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Interviews: Ask Dr. Andy Chun About Artificial Intelligence
samzenpus (5) writes "Dr. Andy Chun is the CIO for the City University of Hong Kong, and is instrumental in transforming the school to be one of the most technology-progressive in the region. He serves as an adviser on many government boards including the Digital 21 Strategy Advisory Committee, which oversees Hong Kong's long-term information technology strategies. His research work on the use of Artificial Intelligence has been honored with numerous awards, and his AI system keeps the subway in Hong Kong running and repaired with an amazing 99.9% uptime. Dr. Chun has agreed to give us some of his time in order to answer your questions. As usual, ask as many as you'd like, but please, one question per post."
.. when A.I. has _nothing_ to do with consciousness?
Why isn't the more accurate term "artificial ignorance" used to distinguish itself on the day when "Actual Intelligence" is created / discovered?
Can you give my fleshlight and real doll AI?
What real-world problems are best suited to the kind of programming used to manage the subway system? That is to say, if you had unlimited authority to build a similar system to manage other problems which problems would you approach first? Could it be used to solve food distribution in Africa? Could it manage investments?
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
Would you be so kind and shut down my pain receivers?
Have you read Professor Dreyfus's objections to the hopes of achieving "true AI" in his book What Computers Can't Do? If so, do you think he's full of hot air? Or, is the task of AI to get "as close to the impossible" as you can?
Finding God in a Dog
If you had to narrow it down to one thing that needs the most improvement in the field of AI, something that we could focus on, what would it be?
"Are you a robot, Dr. Chun?"
Considering we have yet to - and may never - quantify the overall cognitive process that gives rise to our own sentient intelligence, will we have any way of knowing if and when we create a truly aware artificial intelligence?
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
Dr Chun,
What area of AI development is currently making the most progress? In other words, where are the next big advances most likely to come from?
Dear Dr. Chun,
why do I have this terrible pain in all the diodes down my left side?
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
Like many futuristic technologies, AI seems like one of those things that's always "just 30 years away".
Do you think we'll make realistic, meaningful breakthroughs to achieve AI in that timeframe?
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Slashdot editors,
Please don't ruin this by turning it into a video interview where you don't actually ask anyone's questions like you did the last one.
Sincerely,
Speaking for a lot of us.
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
And what's the latest date you see A.I. that is conscious and self aware in the human and animal sense?
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Can you explain to us exactly what AI is?
As a definition, the Turing test has problems - it assumes communication, it conflates intelligence with human intelligence, and humans aren't terribly good at distinguishing chatbots from other humans.
Also, using a test for a definition works well in mathematics, but not so much in the real world. Imagine defining a car as "anything 5 humans say is a car" and then trying to develop one. Without feedback or guidance, the developers have to trot every object in the universe in front of a jury, only to receive a yes/no answer to the question: "is this a car?"
Many AI texts have a 'kind of fuzzy, feel-good definition of AI that's useless for construction or distinguishing an AI program from a clockwork one. Definitions like "the study of programs that can think", or "programs that simulate intelligent behaviour" shift the burden of definition (of intelligence) onto the reader, or become circular.
One could define a car as "a body, frame, 4 wheels, seats, and an engine in this configuration", and note that each of these can be further defined: a wheel is a rim and a tire, a tire is a ring of steel-belted rubber with a stem valve, a stem valve is a rubber tube with a schrader valve, a schrader valve is a spring and some gaskets...
With a constructive definition, one could distinguish between a car and, say: a tractor, a snowmobile, a child's wagon, a semi, and so on. Furthermore, it would be conceptually straightforward to build one: you know where to start, and how to get further information if you are unsure.
Compare with a group from mathematics: a closed set plus an operator with certain features (associativity, identity, inverses), and each feature can be further defined (an identity element is...). Much of mathematics is this way: concepts constructed from simpler concepts with a list of requirements.
The study of AI seems to be founded in mathematics. At least, all the AI papers I've read are heavy with mathematical notation - usually obscure and very dense mathematical notation. It should be possible to determine with some rigor what the papers are talking about.
Can you tell us what that is? What *exactly* is AI?
I'm presupposing it's eventually possible to create a machine that thinks like a man. Is conscious, is self-aware. I doubt we'd get it right first try. Before we got Mr. Data we'd probably get insane intelligences, trapped inside boxes, suffering, and completely at the whim of the man holding the plug.
What are your thoughts on the ethics of doing so, particularly given the iterative steps we'd have to take to get there?
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
I would like to know from Dr. Chun in which areas of life can AIs be used right now (are most beneficial), which areas are too difficult (for now) and in which areas should AIs never be used.
Could you please speak to the bait-and-switch (i.e. changing definitions midstream) inherent in the Chinese Room argument? Can you elucidate how the program encodes/encapsulates/contains the intelligence, and how the symbols used/manipulated are immaterial? The idea that the program encodes "two-ness", irrespective of whether I use the symbol "two" or "dos" or "zwei". The word-games and verbal-sleight-of-hand inherent in the Chinese Room argument have irritated me for many years, but I lack the precision vocabulary to explain well how the program (using my term) "encodes" intelligence.
We had two articles touching on this in recent months, so: Singularity or no singularity? Will AI achieve consciousness/sentience in our lifetime/ever, why or why not, and what is your take on the implications of such a thing if you do think it is reasonably possible?
Just as no simulation of water will quench a person's thirst, if no simulated brain will produce qualia without biological components, and assuming qualia is essential or desired, do you believe it will be possible to create controllable wetware AI?
Does Frame Theory still hold in AI circles, or are there other ideas for how an AI would interact with its external stimuli?
If frame theory is still a viable option for AI, how would we mirror it with a digital substrate or does it seem more likely that before we get to much more advanced AI than we have now that we will end up with some other kind of computational substrate (perhaps more neurologically-based)?
If it is not a viable option, what sorts of techniques should we be looking towards and what sorts of equipment will they require?
Algorithms are considered to be a finite set of steps to solve a problem. Heuristics are a twist of this by saying there is some limit, like time which causes the algorithm to get a less accurate result. Reflections is a method for having code considering existing code. All of these ideas assume that an existing set of code exists and that code is the model used to generate 'new ideas'. It strikes me as strange that all of our code is generated in a sort of procedural method. I admit I know little about AI but with natural intelligence, it seems to often use 'similarity' of others in the environment rather than its own set of known-data/logic.
How do we move to a model in which computers learn from other data sources rather than trying to encode rules? To paraphrase Professor Lee R. Brooks, Unconsciously, we appear to use nonanalytic or similarity-based thinking rather than analytic or rule-based thinking. How do we move computers from rule-based systems to similarity-based systems?
What are your thoughts on the "Curse of AI", that when a problem in AI is solved, it is no longer considered AI because we can explain how it works in terms of an algorithm? See Curse of AI
Who the hell said no simulation of water will quench thirst?
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
What do your think of Fergus et all paper : Intriguing properties of neural networks. Is this a phenomenon you came across before?
Decode your health
Dr. Chun,
Have you read a short story about an AI boss called Manna? (I'll include relevant quotes if you don't have time.) How does your system for the Hong Kong subway compare? It's clearly similar to your subway system in some ways:
But does it micro-manage tasks like Manna?
Does it record employee performance metrics and report them to (upper) management like Manna?
And how have employees reacted to their AI boss - if, in fact, you have been able to get honest evaluations from employees?
(T>t && O(n)--) == sqrt(666)
What do you think is easier to solve?
Artificial Intelligence or the idea of mimicking natural physical systems to process information?
or
Machine Intelligence or the idea of creating systems that do not use natural systems but investigate wholly new ideas of machine design to process information?
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
Just as no simulation of water will quench a person's thirst, if no simulated brain will produce qualia without biological components, and assuming qualia is essential or desired, do you believe it will be possible to create controllable wetware AI?
First demonstrate that qualia actually exists. Then we can discuss whetehr it can be produced by nonbiological systems.
What do you think of Jeff Hawkins' "memory-prediction framework" and how it compares to the AI techniques that you use?
The three laws of robotics is not very practical (as evidenced by Asimov himself; his fiction is essentially a long list of all the ways the laws fail). In fact, ethics classes themselves are complex enough that it's difficult to imagine any simple, cogent way to summarize ethical decision making into a sound bite. But do you believe it is possible at all to codify into the behavior of future complex systems? Personally, if we ever do get strong AI in my lifetime, I'm betting it'll be as screwed up and erratically ethical as we are.
"I will trust Google to 'do no evil' until the founders no longer run it." Hello Alphabet.
Do you belive we will make an artificial intelligence that can do everything a human can do, including learning new tasks it wasn't specifically programed to do? If so how long do you think it will take, and what do you think is the mechanism that will be used (eg nerual network programing, albeit on custom chips)?
Rocket Surgeon.
Dr Chiun,
What do you see as the best AI based approach (fuzzy logic, neural networks, etc) to perform stock exchange predictions ?
Dr Chun, Can you comment on the potential of machine learning? Is it theoretically possible for a "naive" AI system to undergo great qualitiative changes simply through learning? Or is this notion a fallacy? Although it is an attractive concept, no one in AI has pulled it off despite several decades of research.
With the rise of many programming languages especially popular scripting languages, Do we really need specialized languages for AI? Also, Do you think any of the existing ones is the future of AI and what qualify it for that?
I mean to say that a classical (current) computational simulation of water will never produce physical H2O (more likely the output will be a bit pattern represented on the computer's substrate).
Qualia is difficult to explain or prove because it literally encompasses everything that we experience as individuals; it is in a sense a synonym for the word "exist." Maybe everything has qualia or maybe not but it's easy to reproduce in computation - we don't know yet.
The root of my question is what if for some unfortunate reason we need qualia producing bio components to create superintelligence? Would it sully the dream of AI for the system to have (presumably) artificially manipulated emotions in order to sustain the existence in which it finds itself ... not unlike us?
What do you think consciousness is?
How much progress into artificial intelligence will the work done by the NSA etc... make, and consequently how much will the collaboration between those parties accelerate the development of more... how to put it, sentient, artificial intelligence systems.
What is the recipe for a true artificial intelligence to arise?
I have doing some armchair philosophy lately and feel that the ingredients for AI could be four things: pattern recognition, memory, objective, and externality (ability to manipulate external factors).
Is that an accurate understanding of what might be necessary for AI? If not, what would you amend?
If so, how do we start moving towards each of those objectives?
Dr. Chun,
I'm curious as to what makes your algorithm intelligent. (I mean no disrespect, just honest curiosity)
Does it actually come up with completely new methods of maintenance management that you had not foreseen when you originally designed it? Or is it following an algorithm that you created?