Are We Searching Google, Or Is Google Searching Us?

An anonymous reader writes "The folks at the Edge have published a short story by George Dyson, Engineer's Dreams. It's a piece that fiction magazines wouldn't publish because it's too technical and technical publications wouldn't print because it's too fictional. It's the story of Google's attempt to map the web turning into something else, something that should interest us. The story contains some interesting observations such as, 'This was the paradox of artificial intelligence: any system simple enough to be understandable will not be complicated enough to behave intelligently; and any system complicated enough to behave intelligently will not be simple enough to understand.' After you read it, you'll be asking the same question the author does — 'Are we searching Google, or is Google searching us?'"

Comments

Re:Assuming that Google could reach consciousness

[phoenix321]

Any biological intelligence does exactly the same as described: gather data (try to assess external universe model), find correlations (build internal universe model), act according to internal needs (act upon internal universe model) and repeat.

This chain of processing is done by all brains from the fruit fly to humans. Everything else is a consequential result from this process.

A human brain has very few hardwired constants and many of them they can be overridden.

Feedback loops are a natural result of action to fulfill internal needs according an internal model - that is always incomplete or wrong, see Goedel - upon the external universe. In the next step data is gathered, correlations found (which constitutes the feedback loop) and then acted out according to the adapted internal model.

A fruit fly has simple sensors, a very simple correlation engine and a tiny memory for its internal model. But that doesn't mean its following a different path than a newborn Einstein. Einstein has detailed sensors (easily surpassed by those of dogs and eagles, but still ok), a yet-unmatched correlation engine and a sufficient amount of internal model memory.

All other inputs come from the external universe and while some of them are absolutely neccessary and come from other organisms (parents, teachers), they do not impose a hard limit on Einstein: with enough correlation power, he can easily discover new facts, unknown to any of his inputs (teachers, parents).

Einsteins brain was never designed to do anything else than processing input signals, detecting correlations and contacting motor neurons to act upon its internal model. How did he discover Relativity then?

Genes and self-modifying programs

[tucuxi]

Parent is right. As long as there is no way for the programs running on Google's hardware to grow past their original programming (beyond optimization and load-balancing), there will be no Skynet.

Yes, many computer programs work in a feedback loop, and so do all organisms. But as long as only the data entry part of the loop can change, and the system lacks the flexibility to change the type of processing that takes place (the 'program'), no spontaneous evolution will occur.

Several factors are needed to get us to the bleak, dark, machine-vs-human Sci-Fi universe slashdotters know and love.

• The would-be AI programs must be free to rewrite portions of themselves. Self-modifying code is generally frowned upon as being very hard to write and debug, and outside academia (evolutionary programming?), nobody is pushing it. Also, current approaches need massive amounts of processing for meager results.
• The programs should be free to replicate. While Google has a lot of machines, they probably don't want runaway programs hogging the CPU cycles (they are not in the heating business). Internet-roaming malware is a much more likely than Google-sponsored code to eat over the Internets. Partly because the cheapest way to replicate is not asking for permission, and evolutionary systems will take shortcuts whenever available.
• There must be evolutionary constraints to help weed the "unsucessful" strains. If a viral, self-modifying program manages to get everywhere and "kill the host" (bog down the net completely), it will no longer evolve. Fortunately, there's lots of different systems hooked up to the 'net, and colonization would be hard enough.

The first point is the most difficult. It is *not* easy to take pieces out of two programs and build a third program that does things that both do. Whatever OO promises, code is not yet "easy as lego blocks" to assemble. You need very well though-out constraints to mix code in a meaningful way - any self-modifying program would need a small, hard-to-modify kernel that would take care of the mixing mechanism. Nobody knows how to design such a kernel correctly, or what exactly to include as 'genes' (mixable code modules). Computational biology (and biology itself) are hard at work on this problem.

But mixing blocks would not be enough. A successful system would need to build new, unseen blocks by modifying existing ones -- or starting from scratch. How many different things can you say in 20 words? How many of these things make any sort of sense? And how many of those require a very, very specific context to fit into?. The way that evolution can sort this out is by, very slowly, building things that sort-of, kind-of get the job done. However you look at it, there will be huge amounts of trial-and-error involved.

And another problem is that of intelligence "scale". Imagine a super-self-modifying internet worm. The ability to probe and infect does not automatically lead to self-consciousness. There are many, many evolutionary steps from bacteria (very good at self-modification and breeding) to humans. And the current installed base of Internet-connected computers and their "stability" (the time-frame during which a given system remains 'constant') is tiny in comparison to the resources that earths' organisms have had at their disposal for evolutionary purposes. Yes, computers are way fast and this can compensate for some parallelism issues. But I still think that emerging AI is still very, very far off.

Re:This is slashdot

[phulegart]

Hey, we all know the unspoken rules... if you read the article, you aren't supposed to post... and if you post, you aren't supposed to read the article. That's how a million geeks can slam a site from a Slashdot link, because there surely aren't a million posts in the thread of discussion about the same article.

Sorry about crossing the 30 word barrier though, and all the pain I caused those who have read this far...