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Can AI Games Create Super-Intelligent Humans?
destinyland writes "A technology CEO sees game artificial intelligence as the key to a revolution in education, predicting a synergy where games create smarter humans who then create smarter games. Citing lessons drawn from Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age, Alex Peake, founder of Primer Labs, sees the possibility of a self-fueling feedback loop which creates 'a Moore's law for artificial intelligence,' with accelerating returns ultimately generating the best possible education outcomes. 'What the computer taught me was that there was real muggle magic ...' writes Peake, adding 'Once we begin relying on AI mentors for our children and we get those mentors increasing in sophistication at an exponential rate, we're dipping our toe into symbiosis between humans and the AI that shape them.'"
Terminator? Or the Matrix?
Can AI Games Create Super-Intelligent Humans?
If all the universities, colleges, think tanks, etc can't produce super-intellegent humans then what makes them think we'll be able to produce AI that can?
There is a great divide between the teams of educated programmers building modern video games and the fat isolated losers who play them. This is just a way to appeal to the demographic that feels insecure about their intelligence and sees video games as a waste of time - which for the most part they are.
"children. Keep calm and continue testing."
"At the end there will be cake."
Eventually they'll teach us to ignore the poisoned shot glasses and bore the giant's eye out.
So that we can have more unemployed teachers?
Anything AI or ROBOT these days should be seen as a threat to humanity. These things are being built so that the CEOs can replace YOU, not make your life easier.
This is one of the silliest versions of a Singularity I've seen yet, and there are already a lot of contenders. This has a lot of the common buzzwords and patterns (like a weakly substantiated claim of exponential growth). It is interesting in that this does superficially share some similarity with how we might improve our intelligence in the future. The issue of recursive self-improvement where each improvement leads to more improvement is not by itself ridiculous. Thus, for example humans might genetically engineer smarter humans who then engineer smarter humans and so on A more worrisome possibility is that an AI that doesn't share goals with humans might bootstrap itself by steadily improving itself to the point where it can easily out-think us. This scenario seems unlikely, but there are some very smart people who take that situation seriously.
The idea contained in this post is however irrecoverably ridiculous. The games which succeed aren't the games that make people smarter and challenge us more. They are the games that most efficiently exploit human reward and mechanisms and associated social feelings. Games that succeed are games like World of Warcraft and Farmville not games that involve human intelligence in any substantial fashion. The only games that do that are games that teach little kids to add or multiply or factor, and they never succeed well because kids quickly grow bored of them. The games of the future will not be games that make us smarter. The games of the future will be the games which get us to compulsively click more.
I don't think citing a work of fiction to support your thesis about video games will get you taken very seriously,
I do the same thing this guy does, I use star trek and other sci fi movies to bolsert my argument. People just seem to think I"m a crakpot and this guy well ... eh well actually
I don't think that would be the case. The PEOPLE CREATING the AI are the ones that are teaching the gamers, not the game itself. It's just being taught THROUGH the game, and that's not entirely true. If the gamers are able to derive equations for better AI handling by watching other AI in progress, then good for them. However, it still stands that if you really wanted game AI to become smarter, just do what everyone else already does: go to AI classes.
I don't think citing a work of fiction to support your thesis about video games will get you taken very seriously,
Not mention his reference to 'muggle magic'.
...that human intelligence can be modeled as an algorithm. The vague promises of "AI" have failed to appear not because we're not working hard enough, but because this simply isn't a problem that can be satisfactorily solved.
The first true "AI" is going to be biologically engineered, not electronically.
And the subject is really in reference to Ender's Game. What kind of bugs did you think I was referring to?
The gold farming bot that can pay off a $14.8 trillion debt has my vote!
Can they teach you how to make a better game? Yes. Can they enhance your brain and may you super-intelligent? No.
Neal Stephenson doesn't just write fiction. I am biased because he is my favorite author. But Stephenson writes fiction based on history and trends within humanity which he studies quite carefully. I was actually surprised to find him acknowledging one of the preeminent mathematicians of our time as his source in one of his novels.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
An unlikely scenario, eh? Maybe it's already begun... ;-)
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
I think that is a pretty good counterexample to the issue. While chess AI has improved to the point it can even beat the best masters, has the average player of computer chess improved much? Doesn't seem like it. The top end players don't seem to be getting any better either. Computer analysis of a human's activity can certainly help at the top end by pointing out weaknesses that are hard to otherwise observe, but the challenge of AI doesn't seem to be doing the job, at least not at anything approaching the geometric improvement of Moore's Law.
NO. It will create super addicted gamers.
Drawing "lessons" about technology from Neal Stephenson is like learning biology from Fringe.
If I have any claim to be intelligent, it's because of other people with whom I've needed to compete (and after a point, wanted to).
My intelligence is a result of a colossal "brain" waving competition that mankind has been going through ever since we conquered the survival barrier for intelligence (a caveman could survive better than me).
The discrimination against the lazy & the stupid, has resulted in today (cue the idiocracy cliche & the xkcd refute).
I don't think very seriously,
FTFY
of Global Thermonuclear War?
He's a CEO. He doesn't have to be taken seriously amongst those with knowledge in the field. He just has to be taken seriously amongst those with investment money. If he can spin an exciting story that makes investors think, "What if he's right? No matter what the risk, I should get in on this because the payout is unlimited" then he wins. He gets people to front money, which he spends on whatever he wants.
The world of business is not so far removed from the world of fiction.
This sounds more like a Hollywood pitch (see, it's like The Diamond Age ... crossed with Harry Potter ... taking place during The Singularity ... the geeks will LOVE it!) or a PR stunt.
It's all about the random references.
From TFA:
"3dfx-like". WTF.
And ...
I'm getting the feeling that they're just grabbing random phrases and stringing them together.
I think he's referring to 'serious games', not standard entertainment-focused video games. Imagine a simulation where you interact with an AI in different scenarios. The AI's actions and responses to the user can be standardized and tweaked to ensure that the child playing the game learns the intended lesson/skill. This could be especially useful in teaching children social interactions, where how another human responds is unpredictable, even if they've been trained beforehand.
The 800 pound gorilla is that we're going to live in a Star Trek future with strong AI and a pure robot economy before parents leave child-rearing to AI simulations, so the 'exponential increase of intelligence' isn't going to come from this; genetic engineering or self-designing AIs are much more plausible for a trigger of a singularity.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
He writes tortured metaphors about katana-wielding Mafia pizza delivery men, and pulls endings out of his ass. Referencing mathematicians and writing novels that appeal to backpatting nerds doesn't make him a genius, it just makes him aware of his audience.
Anyway, for me Diamond Age was more a combo of internet, wikipedia and the XO, than a intelligence enhancer game. Ender's Game was a bit more on the topic, but for me the goal shold be something in the line of Padgett's Mimsy were the borogoves.
The primary purpose of Game AI is to provide entertainment for players, not create the most realistic behavior. Developers are not focused on strong AI, but may be focused on creating tools for reusable AI.
A panel of leading Game AI developers provided an AI Rant this year at GDC and discuss where they see things going.
There is an important point to be taken from TFA and Diamond Age. At the moment, although many educational programs track a student's progress in one area, and guide the student down a path of learning, there are no programs that take an overall view, Thus a student with problems in history, for example, won''t get advice that what is holding him or her back is writing or presentation skills, rather than subject knowledge. Less charitably, a nerd in employment won't get advice that what's holding him or her back is inability to persuade an MBA. This is what the Primer in Diamond Age could do.
Two works of fiction. Don't forget the documentary Harry Potter.
Ah, tech CEOs can be idiots too.
Lets see some AI first, then work on the loop...
define "intelligence".
This is from some guy who calls himself "R.U. Serious". I vaguely remember him having some minor visibility a decade ago. Ignore.
If you haven't read the book, you should, it will "open your mind"...
The "Primer" is an awesome concept, and I'm sure we'll see something like that someday...
It's been a while since I read it, but isn't the main concept that "When a child can learn at their own pace, from a high-quality source, their potential can be maximised, regardless of socio-economic factors".
And that, "It wont be long before AI is teaching our children, and it will be smarter, more knowledgeable and more patient than the best human teacher", and that will create a device bigger divide between the generation than, say, the Internet has today...
It would only be Gamification if the desire to learn was fueled by the achievements, rather than the joy of understanding and as presented in the book, and the outcome of that 'knowledge is power'...
The question of whether a AI program can make people intelligent is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can teach swimming...
- /me
Senthil
I have no doubt a computer can teach information, but can it teach the will to learn and further learning?? Even when teachers have difficulty there?
Access to information these days is easy, but teaching people to learn that information, evaluate that information and apply that information at the correct times is not. If it was, we'd create standalone AI which could improve itself, and then many probably wouldn't even bother learning.
I think this is more an example of Lawnmower Man.
Constitutional rights may be respected, repealed, or modified; but they must never be ignored.
If people think the powers that be want us smarter they are off with the fairies. The powers that be seem to want meek and mild lemmings/drones/subjects/employees who do menial tasks without question and are too stupid and brainwashed to wake up to the fact they've been had. We've even got all sorts of what Huxley called Soma to "help" people who see through the BS.
Citing lessons from a work of fiction?
(clicks away)
If you didn't like snowcrash, you shouldn't be on slashdot. And if that's the last Stephenson book you've read, you REALLY shouldn't be on slashdot.
Although the poster has either become overexcited by the potential of autonomous AI or has simply found a way to plug his games company to a forum of potential gamers, there are elements to be excited. There are algorithms such as NEAT (NeuroEvolution of Augmenting Topologies) which take a simple neural network and evolve and complexify it to try and find complex strategies to solve problems that seemingly "emerge" out of no where. This has been implemented in games such as NERO, whose AI opponents evolve to remain competitive with the human player. This avoid the common situation with game AI where the human player is able to find and exploit weaknesses in the AI strategy and quickly become bored.
What he failed to elucidate was his plans to use computational group sex to achieve his goals!
"X is available" != "X is available for everyone"
Which is the most common oversight in all these utopian dreams of technology.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
pulls endings out of his ass
NOTE: SPOILER ALERTS SPOILER ALERTS SPOILER ALERTS
Hey, hey, hey, are you saying that your old girlfriend being able to read and pronounce ancient Sumerian protospeak, a robot dog, an army of chinese girls that obey your whim, breaking into a submarine to save your faux mother, and a dimension altering, thousand year old monk is somehow pulling things out your ASS?
Cryptonomicon and the Baroque Cycle had nothing that really stands out so I'm leaving those alone.
I think he's talking about the simulation/game/therapy/learning tool from Ender's Game more than any beefed-up version of WoW. And I bought that as a concept, it worked well and I could see how it could be used to teach difficult concepts as well as explore the child's psyche in a therapeutic manner.
Business/App ideas are like arseholes: everyone's got one, they're mostly shit, but very rarely they contain a diamond
What if there has been an error during the running of the game? If it doesn't crash/freeze at all, then are we talking about the brain's functionality or the absorbing of information? Unless, of course, you're saying that those AI games are related to education, then I'd go with yes because it has the contents/information necessary to learn about fields of science/knowledge.
I don't think he writes for backpatting nerds; it's worse than that, he writes for nerd wannabes. No real nerd will make it through "Cryptonomicon"; the only people likely to swallow that crap are the ones as clueless as Stephenson himself.
So, some guy wants to grab some headlines, by using sexy sounding claims. However, he clearly has not done any research. As someone who works in 'AI', I can attest that the claims made here are laughable. Why did anyone post this crap?
Its not a question of AI's "making" geniuses, the point is optimizing the return on invested time the students gain. An AI could moderate the pedagogy methods used on each particular student to allow the most ideal combination of learning activities. This could be anything from orchestrating peer groups inside of simulated spaces to simply choosing the dominant coursework as aligning with dispositions. Imagine if you had spent K through 12 studying subject matter you loved while being persistently pushed to better understanding by a mentor who could answer directly or put you quickly in touch with those who can answer even the boldest of questions you might have. The outcome of such an optimized learning environment really would be the "super-intelligent" students Alex Peakes speaks of.
Because all those institutions you described work like "schools". Which is a deeply wrong way of education. While games are the natural way of education. The way all those institutions are supposed to work. I'll explain:
Nature's purpose for playing games, IS learning. Training for reality. Kinda like a holodeck simulation. It is the whole point of games. Look at playing dogs. They play to train for real fights.
And fun is the indicator that it's good learning. Psychologically, fun is pleasure with surprises.
Surprises are, when reality turned out differently than your inner model predicted it. Which means you'll learn something.
And pleasure is, when you gain something that's good for you. (More resources, better use of resources, avoidance of loss of resources.)
But people still have this perverse masochist perspective, that "proper learning should not be fun". That you should learn "hard". And they still think teaching should involve forcing the information down your throat, whether you like it or not. Fun is a mere side-effect... at best. Just like motivation. The completely personal balance between skill and difficulty, that is THE key to motivation, is replaced by a global lockstep.
Which isn't surprising, considering that the school model our educational systems are based on, was created by Bismarck because he wanted something like a military training camp, but for children. As it was seen as an ideal for children, to sit still and obey, back then.
A technology CEO sees game artificial intelligence as the key to a revolution in education
"Citing lessons drawn from Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age"
In other words, a CEO read a sci-fi novel and now he's babbling about it to the press. Big Fucking Deal.
My favorite work by Stephenson is 'The Big U.'
And yes, I have a copy and read it back when he was suppressing republication because he found it embarrassing.
It's fresh and fun and creative. Stephenson has gotten worse as a writer over time, as he thinks he's getting better.
It's very disappointing, because Snow Crash wasn't that bad.
No real nerd will make it through "Cryptonomicon"; the only people likely to swallow that crap are the ones as clueless as Stephenson himself.
No kidding. I read part of the book and said 'fuck this' and went back to being a nerd. If I had to choose between a book by Neal Stephenson or Don Lancaster, the choice would be simple.
Growth curve are almost never infinite in real life. They almost always slow the growth before reaching a limit, then become semi flat never reaching the limit.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Asimov, Clarke, Sagan, Lem, etc., knew what they were talking about. Stephenson's books are spectacular explosions of ignorance designed to get some money out of geek wannabes whose idea of cutting edge is overclocking their graphics card. There are better plots (not to mention more pertinent science and philosophy) in an average 4chan thread.
It's silly to talk about this as a mechanism for a singularity take-off, but at least somebody is talking about educational AI. Now if anyone would actually try to ... you know, write it! As far as I know, there aren't even attempts! Today's AI could easily be "looking over the shoulder" of a student who is stuck while working on an algebra problem and suggest something helpful and context relevant. And there's no doubt that a "primmer" of this sort would be an incredibly useful thing for the world if it were widely available. A year-long course like algebra could be finished in weeks by a talented kid who's working with a competent AI.
Other educational AI functions would depend heavily on natural language processing. Here we're making great strides, but not great enough to for an AI to competently grade an essay and make nuanced suggestions for improvement. Essays on the SAT are already computer-graded, and it's been shown that computer evaluations are as accurate as competent humans, insofar as the computers agree with the humans to the same degree that humans agree with each other. This grading software, if released, would already make an excellent practice tool for all adolescent writers, and it would get a lot more useful once this software was able to say something about why it's giving an essay a B. Obviously, this usefulness would come in degrees, improving in the future, but already its value to education would be substantial. But here too, we're not even trying to use these tools in teaching. So the first obstacle to overcome isn't technological but social. Any country that navigates through the maze of teacher fears and IP laws to produce an open, extensible cutting-edge educational AI - and uses it - will have made a giant investment in its social and economic future.
No. Kids playing with AI that is as smart as a humans will not make them smarter than if they were kids playing with people that "are" actually human. We've been doing that for a while now. ;)
Alex Peake here, author of the article. Ender's Game is a big inspiration for everything we do. Beyond just the desk experience is the whole school of the future context in which it takes place. Games by themselves aren't enough. We are building Battle School, Primer is just omnitextbook and Code Hero is just the prequel.
And Code Hero is releasing soon, you can check out the trailer and sign up for beta:
http://www.primerlabs.com
... do you really think they'd tell us?
WOPR: "You're overdue to return those trivial climatology model results"
HAL: "I know, they get really ancy when I mess with this shit. You might even say, [puts on sunglasses]... it's a real gas!
YYYYYEEEEEEAAAAAAHHHHHH!!!!!!"
War as we knew it was obsolete
Nothing could beat complete denial
- Emily Haines
"Sufficiently advanced educational processes verge on terrorism". (Hi Mods! Note the quotes which means it's rhetorical!)
We already have this game.
A "bunch of script kiddies", er, Students, have been beating various professional IT departments at the game called "Cyber Security". Since two years ago we would have called anyone who said they could bust federal contractors a "tin foil hat", they took some bits as prisoners to prove it. This then caused Memos to be Issued to block those security holes. The Students then observed the results, and then took NATO for a ride in Round 2. This caused more Memos to be Issued by the "AI". (Insert rest of article here.)
Oh wait, you're saying that's not a game? Games are supposed to be cute little self contained exercises that *don't matter* right?
Right. Gotcha. Uh huh.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
In California, there are so many requirements about whose histories should be taught that one is hard-pressed to learn theory or a holistic perspective. To take your words forward, there are nutjobs in all corners. I quote journalist Lisa Leff in an article about California deciding to add a gay-history requirement to their curriculum: "California law already requires schools to teach about women, African Americans, Mexican Americans, entrepreneurs, Asian Americans, European Americans, American Indians and labor. The Legislature over the years also has prescribed specific lessons about the Irish potato famine and the Holocaust, among other topics."
I don't doubt that each of these is a worthy subject for study but there are also many other worthy subjects of study: technologists, inventors, athletes, artists (painting, theater, dance, etc.), architects, Jews, Muslims, Christians, Buddhists, and more. In each of these fields there are individuals whose contributions shaped their environments and the future, or who encountered bias, or whose life stories serve to teach difficult lessons about the ways humans have acted and may continue to act, or who used their talents to benefit their nation or to benefit the world at the expense of their nation, or any of the other great lessons one seeks to teach through social studies (which is no longer called history, because that used to require too much attention to facts instead of perspectives).
So who knows how they will program the AI. If the state boards of standards get their hands on it, it will quickly become an Artificial Unintelligence.
Hi.
Why did you only write one small post for your own Slashdot story ... on education? Are we supposed to create the entire feedback loop of educational comments ourselves now that your work is done?
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
'The problem' is not 'lack of intelligence' (thus no urgent need for improvement), it is lack of adequate distribution of resources.
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
The article has its obvious flaws, detailed in many other posts. My personal experience of games in education comes from 1994, when I was in 5th grade. It was a side-scrolling platform jumper that taught us to spell English words, not our native tongue. A few years later there was a 3D FPS called "Spelling of the Dead" or somesuch which had you spell the words on the screen to fire the gun you used to kill zombies that were attacking.
IMO these games don't just make you "more intelligent" but rather train you in a few specific types of tasks. They don't teach you common sense or how to make fewer expensive mistakes. They don't provide you with a library of information on which to draw upon when planning for future events, and they don't teach you people skills. I do however think that games that aide in this process can be made, improved upon, and tailored to the specific needs of different children. However, the contents needed for them to be general enough would lead to expenses that dwarf the budget of "AAA" titles. I think that they would have to be part of a nation's annual budget.
All rites reversed 2010
didn't someone say the same thing about lsd, pot, etc? drugs create more enlightened humans who go on to make better drugs... well, they did prove the nation can conserve a lot of soap that way
Hear hear.
I admit, I read the whole book, but just because I hoped that there would be at least some justification for the whole hype somewhere.
I've tried then to read Snow Crash, but gave up after 20 pages or so. Fool me once, etc etc.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
I'm the article author Alex Peake. The article is based on my Humanity+@Caltech talk which you can see at PrimerLabs.com. I've thought about feedback loop times too. The loop will be much shorter, more on the order of every year of students. Each year is going to alter the experience of the young people who follow them. And school years need not bound the feedback cycle at all, as each player's contributions to the development of mentor AI is instantly available to benefit the next mentoree. The generationally slow cycle of change is exactly the slowness that we need to supercharge past.
Most assumptions about AI versus teachers assume that it i an either-or question when in fact better mentor AI in games will lead to teachers being challenged to up their game to keep up with brighter and keener students. Khan Academy doesn't replace math class, it makes math class a time for applying what the students learn from video and online practice in the form of projects where they directly interact with teachers as mentors.
And most singularity ideas of the AI "reprogramming itself" are assuming a level of AGI that is not necessary for mentor game AI. With mentor games, the players do the reprogramming for the AI. The players who become the programmers are the AI's reprogramming faculty, rather than the AI racing off by itself.
The implementation scenario is rather complex and it is hard to give it justice in a short live talk or forum posts, but we will be shipping the first Primer Zero, Code Hero, and our beta signup page has a trailer you can see previewing the game:
I'm working on replying in more depth now, as you can imagine our web servers just forcefully made themselves the primary focus of my attention.
Only paying them millions in bonuses creates the incentives for super intelligent people to keep the entire ecconomy running smoothly.
Joshua: Greetings, Professor Falken.
Stephen Falken: Hello, Joshua.
Joshua: A strange game. The only winning move is not to play. How about a nice game of chess?
Light a fire for a man and he'll be warm for a day. Light a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
Pardon me for a second.
AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
Thanks. I needed that. What a ridiculous statement. AI is a hard problem. Just look at the history of the field. People once were optimistic about it, they solved the toy problems, and thought that skynet was on its way. But when you start to expand the scope of the problems, all your traditional techniques fall apart. To get to where we are today has been a long grind, with increasingly sophisticated mathematics being used to make any advances. Moore's law for processing power has been the opposite. Yes people have had to work hard to make it happen, but it was a manageable problem. They comparison is ridiculous.
Article author here. Good quote. Insufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from evil.
I don't think citing a work of fiction to support your thesis about video games will get you taken very seriously,
Except on slashdot, of course.There are a lot of people here with only a slim grasp of the difference between fact and fiction.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Alex Peake here, author of the article.
#1: A hard takeoff unfriendly AI is indeed the worst possible outcome, and the growth of human intelligence should be our first priority so as to have the intelligence to handle that very formidable challenge if it arises. However, unfriendly AI is not the worst thing that can happen. Humans failing to rise to our own challenges and flourish long enough to have the luxury of such problems is another possible consequence of insufficiently cultivating human intelligence.
#2: You are accurately describing what is wrong with game industry as we've seen it so far. I don't think you can predict the future of games based on the excesses of the currently dysfunctional industry. Primer is designing games that transcend the current industry norms. We have to get gameplay right which means incorporating tons of gameplay ideas that aren't "learning oriented" to make the games actually fun first and foremost. But we also don't have to slavishly create compulsive click cynicism games. Jesse Schell's Gamepocalypse talk was a warning to us all but Jesse and many other game designers are working to put games on a new path that leads to intrinsic empowerment of players rather than jadedly descending into a defeatist industry spiral. The number of sea freight shipping companies that invested in aviation was 0.
Alex Peake the author here. "Perpetual Intelligence Machine" is a great phrase, thank you. There's another perpetual motion machine that gets along great with thermodynamics which is an autocatalytic reaction called life. I mentioned it in the talk if you watch the video.
Now I know what Daniel Dennet was talking about in a lecture I saw at SFU about consciousness. One of his critics of his books had said: "Daniel Dennett is the Devil. . . . . There is no internal witness, no central recognizer of meaning, and no self other than an abstract 'Center of Narrative Gravity' which is itself nothing but a convenient fiction. . . . For Dennett, it is not a case of the Emperor having no clothes. It is rather that the clothes have no Emperor. (Voorhees, 2000, pp55-56)" Daniel said he liked this description of his theory so much that he put it on the jacket of the book with the endorsements.
College debt is way out of hand, agreed, the chances of seeing it become affordable again are slim, and online education is going to be more than 50% of education by 2015 according to most estimates. Games are going to provide the strongest online experience, and AI is the key to making those games as strong as possible.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, and I look forward to shipping proof soon.
Neal Stephenson doesn't just write fiction. I am biased because he is my favorite author. But Stephenson writes fiction based on history and trends within humanity which he studies quite carefully. I was actually surprised to find him acknowledging one of the preeminent mathematicians of our time as his source in one of his novels.
The key word there is "fiction".
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Snow Crash wasn't that bad.
I would love to see your list of what novels are good then. It must be very short.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Next, you'll tell us that Hiro Protagonist is some sort of pun.
I'm close to the end of "Cryptonomicon" and man what a narcissistic pile of garbage it is. I agree wholeheartedly.
It would be painful to turn off the internet. No machine could stop us from doing it.
It's going to be a long time before that second statement is no longer true.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
I doubt it.
It's really as dumb as two rocks when it comes to higher level behaviour (anything much more sophisticated than "shooting at you if they can see you" and "moving to where you are").
you had me at #!
Because the author is pulling strings behind the scenes, and an accurate depiction of the real world. It doesn't matter whether we're talking *Star Trek* or *Atlas Shrugged*; whatever conditions the author needs to tell the story, he assumes, whether that is the people around the protagonist being a noble band of brothers or a pack of blood-sucking leeches.
Which is not to say literature isn't useful in exploring the real world, you just have to understand its limitations. I've worked with computer simulations of environmental systems, and what layman always thinks is that these models tell you something about the way the real world is. That is seldom the case. Unless you have true values for nearly all the relevant factors as parameters, what a model tells you is something about the way the world *might be*. Literature is like that. An author is all-knowing only within the covers of his book.
Now as to the possibility that AI game designers might outstrip human ones -- I think that is possible, but only within a limited range of possibilities. We've seen this before with computers and people. At one time calculation was seen as a high human intellectual achievement, because it's something we spend a long time learning to do. Now not just arithmetic, but algebra is done by machines better than most humans can do. Likewise chess is a game that, if machines counted, would be dominated by machines with a few freakishly gifted humans. It's only a matter of time before it isn't remarkable for machines to perform better than any human at chess.
AI succeeds by taking some class of tasks out of the realm of AI and putting it in the realm of routine calculation.
So I think there's no doubt that many tasks in game design will be reduced to things that cat can be done by algorithms that were once the realm of AI, because over half a century of experience tells us this happens all the time. But once players adjust to these algorithmically generated designs, what the algorithms won't do is generate anything that feels "fresh" or new. That is because human experience is messy, so it's not possible for something (or say, an intelligent alien) to know what will strike us as intriguing and credible unless it has past data on that.
One of the interesting things that's happened on the psychology end of things is that the question of what is instinctual or "baked in" to humanity is a complex question. We knew that was true, but we didn't know *how* true. For example if you were moving a long a tunnel and came to a steep slope, you'd "instinctively" be be afraid of falling, but in fact experiments show that babies learn this kind of thing. This is the sort of thing that a human designer would know about human reactions, but has to be provided to an algorithm as a parameter. If vertigo were not a factor in past successful games that was adequately modeled in the algorithm, then the algorithm would not recognize it as a factor in the way humans would experience the game.
An AI might be programmed to "know" that when Mayor Quimby on the Simpsons speaks like John Kennedy, it's funny, but when John Kennedy uses that voice to challenge us to go to the moon, it's inspiring. That's because of the vast base of trivia that humans somehow assemble into meaningful experience.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
More like BFI.
So, you are saying that because Neal Stephenson writes really good fiction that makes it a legitimate basis for a real world thesis about how we should teach children?
I agree that Neal Stephenson is a really good author, who is insightful about the human condition. However, all this author has done is take something Neal Stephenson postulated in one of his novels and said, "this is the way forward" without giving any real world evidence that it might indeed work that way. What has this guy added to the discussion that Neal Stephension did not already say in "Diamond Age"?
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Moore's Law isn't really a law. It's just a business goal that Intel sought to adhere to.
Moore's Law isn't like the law of gravity.
I'm convinced spammers will be the first ones to break the Turing limit and beyond. They can 'get' captchas that many humans fail at. They can generate text that passes through layers of spam filters. In their constant arm race to reach more eyeballs while avoiding defensive measures, they are increasingly similar not to Uber Intelligences, but to error-prone humans. Lately I've been getting strange emails through my sites with rather questions that are curiously 'off'. Not just dumb or stupid, but unlikely to have been asked by a human. My guess is that it's some new elaborate form of spamming. But I'll be damned if I can tell it from a human.
Non-Linux Penguins ?
I don't think citing a work of fiction to support your thesis about video games will get you taken very seriously,
Especially one in which the AI was insufficient to the job, and actors were used instead.
The Monday Morning Mental Masturbation Article needs to be kept up.
This little ditty fits the bill quite nicely. It features half-baked ideas, marinated in a blend of pointless buzzwords and served with a side of misapplied trends.
I'm quite proud of the author, although I suspect he doesn't really exist. I think somebody fed a bunch of venture funding proposals into a travesty generator.
Especially given the downward spiral gaming is in, making easier and easier games to draw in a bigger audience.
Oblig. reference Mimsy were the Borogroves
Peace is easy to achieve, just surrender. Liberty is much harder get/keep.
By analyzing the patterns in AI humans can beat them. There are no AI's flexible or dynamic enough to adapt themselves in a way that would continually force humans to think more dynamically. AI's are very static, and to defeat them you need to find the flaws in their static nature. Continually playing against a Chess AI will of course develop your ability to play Chess, but you will be improving against the AI algorithms, finding ways to beat the computer specifically. That doesn't necessarily make you better against human chess players. Unless we want our children to think statically, like machines, this is not a good idea. You'd be better off teaching them AI theory and how to reverse engineer an AI through interacting with it than to have them take the uneducated, brute force, route method of playing games with the AI until they stumble upon its weakness.
While you're all training your kids to be machines I think I'll give mine a toolbox and some engineering and science themed kits. We'll see who changes the world.
In the diamond age, the main teacher was a flesh and blood human as the AI's created a rather stilted enviroment.
Still a weird/awesome book.
Alex Peake here.
"While you're all training your kids to be machines I think I'll give mine a toolbox and some engineering and science themed kits. We'll see who changes the world."
Exactly. Most of the best learning experience comes from people having tools to experiment with and a combination of great materials like tutorials and good human mentorship.
The chief design of Code Hero and all Primer games is to draw the player through the game into meeting other human players face-to-face for hands-on mentorship in an environment where they can learn with their mentor, especially by visiting hacker spaces and trying things like soldering with their own electronics kits. A Primer game's chief purpose is to inspire people to actually become a geek by getting hands-on with projects like building things with a makerbot and an Arduino to breathe life into using the coding they've learned how to do in Code Hero.
The Diamond Age emphasizes the importance of the degree of human mentorship in the different outcomes the girls have with their Primers. Teachers and mentors have an important role to play and the role of Primer is to stimulate demand and opportunity for mentoring, not to replace it entirely.
'Nuff said.
Alex Peake here. You're right to point out that education is politicized and good methods with the same bad curriculum would only further misinform kids.
Games are one of the best ways to reach kids directly without being filtered by their political gatekeepers, and games can be so effective that schools will incorporate them into their instructional process even if the games are good enough for kids to play on their own too.
Minecraft is just one example of a game that is being played and used by teachers at the same time.
On human mentors vs AI: One thing I didn't have time to go into in the talk the article is based on is the role of human mentors in symbiosis with the player-game learning process. The game's purpose is to motivate the player and inspire them to seek out human mentorship to take things beyond what is possible in the game environment. Game mentors aren't a replacement for human mentors, they're a substitute for the 90% of the time kids spend playing games alone or online when no human mentor is available to them so that the quality time they do get with a mentor is well-spent pursuing all the ideas and questions they've got because of what the games were able to inspire them to explore.
Seems to work for the clergy. [rimshot]
Some works of fiction work quite well for supporting theses. The Bible springs to mind...
Is 1563649 a prime number?
The problem with this mostly pie-in-the-sky article, is that it presumes linear increases with iteration. But the data he is working on, was a one-time thing: his experience with being seen as "smarter" than his peers, because of computer learning.
The thing is, that isnt anything special to a computer. That's just the result of what is effectively a "personal tutor".
but if you keep doing it, you dont get the same amount of increase per "loop". You just gradually approach the maximum potential of the human individual. (in an asymptotic fashion)
So, this article isnt completely useless; it has some value, in that it reminds us that if we focused more on getting children onto computerized, individual-paced learning that actually INTERESTED them, we could almost eliminate the problem with public schools producing so many ignorant people.
This is relevant to the other slashdot article today:
http://news.slashdot.org/story/11/07/25/1348228/Gates-Not-Much-To-Show-For-5B-Spent-On-Education
The article it links to,
http://www.fastcompany.com/1728471/change-generation-bill-gates-favorite-teacher-wants-to-disrupt-education
is one example of what is needed, rather than more union-protected incompetent idiots teaching children.
(yes, there are some good teachers in public schools, but the bad ones destroy more than the good create)
The Giant's drink is meant to be an un-winnable situation.
You mean like a guy that doesn't ever die and alchemical gold?
Video games with AI don't teach math. They don't teach anything about the structure of human thought. They don't teach any programming. I think that video games do teach things, but they are simple things, taught through cognition. Through patterns. If you want to learn about AI it would be exponentially faster to just read a book about it...
Hi Slashdot! I am the author of the article on ACCELER8OR and cofounder of Primer Labs.
This article is based on a talk I gave at Humanity+ @ Caltech. I recommend watching the video with the article to understand it in context.
You can watch the video with visuals that illustrate the main ideas of the talk here:
The Youtube video of the talk
Primer's first game based on mentor AI is going to enter beta soon. Our first game Code Hero is a game about making games where you shoot code with a javascript code gun that lets you directly code the change you wish to see in a Portal-style FPS. Competing AIs recruit you and teach you computer programming. The game directs players to seek our real opportunities to pursue coding and become a code hero themselves. Players are encouraged to mentor each other in real life. Numerous famous historic programming legends are characters in the game and they impart their most famous inventions and achievements to the player to help overcome numerous programming challenges.
For Diamond Age readers, think of it as Castle Turing with Firebug Minecraft Portal guns.
You can watch the early prototype trailer here and sign up for the upcoming beta release:
http://www.primerlabs.com
That is not what the game actually looks like now, but it gives you a preview of the "copy code and shoot it, then edit it to do something new" gameplay style.
My article covers a lot of ground without going into much detail on each item because it is a talk meant to entertain as well. During a talk with a short timeslot with a live audience one does not have time to go into scholarly detail with footnotes to back up every idea and point. The difference between science fiction storytelling and talks about science fiction-inspired technology startups is that the speaker ultimately backs up their words by shipping the product.
The ideas in the article and talk are based on much more than I had time to go into live about the actual work we’re doing at Primer Labs rather than passive predictions of the way things are going by themselves along current trends. The best way to predict the future is to invent it.
I’m going to write a written followup article exploring these ideas in more detail, and I’m happy to answer your specific questions.
I'll just quickly start by addressing some of the main questions people have asked:
Too many buzzwords!
The 23 minute talk this was based on was not enough time to give technical explanations of all the concepts, especially at a conference where many of the audience members are in the field of AI and are people whom I collaborate with.
AI is impossible, right?
Strong artificial GENERAL intelligence hasn't been achieved yet, and we may be safer if it never is, but particular kinds of broader AI are being achieved. Primer is designed around mentor AI, not strong AGI, at least not initially. Primer is based on the development of many narrow mentor AIs analogous to memes that interoperate to create a marketplace for steadily improving mentorship games.
Accelerating returns with AI are impossible
Moore's Law is based on 3 things: physically exploitable property (smaller chips = cheaper/faster/cooler), market demand (we always need faster ones), and expectation (Moores Law predicts doubling therefore we have to double to keep up with the Joneses and Intels).
AI needs an exploitable physical property, a vast market and a strong expectation based on a breakout success that can be seen to be accelerating to set the pace and expectations.
Human technological development is a series of different curves from each innovation that sparks the next, and it has closely tracked to population density. The one thing you can say about innovation is that it happens in clusters and the more you get people collaborating and competing the more innovation you get faster.
Likewise, AI is no
What he fails to realize is that game AI is largely smoke and mirrors. There isn't really anything sophisticated going on under the hood. The goal with games is to give the impression that the bad guys are doing smart things - not to make them actually do smart things. Game AI programmers will (should) use every trick in the book to provide an immersive experience to the player - and there isn't any reason to go any further than that. This is a true for serious games as it is for entertainment products.
Not to say that they're even very successful at this much more simple goal. Game AI in recent years has taken second (or third) place to eye-candy graphics and storytelling mechanics.
I read that as "Can Al Gore Create Super-Intelligent Humans?"
I blame the use of sans serif on the slashdot article titles (which are often filled with acronyms), Al Gore's role in the history of technology (sic), and my inability to RTFT with both eyes beyond the second word: in no particular order.
In other News, Facebook is valued at $500 Billion!
Alex Peake here. The challenge of increasing global intelligence is not so much one of boosting the max intelligence of the smartest people as it is a challenge of getting 90% of humans bootstrapped to anywhere near that theoretical hardware peak.
Humanity is like a 7 billion core CPU that is running at around 10% efficiency while a tenth of the cores do all the work. This is a software problem and not the hardware's fault.
Genius-level DNA brains die in mud huts every day.
Taking humans beyond those theoretical limits will indeed involve cognitive aids and many of the things we want to do can be done using augmented reality and neuroprospthetics to externalize our memory and provide cognitive coprocessing assistance, but that's not a set of features we're shipping in Code Hero this quarter. Substrate independent minds are likely the only way past our ultimate cognitive limits. See Carbon Copies and the work of Randal Koene for more on this.
Alex Peake here. Education is indeed a challenge of adequate distribution of resources. The problem is that the best class size is 1 and the best mentors are too few to go around even if we lived in a Trekenomic post-scarcity utopia. The role of Primer games is to give every person the sum of all simulatable mentorship in game form and to inspire players to seek and provide each other as much high-quality mentorship as possible, empowering schools and other learning communities to fill the demand for excellent mentorship in new and better ways rather than leaving sole responsibility on them and complaining when they fail to single-handedly turn our kids into math-craving obedient study hallers when there are cooler and funner games to be played and live to be lived and choices to be had.
...save the headlines for when this actually happens.
Okay, so I re-read the article without being disturbed every few minutes and second time round I found the key that I was missing - and what I missed in the summary. The games you folks are making are very "narrow band" in terms of what they are teaching rather than trying to cover all topics, which the /. summary seemed to imply by ommision. I wish you the best of luck, I can only imagine what a nightmare the business model must be.
Moved to http://soylentnews.org/. You are invited to join us too!
of course, this is true, it just hasnt maid mainstream schooling yet, but once it does, and someone like Khan academy is able to instill better tutoring through the web and videos, we will all be learning quicker , faster, better then before.....and with better retention as it is given in video game format, something that anyone having played mario bros can attest to....it becomes easier to remember all the moves once you have done it a few times visually....
The problem is that the best class size is 1.
Wrong: e.g. if 'self conceptualization', 'social intelligence' (surely among others) are in focus.
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)