out of nowhere, as part of some misguided attempt to see if I'm a bot... I'd probably fail that Turing test.
Basically I'm not arguing your point that it becomes impossible to pass for a bot, if the human knows he's doing a Turing test. You're right. What I'm adding is that often it becomes impossible to pass even for a human. The question quickly get so contrived that it's not even possible to give a simple answer. There are things where there is no real answer, just possible pseuo-answers (ranging from "I don't know" to doing a whole pseudo-philosophical rant on the topic), and it's a toss whether the interviewer will accept your particular pseudo-answer. Someone determined enough might only accept one of the possible pseudo-answers (so if your "shared" experience or way to describe it doesn't _exactly_ match his, you lost) or none at all.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
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.
How about a room full of 5 year olds?
I think I'll stand by my N.Y. analogy.
I've been a subscriber to SL for over two years and in my explorations of the more enlightened side of the world I have come to the conclusion that the ratio of normal to weird is pretty much comparable. I believe that the only reason the weird gets so much more attention is because of the inherent anonymity presented to users which allows them to feel more comfortable to seek out and explore the weird places. If people spent their time looking for museums instead of sex clubs, they could spend days, if not weeks exploring the tremendous amount of art (both RL by proxy, and SL original) present in world, with new and changing content appearing all the time.
In more simple terms. I posit the question... If you could ensure your total anonymity, would you be more likely to take a stroll through a swingers club to see what was actually going on in the building? Would you be more inclined to take part in or casually stand by and observe any of a large array of "socially unacceptable" practices and behaviors because you felt that you could do so with no social repercussions?
In my opinion, this is what I see happening and this is more than likely the cause of the perception of there being a higher ratio of weird.