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?
"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.
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.