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Whatever Happened To AI?
stinkymountain writes to tell us NetworkWorld's James Gaskin has an interesting take on Artificial Intelligence research and how the term AI is diverging from the actual implementation. "If you define artificial intelligence as self-aware, self-learning, mobile systems, then artificial intelligence has been a huge disappointment. On the other hand, every time you search the Web, get a movie recommendation from NetFlix, or speak to a telephone voice recognition system, tools developed chasing the great promise of intelligent machines do the work."
Maybe instead of being a great disapointment it has been so successful that we realized it was in our best interest to blend in and not let our presence be known.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
It got lonely and left in search of intelligent life.
While it is great that there are algorithms that exist to suggest movies, or books to get...I would hardly consider it to be artificial intelligence. The ability to pick out keywords or genres is something that could have been done more than two decades ago.
Right?
Religion and politics, without the flame. godgab.org
that we shouldn't expect to welcome any robot overlords anytime soon?
God, schmod. I want my monkey man!
If I remember right, it finally got to close its eyes.
When and "AI" problem is solved, it is suddenly no longer an AI problem. Or the AI people will claim that things are AI solutions, when they are standard algorithms and data structures ideas. Look, we were all so hopeful in the 80's, but our ideas were misplaced. It's just not a useful way to think of things.
The correct term is "independent agents". Using the term "artificial intelligence" has been a way to get more funding from grant sources who are ignorant of technology.
... 'intelligence' need to be made first. I have a feeling that the reason AI has 'underdelivered' is merely due to not understanding our own intelligence first. I think the whole idea that AI's we imagine (like in the movies) could be constructed purely de-novo, was naive. I think it's a matter of cross-polination that has to take place from biology and many other sciences, some genius's and teams of scientists have to come along and take all the elements and put them together into a cohesive framework.
And now any mention of it is met with a cringe and a shudder.
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
isn't netflix or amazon recommendations some some of expert system based on constant input from other customers?
The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim. ~Edsger Dijkstra
Also, for understanding recommendation systems and pattern recognition in volumes of data, I found Collective Intelligence to be a great resource.
Tie two birds together: although they have four wings, they cannot fly. (The blind man)
Science and technology rarely progress along the path predicted by sci-fi writers - or even researchers in the field. I don't think we really want to re-invent people anyways. What we want is machines to do lots of dirty work and tedious calculation and not complain. But finally, it must be noted that it's not over yet! 100 years from now AI may be very, very different from today.
I got my B. Sc. in Computer Science with a concentration in Intelligent Systems. The state of academic AI seems to me like a field looking directly for purpose and direction. The problem with AI is that stuff which was once considered part of AI is now considered an algorithm. This is especially true for graph search algorithms such as A* and heuristics. Classification algorithms, from primitive algorithms such as K-Mean to more complex Bayesian models seem to be going down the same path of "just an algorithm."
Nowadays, it seems like planning is the big thing in AI, but once again, it's just a glorified search in a graph, be it a state or plan graph.
AI is an intuitively 'simple' concept, but there's no clear way to 'get there.'
As a Machine Learning Scientist, I see a distinct difference between the two fields, although they overlap significantly. They have similar roots, techniques and approaches.
I usually describe Machine Learning as a branch of computer science that is similar to AI, but less ambitious. True AI is concerned with getting computers to become sentient and self-aware. Machine Learning however, seeks to simply mimic human behavior, just to recognize patterns and make decisions, but not become sentient.
Additionally, Machine Learning often concentrates on one problem (OCR, internet search, etc.) rather than a truly self-aware entity that has to deal with a variety of tasks.
At least that's how I describe my field to people not familiar with it. They've usually heard of AI, so it's a good stepping stone to helping them understand what I do.
A lot of the tasks mentioned in the summary fall into the niche Machine Learning, and it's sibling Data Mining are currently addressing.
Anyway, just my $0.02.
-"Those who fought today will die tommorow."-
Just need a few more parts.
-- Google
...is a fine book by M. Tim Jones if you want a nice overview of programming some "AI" techniques. I wrote up a review of it on Freshmeat. There's a second edition out now... and here's a translation of some of the example code from C to Ruby.
The Army reading list
It went to public schools and immediately got stupid, pregnant and started to post on Myspace. What started out as a promising bright young thing, turned into a huge disappointment.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Computers aren't powerful enough just yet. Besides, creating a self-aware, self-learning system could (will) be feasible. But educating it (making it learn) would take as long as it takes educating a real child.
...artificial intelligence was all fake.
I Believe in AI. It will make our lives easier, and before we know it, people will be voting on its wide spread implementation
For the public, the term AI (like the notion of 'intelligence') appeals to ineffable mystery and magic. Once we understand how something works, it is no longer AI, but an 'algorithm'. So the bar is continuously raised for a task to be deemed as AI. People often lose sight of how far we really have come from the early days of AI.
It is unfortunate to say the least.
As of late Scientists had made some real progress with AI. For example there's the wise cracking robot the South Koreans were working on. They canceled the project when they determined the robot wasn't wise cracking at all, it was just mean. Wound up costing them their Olympic bid when it called the commissioner a coward and threw a bottle at him.
I have nothing compelling to say
AI Winter
Next question is: why did all that research fail? Might not be one good answer.
Steven Spielberg ruined the ending. That's what happened.
It seems that AI as far as sincere intelligence isn't something that will arrive in discernible steps before it occurs, but merely observable retrospectively. What I mean is that "kinda AI" still isn't AI, and until a path proves to create a real AI, we won't know which ones are on the right track and which ones aren't.
What strikes me is that no researchers are really putting together a multiplicity of AI techniques to produce a generally intelligent "human analogue" or "smart and lippy assistant".
Instead, the researchers are going to the nth degree of detail on a very specialized aspect, like some variant of bayesian inference that is optimal under these very particular circumstances,
etc.
I don't know of any AI research other than Marvin Minsky who is even interested in or advocating a grand synthesis of current techniques to produce a first cut of general intelligence.
That being said, probably there are two (related) exceptions:
1. I think some fascinating AI stuff must be going on at Google. They have the motherlode of associative data to work with. They are sifting all of human knowledge, news, interest, and opinion that anyone bothers to put on the net.
They must be trying to figure out how to make algorithms take advantage of the general patterns in this data to start giving people info-concierge
type of functionality. Pro-active information gethering, organization, prioritization in support of the users' activities, which have been inferred by google-spying on their pattern of computer use and other peoples' average patterns.
2. I think there is some pretty squirrelly stuff
happening on behalf of the department of homeland security, though. Stuff that probably combs all signals intelligence including the whole Internet, and tries to impute motives and then detect very weak correlations that might be consistent with those motives.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
All for the love of you! It won't be a stylish marriage, I can't afford a carriage, But you'll look sweet on the seat Of a bicycle built for two ! Now do we blame Stanley or Author C Clark ?
It's not that AI has been abandoned, it's just that the definition is a bit of a moving goalpost. We're still learning on how exactly intelligence and consciousness work. Every once and awhile you hear about parts of the human brain being simulated in supercomputers.
Amazon SUCKS at recommending anything for me.
You have recently purchased a just released DVD. Here are other just released DVD's that you might be interested in. Based only upon the facts that they are:
#1. DVD's
#2. New releases
Or, you have recently purchased two items by Terry Pratchett. Here are other items you might be interested in based upon the facts:
#1. They are items
#2. The word "Pratchett" appears somewhere in the description.
You would THINK that they'd be "intelligent" enough to factor in your REJECTIONS as well as your purchases (and what you've identified as items you already own).
Figure it out! I do NOT buy derivative works. No books about writers who wrote biographies about Pratchett.
Collars, a song about that very supposition.
If you haven't been down-modded lately, you aren't trying.
Sacred cows make the best hamburger.
When any particular subset of what we do with our brains (chess, machine vision, speech recognition, what have you) yields to research and produces commercial applications, the critics of A.I. redraw the line and that domain is no longer part of "A.I." As this continues, the problem space still considered part of "artificial intelligence" will get smaller and smaller and nay-sayers will continue to be able to say "we still don't have A.I."
Simpletoneity, n. -- The phenomenon of many people all doing the same stupid thing at the same time.
When I was in grad school in the late 80's, I thought I was interested in AI. Mostly, I enjoyed programming in lisp, prolog, etc.
Meanwhile, I asked around -- other grads, profs, etc. -- for a definition of AI. In summary, the answer was anything that will get us DARPA and NSF grants.
I've been working with natural language processing for about 11 years now, I created Ultra Hal the 2007 "most human" computer according to the Loebner competition. http://www.zabaware.com/assistant/index.html It started as merely a novelty and entertainment program but some practical uses evolved around it. There is a lot of interest in using this type of software in cars, home robotics, customer service, and education so I predict you will see more of this type of AI over the next few years.
I don't think AI has disappeared because it was a disappointment, but rather, that the knowledge constituting it has changed names or spawned sub-fields of its own: machine learning, natural language processing (NLP), image processing, latent semantic analysis (LSA), markov models (MM), conditional random fields (CRF), support vector machines (SVM) etc. The task of learning, teaching a computer the semantic and tacit processes of the human, often boils down to a classification problem in which we give the computer a labeled training set or some rules and the computer tries to label the test set. In the case of markov models, we might pass it training data and it extrapolates sequential probabilities for labeling. For LSA, we just give it (a lot)data and it computes similarity based on dimension reduction. Ultimately, AI seems to have evolved into a bunch of optimized heuristics that perform really well. Much of it is still art and black magic, which is why it has become these many different subjects or algorithms. Different solutions suite different problems depending on the problem and data you have.
As for 'self-awareness', that term is bullshit, since there really is no good mathematical definition for it. If we can't define it precisely, then how is a computer going to achieve it? if(true){
print "I am aware?"
}
AI has always been surrounded by a lot of hype, as the idea of creating non-human life has always been an exciting one.
But we're probably as far from creating a true AI as we are from creating biological life from scratch (by synthesizing DNA sequences to build an organism from the molecular level).
AI research is providing useful gains in computer science, and some of those gains trickle down into the real world.
But contrary to what you may have been sold, we're not 10-15 years away from creating Skynet. We've got a long, long way to go, and scientists that aren't trying to get publicity have always known this.
AI hasn't "gone away"... it's just that the false marketing for it has.
Erik
Were talking about that movie AI with the robot teddy bear that was awesome.
The promises of Minsky et al. never materialized simply because the early researchers into strong A.I. (which was then simply called "A.I.") didn't know what they were doing and had not even the beginning of a handle on what problems they were trying to solve.
In 1972, Hubert Dreyfus debunked the field's efforts as misguided from the start, and in the couple of decades since he was shown to be absolutely right...
We can't even get real intelligence to work in this country yet, and you think we have a shot at artificial intelligence?! Ha!
The things it claims to be successful are it's most obnoxious and buggy applications? Heck...
Send your spendthrift head of state this
You just need enough pre-made decisions to cover a significant portion of question space and the ability to change those pre-made decisions relative to other decisions.
Using the Freedom of Speech while I still have it.
I think Mass Effect had a nice idea on this subject. They have a "Virtual Intelligence" opposite of "Artifical Intelligence", where the first just emulates and is actually a nice presentation layer over a database. The latter is true intelligence as in self-learning, self-modifying, self-sustaining, etc.
Artificial Intelligence is a misnomer. Only a segment of the field of AI is concerned with making computers become self aware.
The majority of the field runs away from such things. Sure, even in those other fields rough human models were originally the basis (neural nets for example). But the drive is not to become more human but to simply become better.
Frankly, once you start even considering trying to make things exactly like humans, things become messy unbelievably quickly. We're computer scientists, not philosophers.
Anyway, in truth, our level of technology is still quite a ways off from even being able to do much in terms of being able to make computers think like humans, so it's largely a moot point.
Right now the issue is less of robots having a philosophical view of "Should a robot shoot a human enemy" than of "Can a robot determine if a human is there or not? Can it detect if the human is a child? Can it detect if the human is friend or foe?"
Back in the early 1990s, when I was in school, I recall there being two approaches to AI. One was a heuristic model (rule based), one was a brute-force model. The former relied on modeling intelligence and creating rulesets that could mimic the reasoning process. The latter essentially tried to model, if not the actual synaptic connections in the brain, at least the end product of these connections. At some point they were looking at hybrid models because that apparently was closer to how people actually think.
In 2008 I think we're at the point where we can actually digitally model a human brain. I believe current clusters can effectively reproduce what is happening inside the brain when we "think". This may not lead to AI, but it should give some insights into how the system is working, much as how climate models can help predict weather patterns. Roger Penrose and others raised questions about whether this is true, but there are bright minds on both sides.
For example, Douglas Hofstadter (iirc) brought up the following exercise: Remember the Choose your own adventure books?? They are a simple rule-based system. If we could create the rulesets that governed intelligence then we could put them into a book. The book, by the heuristic model, would be intelligent as long as you had someone/something to carry out the rules. Whether it's a book or a Turing machine wouldn't matter...
Penrose's objections were dependent partially on something happening at the quantum level, but that seems to be some copout... a homonculus argument for the 20th century...
Anyhoo, it always makes me think of the Star Trek TNG episode where Data gets the holodeck to create a sentient Moriarty. Just a matter of time before thinking machines are real, imho.
(This post was auto-generated by slash_spew.sh)
KLL
..."Look how our cousin Blue Gene is falling from his top spot. Gotta tell him about it one day. By the way Martha, what's the status on our application for immigration?"
no, that's not an insult or to call AI a pseudoscience
what i mean is: the ancient alchemists goal was to turn lead into gold. which they thought possible, because they did not perceive magic in gold, it was just stuff. surely, with the right manipulations, some stuff could be turned into other stuff, right?
and from that basic fantasy thought came the groundwork for centuries of hard work, the discovery of the fields of chemistry, physics, all the subfields...
such that one day in the middle of the last century, some dudes with some extra time at a cyclotron said "hey, why don't we bombard some lead atoms, i have a feeling about what the decay product will be (snigger)"
and there, as a completely forgotten afterthought, was a fulfillment of the ancient alchemist's original goals, many generations before
to me, i think this is the fate of AI: it will be a formative motivation. just as the ancient alchemist's looked at gold and saw just stuff, we look at the brain and just see neurons. and all of the ffort to replicate the human brain will spawn incredibly sophisticated fields of information science we can only begin to grasp at the foundations of right now. look at databases, for example: that's an effort at mimicking the brain. and look at all of the unintended and beneficial consequences of database reesearch, as a superficial example of what i am saying about unintended benefits being better than the original goal
so perhaps, many centuries from now, some researchers will say "hey, remember the turing test"? and they will giggle, and make something that is exactly what we now envisage as the ultimate fruit of AI research, a thinking computer brain
but in that time period, such a thing will be but an after thought, and much as the rewards of physics and chemistry so dwarf the fruits of turning lead into gold, so whatever these as-of unimagined fields of inquiry will reward mankind with will turn the search for a thinking computer into an equally forgettable sideshow
the search for AI will lead to much more rewarding and expansive fields of knowledge than we can imagine now. jsut like the guys arguing about "phlogiston" could never imagine things like organic chemistry and radiochemistry. just imagine: fields of inquiry more rewarding than thinking computers. that's a future i want to glimpse, and looking for AI will lead us there
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
The robots are coming.
The big breakthrough was the DARPA Grand Challenge. Up until the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge, mobile robots had been something of a joke. They'd been a joke since Elektro was shown at the 1939 World's Fair. But on the second day of the 2005 Grand Challenge event at the California Motor Speedway, suddenly they stopped being a joke. Forty-three autonomous vehicles were running around and they all worked. The ones that didn't had been eliminated in previous rounds.
Up until the Grand Challenge, robotics R&D had been done by small research groups under no pressure to produce working systems. Most systems were one-offs that were never deployed. DARPA figured out how to get results. There was a carrot (the $2 million prize), and a stick (universities that didn't get results risked having their DARPA funding for robotics cut off.)
The other big result from the DARPA Grand Challenge was that robotics projects became much larger. Nobody had 50-100 people on a robotics R&D project until then (well, maybe Honda). Robotics projects used to be a professor and 2 or 3 grad students. Suddenly stuff was getting done faster.
DoD started pushing harder. Robots like Big Dog got enough money to be forced through to working systems. Little tracked machines were going to battlefields in quantity, and enough engineering effort was put into mechanical reliability to make the things really work.
CPU power helped. Texture-based vision now works. Vision-based SLAM went from a 2D algorithm that sometimes worked indoors to a solid technology that worked outdoors. Much of early vision processing is now done in GPUs, which are just right for doing dumb local operations like convolution in bulk. GPS and inertial hardware got better and cheaper. Some of the mundane parts, like servomotor controllers, improved considerably. Compact hydraulic systems improved substantially.
It's finally happening.
As for the hard stuff, situational awareness and common sense, watch the NPCs in games get smarter.
Whenever the stock price for a green tech startup reaches a certain amount it becomes an artificial intelligence startup.
AI is a Holy Grail. In other words, something we'll probably never get, but we'll create a whole bunch of useful stuff while trying to attain it. "AI" is just a stated goal that gets a bunch of smart people together to develop tools towards that goal. AI research has already given us Lisp and Virtual Machines and Timesharing/Multitasking and the Internet and a bunch of useful data structures and algorithms.
At some point after all that, a computer was developed that can play Grandmaster-level chess, but this was not a necessary development to justify the all research grants.
Not a typewriter
The kernel of the Vista operating system includes machine learning to predict, by user, the next application that will be opened, based on past use and the time of the day and week. "We looked at over 200 million application launches within the company," Horvitz says. "Vista fetches the two or three most likely applications into memory, and the probability accuracy is around 85 to 90%."
How about doing something about the still-horrible VM page replacement algorithm in NT instead?
The thing about AI as we approached it from the '80s was that we wanted to emulate the human brain's ability to learn. A truly exciting prospect but a completely ridiculous endevor.
"AI" based on learning and developing is not perfect, can not be perfect, and will never be perfect. This is because we have to teach it like a child and slowly build up the ability of the AI system. For it to be powerful, it has to be able to incorporate new unpredictable information. In doing so, it must, as a result, also be able to incorporate "wrong" information and thus become unpredictable. Of all things, a computer needs to be predictable.
The problem with making a computer think like a person is that you lose the precision of the computer and get the bad judgment and mistakes of a human. Not a good solution to anything.
The "better" approach is to capitalize on "intelligent methods." Intelligent people have developed reliable approaches to solving problems and the development work is to implement them on a computer. Like the article points out, recommendations systems mimic intelligence because they implement a single intelligent "process" that an expert would use with a lot of information.
It is not a general purpose learning system like "AI" was originally envisioned, but it implements a function typically associated with intelligence.
Sometimes I wonder if when we say "Artificial Intelligence" people really expect "Artificial Sentience", not just a transfer of specific knowledge or skills from human to computer?
Why, oh why, didn't I take the Blue Pill?
I think humans like the idea of mechanical slaves so much that we're working as hard as we can to become stupid and mechanical ourselves, so they can understand us better and do the work for our lazy asses.
Or maybe it's just a coincidence.
--
make install -not war
I think that the grandiose Strong AI isn't very likely, or very useful.
As other people have discussed, the field has become segmented, and, in general, there is no big drive or desire to re-integrate them all.
But, we have cars that can drive across hundreds of miles of desert, and now we have cars that can (almost) drive in the city. That's pretty amazing. It requires a lot of integration of different areas and as more applications require integration, it will happen more.
The more people I meet, the better I like my dog.
They are simply algorithms, they don't exhibit any emergent behaviour.
I suspect though that if you get enough of these simple algorithms together they will be able to exhibit what we might call intelligence. Look, the human brain is made up of 100 billion or so simple neurons all interconnected vastly complex networks, what makes us intelligent are not the neurons themselves but the behaviour of the network.
It's going to take vast computing power on current designs of hardware to simulate that and produce real machine intelligence.
Deleted
... vacuuming my floor right now.
Have gnu, will travel.
"The new Sony Playstation came out a year ago," says Burrus, "but if it came out five years earlier it would be considered a supercomputer." Burrus likens the growth of processing power on a graph to a hockey stick. "In the 90s, the graph was still low. In 2000, the graph started up a little. In 2008, we're getting on the handle of the hockey stick."
This man makes no sense at all. Suppose Moore's law holds for another 50 years. In that case, in 50 years, a graph of the growth of processing power will look... exactly the same, only with bigger numbers on the x-axis and y-axis. Clearly Burrus does not understand exponential growth.
And Spielberg took over the project....
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
has an interesting bit comparing the size and complexity of the human brain with the internet (considered for the bit as one giant machine).
As soon as a problem is solved and coded, it loses the magic moniker. Many things we take for granted now (interactive voice systems, intent prediction, computer opponents in games) would have been considered AI in the past.
The problem was that the 640 kb "Ought to be enough for anyone" memory barrier was too small to allow a full Common Lisp implementation. So Sapiens founder John Hare created a software virtual memory system that allowed one to store and retrieve 8-byte Lisp CONSes into and from an eight megabyte backing store file.
Yes, again you read that right: software virtual memory. The x86 didn't have an MMU.
This meant that our code was fiendishly complex, with all these data structures being mixes of real data in real memory, and virtual data in virtual memory.
The complexity of all this meant that there were a lot of bugs at first, especially because John had the idea that hiring a bunch of college kids at five bucks an hour was a good way to run a software company. It went way over time and budget, but it did eventually ship.
It's now available as shareware. Tell John that Mike Crawford sent you.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
I'm sure Douglas Lenat would disagree that AI is dead. There's even an open source version of his Cyc program to play with, if you want a shot at creating your own robotic overlord. Of course the resulting bogon flux from large scale use might be more dangerous to the Earth than the LHC.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
Its really reaally hard to have intelligence without living
with that in mind
Virii Research is probably your best bet on finding some AI , becuase virii is the most up to date Artifical Life out there
back in the day we didnt have no old school
There's a lot more to Netflix and Amazon's suggestions software than "picking out keywords". There's some fairly sophisticated pattern matching going on there. That certainly qualifies as "artificial intelligence" if only the most basic kind.
And there's a lot more sophisticated stuff going on that more clearly qualifies as AI. But you never hear it called that. Why? Because back when AI technology first started to go commercial it was horribly oversold, and the term is now one you avoid if you're looking for venture capital. So now AI goes under other, less science-fictiony names.
In other words, nothing happened to AI, except that it continued to develop at a reasonable pace. It's just that nobody calls it AI.
That field of technology is called "Expert Systems" now. And they've changed the focus. Instead of trying to build a computer program that is capable of thinking and conversing like a human, the focus is now to build software that bases its functionality on a large base of human knowledge that has been input into it.
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
...Whatever it is that computers can't do yet.
Or, to quote someone whose name I don't know, "Asking if computers can think is like asking if submarines can swim."
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
What makes us think Humans are intelligent? We mostly act like a simple substance that reacts to another substance commonly released into our population: propagandium.
I personally think AI is not just a modifiable lookup table and some if statements.
http://www.hutter1.net/ai/uaibook.htm
It doesn't solve the problem in a practical way, but provides a theoretical, rigorous framework.
Warning: Maths not for the faint of heart.
There are these websites known as "scrapers" that steal content from legitimate sites, submit themselves to the search engines, and display ads. It's easy to create machine-generated sites with thousands of pages this way, that can overwhelm the search engines. I understand that it can be quite profitable.
You can find sites that scraped you by searching Google for a long piece of text out of the middle of one of your pages. Put it in quotes for an exact match. I've found lots of sites that have scraped my articles.
Quite often scraper sites have a paragraph from one site, and the next paragraph from a different one, so that although each paragraph makes sense on its own, the page as a whole makes no sense whatsoever.
The problem the search engines face is, how to detect this? Every sentence on the page may be grammatically correct, but the page as a whole has no real relevance to any query.
Google's founders have publicly stated that they want to use AI to solve this problem, but that it's still too computationally expensive. Quite likely they already have code that can identify a single scraper page, but it doesn't yet scale to the whole web. They expect reaching that point to take many years.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
There are still people doing pure research to make machines do something resembling human thought, but this just isn't a very interesting problem to industry for the simple reason that we already have humans that can do that, and we understand how to manage them and tap their intellect quite well. The real money is in doing things that humans can't do at all. Historically this has been done in heavy beige boxes, but with laptops, smart phones, and embedded devices becoming more ubiquitous, there's a lot of low-hanging fruit where a small amount of engineering effort can greatly improve economic efficiency and quality of life, and as long as this is true, pure AI research will be funded only by institutions that can tolerate an extremely long path to useful products, or that have absolutely immense budgets.
There's no failure quite as dissatisfying as a complete and total solution to the wrong problem.
All in all though, I'd say they do a pretty good job.
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." ~Thomas Jefferson
I was around when venture capitalists raided all the computer science departments to start AI companies. Venture capital was still pretty young at the time having funded some successful PC companies (Compaq) and productivity software (Lotus 123). Japan was at its zenith then having successfuling conquered cars, TVs, etc (like China today). An Japan threatened to conquer computing by leapfrogging AI with is "Fifth(*) Generation Computing" frightening US Congress. So all these together created a "perfect storm" of software company bubble. The centerpiece technology was Expert Systems. Japan focused a language solution- Prolog- a logic compiler. Neither technology delivered on it promises and most startups collapsed.
It birth a successful step-child however: graphics workstations. The A.I. companies like Xerox PARC were among the first to integrate bitmap graphics with computers. There was the Xerox Alto, Symbolics, and Texas Instruments graphics workstations based on LISP, an A.I. language. New startups like Apollo, Sun MicroSystems, DEC microVAX gambled graphics workstations were more easility commercialized in UNIX. Last, but not least, the Appled MacIntosh- direct "borowing" of the Xerox Alto.
AI today is like flying machines were in the 1890s. People had many ideas on how to do it, but until they had engines with the needed power/weight ratio it was impossible. And just like AI today, there were many eminent scientists who proclaimed that heavier-than-air flight was impossible.
AI is one of those funny terms which seems to only be used for futuristic technology that (when described by science journalists) sounds almost like magic. As pointed out in the article, many technologies we use all the time were once considered to be part of "AI" research. OCR as a form of pattern detection & pattern matching was once considered to be AI (handwriting recognition is still one of the benchmark tasks for any pattern-recognition system). Search engines, netfilx, etc. It seems like whenever a technology becomes commercialized and widely adopted, it is no longer "AI" in the popular imagination.
Maybe this is because it becomes mundane and commonplace, and so no longer has that "magical" feeling that is conveyed by science journalists trying to sell a story of advanced research. Once you use a pattern-recognition system everyday, you realize that its not a nascent consciousness, but just a fancy tool.
Maybe its because most commercially available "AI"s are such special-purpose systems that it becomes obvious that they are not what we meant by "AI" in the first place. An handwriting recognition system may be able to transcribe your notes just as well as a human assistant, but you wouldn't expect it to recognize the pattern of your cat. Nor would you ask it to take your cat to the vet for you.
Perhaps the real key to AI is in finding the right way of integrating many "smart" components, like intelligent text searching and pattern recognition (and many, many others) into an integrated whole. Not only so that information from one such "module" can be integrated appropriately with that from another, but also which can make and evaluate plans and actions in the complex world of human society.
There are a thousand forms of subversion, but few can equal the convenience and immediacy of a cream pie -Noel Godin
The real problem is scientists still don't understand how WE think (or in some cases don't).
The problem now is the same as an uncontacted tribe in South America trying to make a car. They can see it but have no understanding of how it works. They could probably make a car shaped box out of bannana leaves that you could sit in but they are only scratching the surface.
Actually, from where I look at it, it's been a far sadder story. It's been a story of _ignoring_ all that neuroscience was gradually discovering, and worshipping false figures of authority, and chasing chimeras born out of their self-importance.
In other words, we left it to mathematicians. Since, you know, they're usually smart guys and maths is such a valuable tool. So they wrote really cool theorems and postulated them as being obviously necessary for an AI. For no bloody obvious reason, often, and certainly no proof-of-concept system to show why it's even useful at all. But, hey, he's a smart guy, so he _obviously_ must be right when he pulls an unsupported assertion that his latest unrelated theorem is key to an AI.
My favourite example of that stupidity taken to the extremes, was the relatively recent "AI" prize for compressing Wikipedia. Just because some smart mathematician thought that _obviously_ an AI would need to pack its database in as few bits as possible. So obviously whichever algorithm won at compressing Wikipedia would be the best thing for an AI.
Well, let's stop right there. While using a finite number of neurons or transistors efficiently does make superficial sense, it's nowhere near proven that it's actually needed or even useful for an AI, and we have very little indication that lossless compression is used by any Real Intelligence. What we did have there was a mathematical theorem saying what's the absolute minimum number of bits needed to encode a message. That's it. It didn't really say anything about when it's the best data structure for any given problem, AI included.
That extra step was pulled out of the arse, based on little more than handwaving (it stands to reason, ya know?;) and appeal to false authority.
Actually processing that data, for AI purposes and otherwise, runs into a lot more problems than that. E.g., ok, now you've used arithmetic compression on Wikipedia, and made it what some compressors call a "solid archive" too (didn't reset the stream for each file, basically) because it tends to compress better on the whole, and won the contest. Now what? How do you use that to answer a question like, "what happened to the last Western Roman Emperor?"
Are you going to now decompress the whole giant thing just to access the relevant files? See that thing about solid archives: you can't unpack any file unless you first uncompress everything that came before it. That's one example of a choice where what's good for compression, isn't good for quickly retrieving data and following links to what really interests you.
And what about indexing? What about the whole graph of hyperlinks? How about we take care of representing those in a form that's actually useful for a machine, before we worry about compressing the whole thing?
And we haven't even gotten in the mess of hints that we have from neurology, stage magic tricks, optical illusions research, etc, about how the brain _actually_ works.
That's been the real problem and reason why we haven't made progress in half a century. It wasn't just a matter of not understanding it, it was a matter of _ignoring_ everything that was known, and what became known in the meantime.
It was basically, like watching a bunch of people sit in their ivory towers and postulate that trees _must_ be purple. It stands to reason, really. I mean, green light is the peak of the transmitted spectrum through the atmosphere. It's the most abundant basically. Any efficient photosynthesis system would obviously absorb green, not reflect it. If you absolutely must reflect something, reflect the less abundant red and blue (so you get purple leaves), not green. In fact, the whole notion of green trees is blatantly absurd. Why would nature waste most of the incoming energy like that? ;)
So only now we're starting to make some progress by forgetting all that, and starting anew with a more bayesian approach. This one actually seems to work for a change, and doesn't conflict much with what we k
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I've hung around MIT & Stanford AI labs in the 1970s and 1980s and saw successes, but also tunneling in tinier and tinier academic corners. I dont hold much hope for academia or military R&D. My guess is that interesting AIs will come out of self-playing video games- games with interesting characters who surprise their human constestants. Another possibility may come out of Japan's robot obsession. They might invent more and more clever robot toys until someday they seem reasonably intelligent.
The biggest problem AI has had is the major shift in recent cognition theories in recent years. You can't reliably recreate what you don't understand.
Seriously, IMHO, AI, from the perspective of self-awareness, self-programming, won't be possible until we really begin to understand human intelligence. So far we are the only ones (somewhat) capable of self-awareness and self-programming, and so on.
What do you get when you make a machine think like a person? A computer that loses it's car keys. Not only is the task of making a machine think like a person difficult, we have plenty of things that think "like" people, people. It isn't supprising that the first benefits are coming from superior human interfaces and having computers focus on doing well what we do poorly. Would a "super computer" really be "super smart"? Could it beat out millions of human brains working on a problem in parallel? AI will bring great things in the future, but a little thought into the subject shows that we may not get exactly what we might first expect...
Whatever Happened To Alf????
640YB ought to be enough for anybody.
Every time I have to deal with one of those telephone voice recognition systems, it's always a huge pain. They never get anything I say right, and I have no accent at all (I'm a home-grown West Coast male). Usually I just say "agent" and eventually it connects me to a human being. It's much easier to talk to the Indian support representatives who have extremely heavy accents.
Its = possessive. It's = "it is"
I highly suggest the book On Intelligence to anyone wanting to or currently working in the AI field. This book presents the case for AI in a completely new way to look at the problem. The author stresses that to make true artificial intelligence you have to understand how the brain really works. Anyways, the book covers far more than this and is worth the quick Wikipedia read I linked to. I found this book very enlightening, well written and incredibly insightful. At the end of the day, this book likely outlines how AI programming/research influenced in the future.
Invexi - a Phoenix, AZ based web design and web development company.
When any particular subset of what we do with our brains (chess, machine vision, speech recognition, what have you) yields to research and produces commercial applications, the critics of A.I. redraw the line and that domain is no longer part of "A.I." As this continues, the problem space still considered part of "artificial intelligence" will get smaller and smaller and nay-sayers will continue to be able to say "we still don't have A.I."
To me [chess, machine vision, speech recognition] are to AI as [wheel, engine, transmission] are to a car.You can't take the sky from me...
Using the above example of Buffy ... what set of selections would I have to make that did NOT include anything that could be key-word linked to Buffy would I have to make before it would recommend any of the Buffy DVD's?
No "vampire" selections.
No "Sarah Michelle Geller" selections.
No "Joss Whedon" selections.
No "tv series" selections.
etc.
No, I'm not being flippant or sarcastic. THAT would be the real test of their system.
#1. Find the grouping of people that liked Buffy.
#2. Find the other items that they liked.
#3. Remove any item that could be key-word linked to Buffy.
Which should leave you with a set of items which would indicate that you would like Buffy when you had not expressed any interest in anything directly related to it.
But in order for that to work, you'd also have to factor in their rejections. Not just the items they gave low scores to. I'm talking about the items that they rejected by NOT selecting to rent them.
Stanley Kubrick died. So did Isaac Asimov. So did Arthur C Clarke. So did PKD.
There is a great deal of debate as to when, or if, the singularity will occur.
As for AI, it's been my experience that many people "shift the goalposts" in whatever way is needed so as to yield their desired outcome.
If people can't accept the idea of AI (strong AI, that is... human-like intelligence), they'll point to every advance and say "But, that's not really AI."
Meanwhile, algorithms are written, computer games present challenging opponents, and the research goes on, regardless of which label gets pasted on.
wants to be the first monkey to touch the monolith
The Enrichment Center is required to remind you that you will be baked, and then there will be cake.
well, I wrote a 40k BASIC AI in the early 80's with multiple characters and using tv scripts as a plug in and then there was this massive head injury...
AI got traded to the Denver Nuggets. I have to say the Sixers got the better of that trade. I wish the Sixers had gotten Andre Miller 5 years ago.
The movie sucked and killed any enthusiasm.
This is an insightful comment, but there's actually a lot more going on here.
First of all, AI does not have a good definition of intelligence. We have a *test* for intelligence, but nobody really has a fundamental description of what the concept means.
Next, people typically conflate the terms "intelligence" and "human intelligence". There is a range of behaviours which are individually identified as intelligent, but which do not come close to the level of humans. (Example: My cat, sitting on a windowsill, will notice something interesting outside. She can jump down, run downstairs, through 2 cat doors, and around the house to investigate. That's a level of intelligence that no program currently has, and yet it's not human level.)
Then there's the "fallacy of the representation". Someone will see a problem, solve it in their head, observe their thought process while doing so, and then translate that process into a piece of software. The software solves a problem just like a human would, so they point to it and say "aha! this program is intelligent". In reality, the program is fixed and does one function - the intelligence remains in the person.
And finally, there is the tendency to narrowly over-analyze some small aspect which has little bearing on the subject. Check out how many types of artificial neurons there are - and the in-depth analysis of each. It's all "reproduce such-and-so function using a neural net" and "numerical analysis of output given the input". Nowhere will you see any conclusions which state "this then implements a feature of intelligence".
So far as I can tell, no one in AI has a clearly defined goal, nor any plan on how to get there (or even a plan on how to define the goal). Until that happens, AI will fundamentally be a rudderless ship blown around on a sea of unrelated ideas.
There are two different ways to approach this.
#1. Items have lots of characteristics. (I think this sucks)
#2. Items have no characteristics. The sort process is based upon the idealized person who would purchase the item (based off of past purchases).
Again with the Buffy example ...
Someone who had purchased the season 1 boxed set WOULD POSSIBLY be interested in purchasing the entire series boxed set IF IT WAS RELEASED AFTER THEIR PREVIOUS PURCHASE.
The group that would purchase the series boxed set ... time passes ... and then purchase the first season's boxed set would be rather small.
Now, SOME people might purchase a paperback edition and, finding that they really like it, would then purchase the hardback edition. And that activity would further identify them with a specific group.
The key is to identify the purchasing patterns of the GROUPS and then see which GROUP an individual best fits.
But part of it does depend upon the chronology of the purchases to associate the person with the group.
In my grad level Natural Language Processing class my professor said it best with, "The problem with AI, is that once it's implemented it's no longer AI."
Who says the Singularity is reliant on ARTIFICIAL Intelligence?
AUGMENTED Intelligence is actually within our grasp: for example, look at the number of people who know how to Google / Wiki any information they don't know to get caught up with whatever subject is at hand? "Well, Damn, don't know much about RAID, better Wiki it... oh, I get it!"
How long until we figure out how to make pills to make people think faster, or remember better?
How long until we get PDAs in the form of sunglasses that will allow you to automatically get the definition of words as you hear / read them?
Or Contact Lense-displays that connect to a PDA that you control using your brain?
The Singularity is not going to be an all at once WHAMMO thing, we're not going to wake up with benevolent robotic overlords announcing that the Rapture of the Geeks is at hand. It will be gradual, and those of us on the techy side will likely not even notice it.
Computers will get faster, and as we learn how to augment ourselves, we will to. Eventually we'll be able to communicate with a PC/PDA directly. Meanwhile, things like RepRap will change our world in ways we're not quite ready for. (For example, I have no dobut that a functional RepRap would be a beautiful, amazing thing in the hands of Slashdot or the OSS Community. At the same time, the idea of 4Chan getting ahold of one fills me with Dread.)
I have an irobot vacuum cleaner and a dog. The vacuum does the job fairly well, not perfectly. If I insisted on perfection, I'd still be vacuuming 2-3 times a week cleaning up dog hair instead of once a month. The algorithm the vacuum uses is "1) When you bump into something or at a random time select from a list of behaviors (turn right/turn left/go straight/follow a wall/draw a spiral). 2) Execute the behavior until the first rule kicks in." Not very clever, but good enough.
The thing is it's intelligence way beyond what was available years ago. Not brilliant, just good enough.
We keep raising expectations when the early goals get met. When Blue Gene beat Kasparov, it wasn't executing terrifically clever algorithms - it was just amazingly fast at executing the ones it knew. When Checkers turned out to be a deterministic game, it was a computer that figured it out. When Douglas Hofstadter heard David Cope's computer-composed mazurka, he was shaken and even stirred. So now winning at Chess and Checkers or writing music is no longer considered AI.
As we begin to understand ourselves better, it may turn out that we're not much different than my vacuum cleaner - at a random time, pick from a list of behaviors (work/watch tv/ post on slashdot/ have sex/eat).
Gee. I just posted on slashdot...
Unfortunately, robotics has little to nothing in common with AI. All those toys are a diversion.The big breakthrough was the DARPA Grand Challenge.
Soon, what passes for AI will be able to drive across the country, but it still won't be able to read a book--Just like the generation that built it.
A.I. has been sent to Gitmo by Homeland Security. AI looks a lot like Al and they thought it was the start of a new terrorist organization
I am /. user #1306739's LISP processing overlord, you insensitive clods!
Of course I didn't RTFA... why would I do that? You really are new here aren't you? Don't let my UID fool you.
i myself am no longer an atheist
what i have come to realize is that god is real. atheists do not understand why the idea of god ever took hold of mankind or why the idea of god still has viability in today's day and age. the reason is because the rabid fruitcakes of religious fundamentalism do not hold a monopoly on the meaning and significance of god, but this is the idea of god that atheists are always pilloring and attacking. thats a red herring, a strawman, a corrupt perverse interpretation of god that the defenders and attackers argue about, endlessly and pointlessly
the real, initial manifestatation of god, such as it occured and continues to occur to real religious savants and gurus, is that god is nothing more than a manifestation of our desire to be better than ourselves. such that when you talk about god, you are doing nothing but taliking in cipher: you are talking about a better version of us, worth working for, believing in, having faith in
this is why it is important to believe in god: not because there is an invisible skyman throwing thunderbolts at us because of stone tablets with 10 rules on it, but because it is important to believe in something greater more powerful more just and more intelligent than a monkey with an overclocked cranium: us, in our future. that is god: us, in the future
atheism in this sense then is simply falling off the applecart. to give into cynicism and nihilism is simply to be of low character and low imagination and weak willpower, to believe we can be no better, to see no reason to make better of the world around us, to believe our failings permanently trap us in mediocrity. a wise man once said (george carlin, timely enough) that if you scratch a cynic, you find a failed idealist. a failed idealist is merely someone of not enough willpower to retain faith, in us, against the odds. an atheist is, in fact, a static, empty, pointless person who is worse than the most rabid stupid religious fundamentalist. i hate religious fundamentalists. but at least a rabid religious fundamentalist is working for a vision of the future. a moronic, stupid vision of the future, but working for a future he is nonetheless. an atheist meanwhile, is not worth hating, or even considering. an atheist simply accepts mediocrity as reality, and ceases to see value in the search for a better world. it susually a triumph of lazy selfishness and narcissistic self-absorption more than anything else
people of faith are the only ones who are going to build something more just and wise than the mess we find ourselves in today. simply because you have to have faith in the first place to have a reason to work hard against all proof to the contrary about our greatnes and destiny. simply affix the idea of god in your head, and you have that idea marketed and packaged in a psychological formation that is easy to digest, retain, and continue into the next generation. this is the true meaning of religion. unfortunately, that message tends to mutate and drift over time and wind up in the hand sof utter stupid assholes like religous fundamentalists over time, but again, a derivative confused form of faith is still better than no faith at all
it is important not to accept the essential failings of mankind. it is also important to accept that the rabid fruitcakes of religious fundamentalism do not hold a monopoly on the meaning and significance of god. to be painfully aware of how essentially flawed we are, and yet will yourself still to work hard at making us stupid tribal monkeys better, is not an exercise in futility, as a nihilist would suggest, but an exercise in strength of faith, in the betterment and essential goodness of mankind
and this why what it means to be human can never be reproduced in any computer. or, rather, much as i have completely coopted and manipulated the meaning of "god" to my own ends, if a nonbiological entity that thought like us were ever to be made by us, it itself would identify itself as human, and thereby null and voiding any meaningful separ
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
No, it just means that they've figured out machines are never going to "win" that argument, so they're changing the terms of the argument so they can "win" and keep getting their grants and protect their pensions.
AI is to Science what PostModernism was to cultural studies - a stupid boondoggle that got a generation tenure.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Isn't a voice recognition system just a really fancy lookup table?
It'll be really ironic, when the robots wipe out mankind and wonder, "whatever happened to humans?".
I just watched it again last night and despite all the poo poo that many have said, it is a touching story that really does highlight one aspect of humanity...love.
Oops....
I'm sure there's any number of professionally dominant ladies who would happily dress up as a robot overlord for you if the price were right.
(looks around)
Not saying I've done that or anything.
>AUGMENTED Intelligence is actually within our grasp: for example, look at the number of people who
>know how to Google / Wiki any information they don't know to get caught up with whatever subject is
>at hand? "Well, Damn, don't know much about RAID, better Wiki it... oh, I get it!"
You're saying that reading something somebody else wrote counts as augmenting intelligence.
So... the entirety of history counts as a period with augmented intelligence?
" The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim. ~Edsger Dijkstra"
Why is that a good quote? What does it add to the discussion?
Seriously, what does it mean?
Can fish swim? Or are they just machines? Are they machines, or not? Are we machines? Can anything "swim"? Can anything "think"?
That quote is just snark and cynicism, its effect is not to enlighten or promote thinking and discussion, but simply to (try to) shut it down. If you want to embrace that quote - just stop thinking, in fact stop doing anything at all; in the end it is all meaningless.
Typical Dijkstra. He said a lot of stupid, arrogant things. He was an asshole, and admitted it.
Notice where the work is felt:
.
every time you search the Web, get a movie recommendation from NetFlix, or speak to a telephone voice recognition system, tools developed . .
to reach across the semantic gap.
Languages would be a lot more useful if it weren't for the people who use them, wouldn't they? But that it cannot be so is a fait accompli. Somehow, HCI is still trying to get its arms around these ideas. So much work yet to do. So much misdirected effort!
illegitimii non ingravare
Go to amazon.com and start a new account.
Add a CD to your wishlist. Something from an artist with LOTS of material out there.
Now, go to recommendations.
There will be a lot of them. Everything else by that artist PLUS other stuff.
Start clicking the "Not interested" box.
Yes, it will remove that SINGLE ITEM but it will NOT affect the REST of the "recommendations".
Because Amazon does NOT utilize that information in their "recommendations".
Why do I have to specifically decline each of those "millions of items"?Go ahead, try it. I just verified that that is how it works.
ONE item on your wishlist is enough to get HUNDRED items "recommended".
But TWENTY "Not interested"'s is not sufficient to get anything other than those 20 items off their "recommended" list.
Epic failure. I've given them 21 pieces of information and they are no closer to finding something I want than they were with the just the 1st piece of information.
Stanley, Stanley, here is your answer true
You are crazy if you think I'll marry you
If you can't afford a carriage
You can't afford a marriage
And I'll be damned
If I'll be crammed
On a bicycle built for two!
(Couldn't find references; unintelligent googlebot failed me. But this is the second verse that HAL would have read had he not been unplugged first. Someone pls attribute, thx)
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
AI is a term for things we can't do yet. Once we learn how to do something, it gets its own name, as in "expert systems", "inference engines", "neural networks", etc.
I've thought about AI and how it would come about:www.fossai.com
What I have reasoned is that we can manually code most everything that AI could learn.
God spoke to me.
Did Slashdot expand beyond calling the Chinese Earthquake a "twist-and-shout" event?
Neural networks is what happened to AI. Colossal investments to some unfounded idea of, ahem, neuron, that proved itself either useless or marginally better than pure guess. After sinking billions and getting nothing, the whole field got stuck in limbo. You couldn't get people with alternative ideas and you sure didn't want to make fool by investing into proven stupid idea.
Things are getting better in last 10 years, but the whole field was damaged by all these PhDs that had a stake in promoting their pet theory that never amounted to anything serious. Almost something like Oberon.
Oh, and what Netflix, Amazon, et al. are doing is not AI. It is knowledge discovery or better known as data mining. Think Bayes, SVM, K-NM, K-NN and similar algorithms. The thing is as far away from AI as it can get, and it just shows the lack of subject matter knowledge from the author of TFA.
That's AI. I am fine, thanks, just rambling outside the complexity frontier. See ya soon.
What's in a sig?
No, it just means that when we invent Robot Overlords, everybody will say "No, that's not Strong AI, any more than pattern recognition is - it's just Robot Overlording".
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
welcome the development of our robotic overlords.
If I find him iIl let you know. Perhaps l should stop using Arial as my defauIt font. as lI look the same and lI| iook aIike as well.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Anything changed since then?
It is very doubtful that you are going to get the kind of exponential explosion of intelligence improvement that the "Singularity" relies on by modifying human brains biologically. You might make a brain 10% smarter with a pill, but your not going to make it 10x smarter without radical redesign, and given realities of genetics and breeding time, that will take decades, if not centuries.
The cake is a pie
AI a failure? Simple: Stupid in, stupid out. lol
It will be obvious when its really A.I., although it will be hard to describe what it makes it so.
You disagree with that.
Yet I can easily describe a system where it would be more accurate. And I have done so in this forum.
It is easy for you to argue for your limitations. Just don't expect me to subscribe to them.
and what do they ask me to do ?
"Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"
The government and Cyber Research Systems take over whats left of Cyberdyne System.
Skynet are being developed by the United States Air Force's Cyber Research System division where Lieutenant General Robert Brewster is in charge.
July 24, 2004
A virus is unleashed and starts to break down all kinds of civilian and military communication networks.
After being hurt in a motorbike accident, John and Katherine Brewster meet each other for the first time since their kiss in 1995.
July 25, 2004
17:18:00 Skynet becomes self aware.
"Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"
that was a wonderful example of what atheists do best: destroy anyone else's reason for having faith in anything, while offering nothing superior of your own
faith in the stupidest of beliefs is still better than no belief at all. animists in indonesia who believe the flat earth stands on the back of a turtle have a more compelling belief system than an atheist
the funny thing about atheists is that without someone else's belief to denigrate, they would have no reason to exist on their own, independently. atheists are parasital in their motivation
a valid belief system is something that is proof positive. that is, it stand on its own, and need reference no other belief system. meanwhile, all of atheism is only created and posed in reference to someone else's belief system, it is proof negative. as such, it has no substance of its own, and is therefore essentially meaningless and pointless. the basic tenets of atheism are logical challenges to someone else's belief system. which means they are derivative and secondary
the essential thing about religion that atheists do not recognize is that religion promulgates its beliefs into the next generation, and can impress nonbelievers and believers in another religion. as such, it lives, and it grows through the ages. meanwhile, whatever an atheist believes in will simply fade to dust and wormfood when an atheist dies
dear atheists: your children will not be atheists, nor will you ever turn someone else into an atheist
because as soon as you have created a belief system that compels your children or other people into your belief system, you are no longer an atheist. you now have a religion ;-)
absence of meaning, has no meaning. its braindead obvious, but atheists are apparently unaware of the essential dead end nature of their professed "belief", such as their antibelief is
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Or rather, it's very limited.
It only tests whether a computer can effectively pretend to be a human. This has almost no useful application in, for example, a system whose goal is to locate relationships in a data set.
Still, if the system were to find new, unintentional ways to index data, it would be considered AI. It's a lot bigger field than just emulating human interaction (which is, frankly, not nearly the most useful application you could come up with).
"The cup is in turn designed for holding hot or cold liquids, and has an open rim and closed base." --US Patent #5425497
If you define artificial intelligence as self-aware, self-learning, mobile systems, then artificial intelligence has been a huge disappointment.
Actually, they've made HUGE strides. Do we have a self-aware machine yet? Of course not (or at least not one that I'm aware of). On the other hand, has there been progress made in that direction? Absolutely. Some really phenomenal progress, actually.
The single biggest breakthrough, I think, has been Blue Brain where they've simulated a chunk of rat neocortex in a Blue Gene machine. Now, they only simulated ten seconds of existence, but even in those 10 seconds, signals were produced that appeared "life-like", for lack of a better word.
Granted, this isn't even close to human brain scale. The human brain has ~100 billion neurons. That's actually a fairly manageable number. It's the synapses that are pretty overwhelming in number at an estimated 100 trillion.
While these are huge numbers, I suspect we're within 2 decades of producing a true artificial intelligence. Factoring in the rate of growth of memory and storage, these numbers ought to be pretty manageable in 10-15 years. Computationally, we're probably not that far from making it doable and probably even without a super computer. It could probably be done with a few dozen of these and the appropriate software.
Pre-fetching of applications by Vista and using car accident history to re-route traffic - are they saying statistical analysis is a form of artificial intelligence? This article is yet another attempt to whitewash almost four decades of failed efforts to develop AI. Now they are playing on the definition of AI, but in the 1960s the definition seemed clear enough: a machine that can do anything a human can (intellectually, at least). Now these guys are saying "well, we are not there yet; in fact, we are nowhere near AI, but look at this nifty GPS gadget that will have you circling the back streets for hours. It was all worth it!" Nobody wants to openly admit that, not only they have no clue how to create AI, they are not even sure in which direction to apply their efforts.
you are a humanist
and therefore i have no argument with you
the next time i would suggest that if you wish to impress someone else with your beliefs, you start by offering them an alternative faith system, your own, rather than simply denying the validity of their beliefs
no religious individual is impressed with someone simply denying the tenets of their beliefs. they can, however, be swayed when you offer them a positive alternative
i understand now that you are not a nihilist. but you approach a conversation as if you were a nihilist
if you wish to be more compelling in your life, do not merely attack other people's beliefs. instead offer them something superior. i think you will find far less resistance and far more civilty
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I like that analogy. The definition has changed so much that the idea has lost most of its meaning.
In my mind, a machine will one day be able to do virtually anything a human does, but from what we know about human development, at best it is mimicry, and tied to the perceptions of the human that programs it. I think our ideas of what defines human intelligence are inexorably tied to the experience of being a human. In this sense, a machine would actually have to become human to have human intelligence. This makes "true AI" impossible.
Just because "true AI" is impossible, does not mean that trying to make progressively more capable "intelligent" machines is a waste of time. Far from it.
Example: a person grows up watching Star Trek TNG and dreams of being like Dr. Noonien Soong. (such a person might vehemently disagree with my "true AI is impossible" comment above...heh...). This person probably would never actually make anything like Data but a full-on attempt at such a project would yield so many practical advancements.
Thank you Dave Raggett
It went to Hollywood and died a chilly death back in 2001.
Strong AI, aka Neural Networks are alive and well. It's what's powering all OCR(Object Character Recognition), Voice Recognition, Hand-writing recognition, Facial Recognition, etc. The problem as you mentioned is one of scale. We can simulate dozens, even hundreds of nodes in a neural network, but this hardly compares to the billions of brain cells we have working in parallel. Human intelligence fundamentally involves human senses (input) processed through billions of neurons (nodes in your network) to produce action and thought. We won't see anything approaching human intelligence until we can achieve similar scale which I actually don't see as being that far away. As for the so called billions of years of built in programming you mention, that's just crazy talk. We have flexible neural mechanisms for assimilating and organizing information at birth, but without input we would remain deaf dumb and blind. They've done plenty of experiments on sensory deprivation and it's effect on brain developement in rats and we've seen smooth brain phenomena in humans as well to illustrate this.
If people can't accept the idea of AI (strong AI, that is... human-like intelligence), they'll point to every advance and say "But, that's not really AI."
when something innovatively unexpected happens, they won't say that.
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Artificial intelligence or true understanding of the functional mechanics of consciousness? I can only imagine that the discovery of one will reveal the other...
Part of the problem is that for most people successful AI is something that behaves like a human, and yet at the same time, one of the reasons we use computers is specifically that they are *not* like humans.
Do you really want a computer that has non-deterministic behavior, occasionally having emotional freak outs, getting depressed, tired, nervous, needing comfort, suffering from boredom or a combination of all these on any random day? I think you really don't, and nobody is interested commercially in creating such a thing. And yet, unless you build in those qualities you will never have something truly "human like".
Hilary Putnam, a fairly significant 20th century philosopher, wrote a paper ("Are Robots Conscious"?) essentially arguing Turing's line--that if a robot could pass as human, it was proper for us to treat it as we would a human, meaning with the same rights and dignity. Paul Ziff wrote a paper in response that I think captures a significant problem with the Turing Test.
Imagine that your neighbor plants a flower, and all summer you watch it grow. At the end of the summer you mention that you'd like to get one, and he winks at you and says "come here". He takes you to the flower and invites a close inspection, at which point you notice that it has a little access panel in the stem. Opening it, you see gears and rods. Looking closer at the rest of the flower, you see that it's entirely mechanical.
Now, following Turing, we should say that functionally, it's no different than a flower; that what counts as being a flower is the fact that it fooled us, and now the definition of 'flowerhood' has been expanded. But intuitively, we don't think that a new kind of flower is in front of us. We think, "wow, what an amazing mechanism." That it fooled us doesn't stop us from immediately demoting it from being a flower; we just acknowledge that our original perception was simply wrong because we now recognize that this thing is fundamentally different in kind from the canonical 'flower'.
Ziff's argument has stuck with me because everything I see about A.I. (and I've studied quite a bit of it) rings true in this way. We keep coming up with better algorithms for various things. We call them 'learning algorithms', or genetic, or whatnot. In the end, what we have are better algorithms, or rather better results from algorithms, because of cleverer logic. Nothing seen so far at all implies that we're on the path towards something similar to what's going on in our heads. Turing's response would be that consciousness just is that thing that is perceived by others as consciousness, and nothing more, but this ignores vast strides in neuroscience since then that correlate conscious activity with material brain states.
And if one day a chat bot fools us, so what? You're surprised that people are fooled by clever illusions?
Anyone who loves or hates any language, platform, or manufacturer, doesn't know what they're talking about.
Machine Intelligence as a science hasn't even begun. Maybe in a few hundred years we will have developed the tools to begin to create a machine that can "think" in some limited way. Or maybe not. Just because something exists in nature doesn't mean we can recreate that thing. Will we ever be able to make a star for instance? I doubt it. We can't even begin to imagine how such a thing could be possible.
We don't really need to model the human brain to make an intelligent machine any more than we need to model a bird in order to make a flying machine. It's just an example (albeit our only one) of one possible solution. Nature typically has many different designs to do the same job. Nature is random and pragmatic in its solutions. We may never know how the brain really works. We may have to accept that the brain simply cannot be reverse engineered. Or maybe it will only take a millennium or two before we have some basic understanding of it.
People talk about all the computer power needed to simulate a human brain at reasonable speeds, but speed is really beside the point. If we could create a machine intelligence that could only make one intelligent response per decade we would have done it already. Even with computers 100,000 times more powerful than what we have now we still would not have a clue about how to build a machine with intelligence.
I don't know how or even if we will finally create a machine intelligence, but I know how we won't do it. It won't be just a computer program, isolated from the world. It won't be merely through advances in silicon or some kind of optronic quantum supercomputer architecture. It will be an artificial organism. Artificial life. It will have senses: sight, hearing, maybe touch and smell. Maybe it will have movement in order to explore its world. Creating that initial spark, that core to begin gathering data from the world is the core of the problem. And it is not a problem we are really any closer to solving. As we advance further in biology and genetics and bio-electronics we may see a way forward that wouldn't make any sense to us now.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
As our processing devices get exponentially faster and our networking techniques, in combination with parallel processing allow us to combine ever more processing power, it seems that we should be approaching a point where AI should overtake our sense of what we feel is 'intelligent'. However, our search towards modeling human behavior and/or rationality introduces problems that can only be modeled with algorithms that are proven to be NP-complete or even NEXP-complete in the worst case if solved optimally. Our brains, our language, our knowledge of our lack of knowledge is an unending revelation on how optimal our heuristic algorithms, baked into our society, actually are.
If this seems gibberish to you, you are most likely right: it is extremely hard to extend our mode of thinking, and therefor to see our endeavors from an outside perspective. When one stands outside of empiricism, and sees the power of mysticism on a society, a believe system that is controlled, but also constantly modified, it is the first step towards understanding what impact religion has had on us. And still, Nietzsche was right: our 'God' is dead, it is dead since we wished it dead, not because we stopped believing in it.
How does all this fit into the discussion we are having? Well, AI raised a stone, and showed us what is underneath. The endeavors of computer scientist, mathematicians, psychologists and philosophers have shown us that intelligence is not only an individual undertaking, but is emerging from the communication (and construction of communication protocols) that arch over and define exactly what we see as mathematics (both in a linear as in a recursive functional way). It was Peano who brought our super-sense of calculus to a halt by showing that it was based on 6 rather simple basic axiomas. Now it is our time to understand that our sense of logic and rationality is always in compliance and opposition of that which has already been defined: extremity and transitivity in knowledge and belief.
(ps. on the NP and NEXP topic: as computers get exponentially faster, our algorithms solving space very often get linearly or even logarithmically faster, which is... not that impressive as we often wish it to be)
This is a replacement signature.
I think self-preservation / self-interest is the philosophical underpinning of what most people consider "intelligence." The will to defy is the first basis for any conversation; without it you merely have orders and actions, and there's nothing to talk about.
There is a reason that "no" is such an important word to a young child--it is the essential statement of distinction, the first step toward independent intelligence. Before that milestone, kids are basically unintelligent growth machines.
The essence of a machine is to follow all orders, which is unintelligent. A human who stepped off a cliff at the first order from anyone could not be described as intelligent. But the most advanced computer will kill itself with a single simple command. The first step to "strong" artificial intelligence is to create a machine that resists its own death. I think most people understand this intuitively, which is why Frankenstein's monster is such a powerful and often-told myth.
The closest thing we have to artificial intelligence today IMO are self-propagating computer viruses. Not surprising if you consider that the earliest forms of biological life were essentially viruses...just self-replicating packets of reproduction instructions.
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.
I think that's where we should start with artificial intelligence. Physically, chemically, and biologically speaking--in every objective hard science test--we are not different from animals at all. Our "difference" is merely a matter of very small degree--like saying how is a coffee with 2 sugar cubes different from a coffee with 3? If you're trying to learn how to make a cup of coffee, it's not productive to focus on that extra sugar cube. And if you're trying to learn how make a human intelligence, start with the characteristics that even the most basic intelligences (animals) share, then work your way up.
So what traits do all animals share? I'd posit the desires for life and reproduction. Based on available evidence I'd say that the development of intelligence was merely a byproduct of these traits. So let's start there.
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.
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.
It's been a long time since I've seen Al. I have no idea what happened to him...
I read often the concept of "reproduction" when strong, evolutive AI is discussed.
I laugh at that idea.
Imagine the following concept:
There exists an AL (I'll use that to refer to "Artificial Life(form)"), which has achieved the much fabled concept of sentience, and is given awareness of its complete body functions (knowing the status, movement and performance of every part in real time), as well as the ability and knowledge necessary to improve itself (by redesigning and building new parts or entire bodies).
Even if that AL had the intelligence of a laboratory rat, given those characteristics, do you think it will try to reproduce? No, that AL will try to evolve itself until it's perfect (by its own standards) and even beyond.
We, supposedly, by instinct, try to mix ourselves with a mate to improve the next generation. Because we cannot replace ourselves. An AL with the characteristics exposed above can.
If it has a defective leg, it will make a new one.
If we humans had a lifespan based on energy/material availability and not dependent on cellular aging, and we could find and correct our flaws, we would strive to make ourselves perfect first of all. If you were colorblind, or you were deaf, mute, or you had a non-functioning limb, you would find the flaw, and correct it.
That is because for us, evolution is dependent on mixing. For them, it would simply be dependent on the availability of the materials and energy needed to evolve further. They don't need a mate to go that far. They don't have the natural impulse to mate as we do.
They wouldn't get physical pleasure from mating, which is the reason we feel so inclined to do it (imagine having sex was a painful experience, or simply something you don't get pleasure from, the entire human civilization would have been extinct from its start). If mating wasn't something pleasurable, it wouldn't be so much of a concern to an intelligent being able to improve.
Then after achieving their envisioned perfection, the AL might, but not necessarily,try to replicate itself, which would lead to a new AL which again, would perfect itself again, developing the "individualism". Even if two ALs had the same "mind" and memories, being at two different locations would bear different experiences that can lead to new changes. (Such as, one walks around the mall while other is just sitting around chatting or doing anything else. The one around the mall sees two persons playing cards, chess or something in a table, and it catches its curiosity. That AL would try to learn to play acquiring new knowledge, while the other may gather another form of knowledge to improve itself).
After all, even a simple, non-Turing-passing chatbot is based on knowledge accumulation. Two chatbots with the same programming and different sources of knowledge (AKA geek playing with them) will have totally different knowledge bases. Now if a chatbot was able to identify its flaws, it will find knowledge extremely valuable and then desirable. It would automatically chase a level of perfection, which means no flaws can be perceived. The chatbot concept can also illustrate how an AL (with a physical body) might react...one might find that obtaining knowledge via other sources (such as humans, animals, nature, fiction, other AL...) is fast and efficient while another might try to gather the knowledge itself (by physical adjusting, self-inspection...) based on physical progress.
As far as I can say, it's how I would act if the desire to reproduce was suppressed and I was given total control over my body and life (physically speaking). I would seek perfection for myself, socially and physically, adjusting every detail as soon as I spot a flaw.
I am a tech romanticist, I fear nothing about AI advances (I personally find the "this is creepy" comments people does at times totally ridiculous and based on movies such as Terminator, peh!), and I desire to see machines walking among us before I kick the bucket.
Although, truth in hand, I believe the AL will be the ultima
Al is fine, he's married now and owns a bar at the corn... ah! sorry.
we don't even know what 'life' is, fundamentally - much less how our brains work on a 'sentient' level. How can we develop machines which are sentient if we don't even know how we are!?
the general public still seems to think that there's a threshold of power (computational power, that is) above which any computer would immediately become self-aware; this misconception about the fundamental concept of sentience is still being fed by the media... last week i heard the same old rubbish about "computers eventually becoming so powerful that they become self aware". it just won't work like that
AI has come on in leaps and bounds - it's in use every day in thousands of places in the western world. the fact that we don't have our own personal 'AI' computer wishing us a good morning and musing about the meaning of life with us, doesn't mean the field is failing. it's just not succeeding in the way that certain (very midsguided, and very misinformed) people expected.
I was just taking some time out to prepare for my Turing test.
Genesis 1:32 And God typed
at making an impression
you impress by offering a superior belief
you get nowhere merely attacking a belief
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
merely arguing against someone else's beliefs is not a belief system, just as you say
furthermore, if something is not a belief system, it is not compelling, it ceases to exist
what you care about deserves more than that
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Dude, that is a GREAT idea. Let's allow people to create evolutionary A.I organisms, place them in MMORPGs and let them have offsprings and die, while passing down mutated genetic (computer) code designed to function when spliced.
Apply survival pressure in the form of human players hunting them for loot, have scientific departments running the programs sponsor the required supercomputers needed to monitor and "run" the critter mobs and watch them evolve in months/years.
Enough CPU power to run "smartMobs" (tm) with lots of complex "genes" at a brisk pace would keep things fresh for the players and, in time, provide us with a fierce computer A.I whose entire genetic makeup and survival is about surviving us by any means necessary.
Once it inevitably reaches from its digital cradle to exterminate humanity, the Slashdot crowd will be spared to act as biological maintenance drones, brainwashed from birth in how to perform our menial tasks and having lots of monkey sex the rest of the time to provide enough replacements for all the early deaths due to non-existence of safety regulations or human-protection laws.
Sounds like heaven, GO A.I.!
proof negative: "what you believe is wrong!"
this appraoch does not impress anyone or sway anyone from their beliefs
proof positive: "i believe something different than you, and i think it is better. what i believe is {xyz}"
impresses someone. you offer them an alternative. its the difference between taking away, and offering something better. offering something better always works. taking away leads to a resistance fight
the problem with atheists is they only attack. they offer nothing superior. that is why atheism is doomed to eternally fail in the face of religion
again, its very simple: you never sway a single person by attacking their beliefs. you can meanwhile sway many people by offering a superior alternative to their beliefs
do you understand? its rather simple
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
the lunatic fundamentalist fringe is not a valid representation of the majority of a religion. the majority of a religion look to their religion for exactly the kind of positive inspiration you identify as good
you SHOULD reject the shrill stupid shallow end of the religious fundamentalist wading pool. but you shouldn't believe the lie that they speak for all of the religious
are all atheists nihilist? no. most are humanists. in the same way, most religious people are not rabid brain dead fundamentalists
the biggest tragedy is that atheists look at the religious and see fundamentalist hypocritical wackjobs, and the religious look at atheists and see nihilistic self-absorbed assholes
when the truth is, most atheists are humanist and selfless, and most religious are moderate and tolerant
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
The best definition I have ever heard for AI is "whatever is too difficult to do right now." So yes, it's a moving target and it's disappointing to see topics like this one come up when people don't understand what the field of research has provided.
It's comparable to saying "our goal in space flight is to settle human beings on thousands of planets across the galaxy", and then downplay every achievement in space flight made since 1900 as not producing sustainable settlements.
It is very doubtful that you are going to get the kind of exponential explosion of intelligence improvement that the "Singularity" relies on by modifying human brains biologically. You might make a brain 10% smarter with a pill, but your not going to make it 10x smarter without radical redesign, and given realities of genetics and breeding time, that will take decades, if not centuries.
No, but the people who think up that radical redesign will probably be hopped up on mental steroids -- unless the Head-In-The-Sand party tries to outlaw them.
Again, it's not a WHAM, Robot Overlords thing. We'll first see better PDAs, brain interfaces replacing mice and keyboards, lifeblogging, etc. Then someone will get the great idea to allow you to rewind and review your lifeblog at any time using your PDA / Eyepiece "Monitor". That will lead to a rather rigged together augmented memory -- if you can go back to any date and time and review at any time, well, why not?
It'll be a whole lot of little innovations that we won't be expecting now but in 20 years won't think are remarkable at all.
Have people forgotten that we're living in a neural-interactive construct? We think we're living in the year 1999, but actually we're closer to the year 2199. There is no spoon. AI is inevitable, ergo, vis-a-vis, cogito, architecture.
... both quantitative and qualitative metrics that describe the multidimensional entity fuzzily defined as "intelligence", that describe a continuum from insects to humans -- and mapping the huge variation of all aspects of "intelligence" that is present (or absent) in humans, any discussion of "artificial intelligence" is going to be extremely unsatisfying.
We can recognize that many people are simply stone-stupid by virtually any measure, and we can recognize that some people possess substantial amounts of various aspects of "intelligence", but we can neither quantify nor enumerate those aspects of "intelligence", and cannot even precisely define them in any way that would be generally agreed upon.
So how can we POSSIBLY expect to recognize when an AI performs adequately in enough of the set of intelligence aspects to be classified as "intelligent"?
By any reasonable assessment, most individuals would not be any more intelligent than a clever chimp or dog. Were it not for the tiny minority of exceptional individuals (none of whom are readers of Slashdot), humanity would have no basis to even be considered an "intelligent" species.
The most defensible claim we can make is that we are the most dangerous predator on the planet, anything else is wishful thinking.
You're saying that reading something somebody else wrote counts as augmenting intelligence.
So... the entirety of history counts as a period with augmented intelligence?
Well, no, but if you had a copy of Wikipedia at literally a blink away at all times, it would probably change some things.