Slashdot Mirror
Where's HAL 9000?
An anonymous reader writes "With entrants to this year's Loebner Prize, the annual Turing Test designed to identify a thinking machine, demonstrating that chatbots are still a long way from passing as convincing humans, this article asks: what happened to the quest to develop a strong AI? 'The problem Loebner has is that computer scientists in universities and large tech firms, the people with the skills and resources best-suited to building a machine capable of acting like a human, are generally not focused on passing the Turing Test. ... And while passing the Turing Test would be a landmark achievement in the field of AI, the test’s focus on having the computer have to fool a human is a distraction. Prominent AI researchers, like Google’s head of R&D Peter Norvig, have compared the Turing Test’s requirement that a machine fools a judge into thinking they are talking to a human as akin to demanding an aircraft maker constructs a plane that is indistinguishable from a bird."
He talks mostly in this article about how the focus has been on developing specialized software for solving specific problems and with specialized goals, rather than focusing on general AI. And it's true that this is part of what is holding general AI back. But there is also something that Loebner is perhaps loathe to discuss, and that's the underlying (and often unspoken) matter of the *fear* of AI.
For every utopian vision in science fiction and pop culture of a future where AI is our pal, helping us out and making our lives more leisurely, there is another dystopian counter-vision of a future where AI becomes the enemy of humans, making our lives into a nightmare. A vision of a future where AI equals, and then inevitably surpasses, human intelligence touches a very deep nerve in the human psyche. Human fear of being made obsolete by technology has a long history. And more recently, the fear of having technology become even a direct *enemy* has become more and more prevalent--from the aforementioned HAL 9000 to Skynet. There is a real dystopian counter-vision to Loebner's utopianism.
People aren't just indifferent or uninterested in AI. I think there is a part of us, maybe not even part of us that we're always conscious of, that's very scared of it.
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
Too many decades of lofty promises that never materialized has turned "AI research" into a dirty word...
Palm trees and 8
Forget HAL, where is Cherry 2000!
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim."
Non-Linux Penguins ?
I tend to think we need to split out "Artificial Sentience" from "Artificial Intelligence." Technologies used for expert systems are clearly a form of subject-matter artificial intelligence, but they are not creative nor are they designed to learn about and explore new subject materials.
Artificial Sentience, on the other hand, would necessarily incorporate learning, postulation, and exploration of entirely new ideas or "insights." I firmly believe that in order to hold a believable conversation, a machine needs sentience, not just intelligence. Being able to come to a logical conclusion or to analyze sentence structures and verbiage into models of "thought" are only a first step -- the intelligence part.
Only when a machine can come up with and hold a conversation on new topics, while being able to tie the discussion history back to earlier statements so that the whole conversation "holds together" will be able to "fool" people. Because at that point, it won't be "fooling" anyone -- it will actually be thinking.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Back in the early 1950s, it was thought that the real prize of AI was to get a computer able to beat the best human chess player consistently. The reasoning at the time was that the only way this would be possible was for breakthroughs to happen in AI where a computer could learn to think and could reason better at chess than a human. Fast forward to 10 or so years ago where IBM realized that just by throwing money at the problem they could get a computer to play chess by brute force and beat the human champion more often than not. So I'm not surprised that some AI people discount the Turing test. I am not an expert in the field but it seems to me that AI is a heck of a lot harder than anybody realized in the 1950s and we may still be decades or even centuries away from the kind of AI that people 60 or so years ago thought we'd have by now. Part of me does wonder if maybe just like how AI research in chess took the easy way out by resorting to brute force that now it's they'll just say the Turing test is not valid rather than actually try to achieve it because to pass it would require breakthroughs nobody has thought of yet and that's hard.
He talks mostly in this article about how the focus has been on developing specialized software for solving specific problems and with specialized goals, rather than focusing on general AI. And it's true that this is part of what is holding general AI back.
No, that's not true ... that's not at all what is holding "general AI" back. What's holding "general AI" back is that there is no way at all to implement it. Specialized AI is actually moving forward the only way we know how with actual results. Without further research in specialized AI, we would constantly get no closer to "generalized AI" and I keep using quotes around that because it's such a complete misnomer and holy grail that we aren't going to see it any time soon.
When I studied this stuff there were two hot approaches. One was logic engines and expert systems that could be generalized to the point of encompassing all knowledge. Yeah, good luck with that. How does one codify creativity? The other approach was to model neurons in software and then someday when we have a strong enough computers, they will just emulate brains and become a generalized thinking AI. Again, the further we delved into neurons the more we realized how wrong our basic assumptions were -- let alone the infeasibility to emulating the cascading currents across them.
"General AI" is holding itself back in the same way that "there is no such thing as a free lunch" is holding back our free energy dreams.
But there is also something that Loebner is perhaps loathe to discuss, and that's the underlying (and often unspoken) matter of the *fear* of AI.
We're so far from that, it humors to me to hear questions and any semi-serious question regarding it. It is not the malice of an AI system you should fear, it is the manifestation of the incompetence of the people who developed it that results in an error (like sounding an alarm because a sensor misfired and responding by launching all nuclear weapons since that what you perceive your enemy to have just done) that should be feared!
People aren't just indifferent or uninterested in AI. I think there is a part of us, maybe not even part of us that we're always conscious of, that's very scared of it.
People are obsessed by the philosophical and financial prospects of an intelligent computer system but nobody's telling me how to implement it -- that's just hand waving so they can get to the interesting stuff. Right now, rule based systems, heuristics, statistics, Bayes' Theorem, Support Vector Machines, etc will get you far further than any system that is just supposed to "learn" any new environment. All successful AI to this point has been built with the entire environment in mind during construction.
My work here is dung.
it's not fear.
it's not "we could do it but we just don't want to".
it's not "the government has brains in a jar already and is suppressing research".
those are just excuses which make for sometimes good fiction - and sometimes a career for people selling the idea as non-fiction.
but the real reason is that it is just EXTRA FRIGGING HARD.
it's hard enough for a human who doesn't give a shit to pass a turing test. but imagine if you could really do a turing machine that would pass as a good judge, politician, network admin, science fiction writer... or one that could explain to us what intelligence really even is since we are unable to do it ourselves.
it's not as hard/impossible as teleportation but close to it. just because it's been on scifi for ages doesn't mean that we're on the verge of a real breakthrough to do it, just because we can imagine stories about it doesn't mean that we could build a machine that could imagine those stories for us. it's not a matter of throwing money to the issue or throwing scientists to it. some see self learning neural networks as a way to go there, but that's like saying that you only need to grow brain cells in a vat while talking to it and *bam* you have a person.
truth is that there's shitloads of more "AI researchers" just imagining ethical wishwashshitpaz implications what would result from having real AI than those who have an idea how to practically build one. simply because it's much easier to speculate on nonsense than to do real shit in this matter.
(in scifi there's been a recent trend to separate things to virtual intelligences which are much more plausible, which are just basically advanced turing bots but wouldn't really pass the test, which is sort of refreshing)
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Computers can be used to model and compute chemical reactions. If a chemical can produce "thought" than nothing stops a computer from doing it other than computation power.
These sorts of articles that pop up from time to time on slashdot are so frustrating to those of us who actually work in the field. We take an article written by someone who doesn't actually understand the field, about an contest that has always been no better than a publicity stunt*, which triggers a whole bunch of speculation by people who read Godel, Escher, Bach and think they understand what's going on.
The answer is simple. AI researchers haven't forgotten the end goal, and it's not some cynical ploy to advance an academic career. We stopped asking the big-AI question because we realized it was an inappropriate time to ask it. By analogy: These days physicists spend a lot of time thinking about the big central unify everything theory, and that's great. In 1700, that would have been the wrong question to ask- there were too many phenomenons that we didn't understand yet (energy, EM, etc). We realized 20 years ago that we were chasing ephemera and not making real progress, and redeployed our resources in ways to understand what the problem really was. It's too bad this doesn't fit our SciFi timetable, all we can do is apologize. And PLEASE do not mention any of that "singularity" BS.
I know, I know, -1 flamebait. Go ahead.
*Note I didn't say it was a publicity stunt, just that it was no better than one. Stuart Shieber at Harvard wrote an excellent dismantling of the idea 20 years ago.
You're never going to get a Turing computer to actually think, although some future chemical or something machine may.
Never say never :) It is hard to say whether an AI could ever accomplish thinking (or sentience) or not. It seems to be an emergent quality and I doubt whether it is chemical or electrical will matter much. And for the most part appearing sentient might as well be sentient. Outside of myself I can only assume others are sentient because they appear so and because we are genetically similar. There is not exactly a good standard or definition of what is or isn't sentient that doesn't depend on the bias of being human.
Some commenters in this thread (and elsewhere) have questioned whether "strong" artificial intelligence is actually possible.
The feasibility of strong AI follows directly from the rejection of Cartesian dualism.
If there is no "ghost in the machine," no magic "soul" separate from the body and brain, then human intelligence comes from the physical operation of the brain. Since they are physical operations, we can understand them, and reproduce the algorithm in computer software and/or hardware. That doesn't mean it's *easy* – it may take 200 more years to understand the brain that well, for all I know – but it must be *possible*.
(Also note that Cartesian dualism is not the same thing as religion, and rejecting it does not mean rejecting all religious beliefs. From the earliest times, Christians taught the resurrection of the *body*, presumably including the brain. The notion of disembodied "souls" floating around in "heaven" owes more to Plato than to Jesus and St. Paul. Many later Christian philosophers, including Aquinas, specifically rejected dualism in their writings.)
Evolution has been working on us for millions of years. It will probably take us hundreds or thousands before we get strong AI.
It also took evolution millions of years to get flight. You're comparing apples and oranges. Evolution has no intelligence directing its actions, whereas sometimes human activity does.
Dear Baden Powell
I am afraid I am not in the flight for "aerial navigation". I was greatly interested in your work with kites; but I have not the smallest molecule of faith in aerial navigation other than ballooning or of expectation of good results from any of the trials we hear of. So you will understand that I would not care to be a member of the aeronautical Society.
Yours truly Kelvin
This, a mere 13 years before the first airplane crossing of the English Channel.
Look where all this talking got us, baby.