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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?'"
If you're in Russia, Google searches you :)
After you read it, you'll be asking the same question the author does
Do you mean we are supposed to read TFA? Seriously?
Dawkins Revisited: A person is shit's way of making more shit -- Steve Barnett, anthropologist.
The best argument against this kind of ridiculous assertion that somehow random information will somehow give rise to intelligence is provided in the old movie Short Circuit. The SAINT 5 robot spends all night reading the encyclopedia and when morning comes, it is suddenly an expert on everything. But its expertise is only in pure knowledge, not the rational use of that knowledge to create something beyond mere identification.
The only way for a robot to grow past its programming is to add the capability to do so. And simply having a system scan data and find correlations isn't going to be enough. There needs to be an action taken on the discovered correlations, and beyond that the actions need to be reprocessed back into the system in a feedback loop. And even further, it is necessary for the program to identify patterns and make intelligent decisions based on those patterns, but the intelligence necessary to make those decisions must come from external sources. I.e. the programmer.
It's a bit outlandish to think that just because a program is constantly watching and processing inputs that it is somehow sentient.
I don't know who's searching who, but I do know that I no longer use Google because it's "simply the best". Relevant results are always lost in a torrent of ads, fake review links and e-stores trying to sell me something that's irrelevant.
To the point that I'm not using Google because I genuinely like it any more, but merely because I know the alternatives are even worse. In a few years' time Google went from the best to the lesser evil.
It's... disappointing.
If a system capable of being understood could not act intelligently, then why the hell do we even bother studying the human brain? And further, any attempt at creating artificial intelligence would rely on us not knowing what the hell we are doing?
I am tired of this kind of blanket assumption that anything humans can do that we don't understand or know how to reproduce artificially is somehow incapable of ever being understood or reproduced. We are not so special as to invalidate the existence of the mechanical processes that make us work.
Some knowledge based algorithms seem unpredictable when given random data. This is not intelligence either, it is more a result of unintended consequence. You can go back and figure out why it acted a certain way.
The same rules apply to people. We have a set of programming we are born with, and then we are given random data. This data and our pre-programming explains why we act a certain way. The ability to go back and figure out why we act a certain doesn't mean we aren't intelligent.
It is a mistake to assume our intelligence is something more than a program. Our programming is just less transparent to us.
Wake me up when it starts teaching the monkeys how to use tools and kill each other. And no Republican jokes, either.
Soooooooooo, this Republican walks into a bar with a monkey under his arm....
Turing machines were being assembled into something that was not a Turing machine The author needs a bit of theoretical computer science. However many Turing machines you assemble, you still have a Turing machine.
Wake me up when it starts teaching the monkeys how to use tools and kill each other. And no Republican jokes, either.
Soooooooooo, this Republican walks into a bar with a monkey under his arm....
Walks into the bathroom and taps his foot under the stall door.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
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 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.
Bartender says: what are you doing with that jackass?
Republican says: It's not a jackass, it's a monkey.
Bartender says: I wasn't talking to you.
Sweet informative mod.