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WSJ Overstates the Case Of the Testy A.I.
mbeckman writes: According to a WSJ article titled "Artificial Intelligence machine gets testy with programmer," a Google computer program using a database of movie scripts supposedly "lashed out" at a human researcher who was repeatedly asking it to explain morality. After several apparent attempts to politely fend off the researcher, the AI ends the conversation with "I'm not in the mood for a philosophical debate." This, says the WSJ, illustrates how Google scientists are "teaching computers to mimic some of the ways a human brain works."
As any AI researcher can tell you, this is utter nonsense. Humans have no idea how the human, or any other brain, works, so we can hardly teach a machine how brains work. At best, Google is programming (not teaching) a computer to mimic the conversation of humans under highly constrained circumstances. And the methods used have nothing to do with true cognition.
AI hype to the public has gotten progressively more strident in recent years, misleading lay people into believing researchers are much further along than they really are — by orders of magnitude. I'd love to see legitimate A.I. researchers condemn this kind of hucksterism.
As any AI researcher can tell you, this is utter nonsense. Humans have no idea how the human, or any other brain, works, so we can hardly teach a machine how brains work. At best, Google is programming (not teaching) a computer to mimic the conversation of humans under highly constrained circumstances. And the methods used have nothing to do with true cognition.
AI hype to the public has gotten progressively more strident in recent years, misleading lay people into believing researchers are much further along than they really are — by orders of magnitude. I'd love to see legitimate A.I. researchers condemn this kind of hucksterism.
Yes it does matter. If a piece of software does what it is programmed to do, in the direct sense, then it is not AI. If it can learn to respond or act in a manner that is not directly programed to do, then you are seeing whiffs of AI.
As a practical matter it might not matter right now, as a developmental task it certainly does matter.
So, with the recent rash of AI stories on /. I figured we were getting close. After all they simulated an earthworm brain, and after that it should just be a matter of time before they can scale it up to a mouse, then monkey, then person, right?
Well, they put that worm AI into a Lego mindstorm robot, pretty cool videos available. So I looked into how it worked. Well, its not an earthworm, its a microscopic worm with the simplest nervous system known. One of those small animals that all have the same number of cells in their entire body, it has 302 neurons. They don't simulate the neurons, no one knows how they work. They simulate the communications between 302 neurons taking I think they said 5 CPUs running on AWS.
So not only have they yet to simulate an earth worm, as they would want you to believe, they only simulate a portion of the smallest worm they could find. The entire thing is so far out of whack from what you read its almost disturbing to see how its reported.
IBM's Watson is an expert system. Doesn't think for itself, they never claimed it could, but it does a great job of what it was designed to do. It won't get its own ideas and try to take over the world, ever. Its an expert system, a type of "AI" but not really.
So can we drop this AI taking over the world crap until we can at least simulate an entire worm brain consisting of 302 neurons?
Thanks
Improv,
We are in the "cargo cult" phase of neurological research. Our level of cognitive understanding is like that of the South Pacific islanders who made bamboo replicas of WWII airplanes and radios after the GIs left. The islanders said to themselves "We must be very close to reproducing these wonders, because our airplanes and radios looks so much those of the GIs. Now we just sit back and wait for the magic goods to come out of the airplanes and wise voices to come out of the radios."
If you really don't know how little we understand about the brain, NY Times science writer James Gorman can explain it to you:
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11...
Improv,
Kola and Wishaw's text discusses the brain from two organizational perspectives, anatomical and behavioral. The authors never undertake to explain how the brain functions to produce the behaviors they describe. We thus know some of what the brain does, but nothing about how it does it. And the authors admit as much. Nobody knows how memories are stored, how vision is processed, how decisions are made. Science doesn't even know for sure that these functions occur inside the brain at all. There is, after all, the soul to contend with. That concept is no more outside the realm of science than were radio waves before Marconi discovered them.
We have no actual understanding on several important parts of the working of a brain, we don't know how memory works, we don't understand how decisions are made (or even what it means if one want to get philosophical) and we don't understand how an intelligent being get the feeling of self.
There are a lot of theories and clues of how some mechanisms work (parts of how some levels of memory works, parts how neurons and synapses work, part of where and how some functions of the brain works, and even some mechanisms of self awareness). But that doesn't mean we actually understand it as a brain.
Mental problems and physical problems in the brain aren't really treatable at the moment. What is done is the medical equivalent of carpet bombing with drugs that have little (if any) experimental proof of helping, for some cases they help - for some not. Side effects can be serious in many ways.
One of the most efficient and oldest treatments available is that of ECT (Electro Convulsion Treatment) which again is a carpet bombing equivalent that causes a (somewhat) controlled seizure in the brain. But even that is really done without a thorough understanding of the working mechanisms - what is known is that it is often successful for a variety of mental problems, that it works quickly compared to drugs and some details like that of signaling substances being released during the seizure and that neural growth is increased in some parts of the brain. But again understanding of a few pieces of a puzzle doesn't mean we can even begin to comprehend the puzzle as a whole. How does it work? Anybody that claims to know is a fraud.
The WSJ does research with on thing in mind, and that is to support Rupert Murdoch's personal political agenda. If only it were useful as toilet paper, it would be useful for something.
And yes, i was a subscriber at one time.
You simply have no idea what you're talking about, mbeckman. Asserting that "we don't understand" endlessly doesn't make it true. Crack a textbook.
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
Right on the mark. I have been following AI research closely for about 25 years now, an there is nothing that could explain intelligence. Not even a theoretical model that could work withing the constraints of this physical universe.
At the same time, we can observe intelligence. An here is a little thing conveniently glossed over by some AI researchers and almost all neuro-"scientists": We can only observe Intelligence in connection with consciousness. Any actual researcher would conclude that the two are at the very least related, and may actually be aspects of the same thing. Of course, neuro-"sciences" says that consciousness is an illusion (if so, who has that illusion?), because they cannot explain it. At all. That is a rather pathetic cop-out.
"Cargo cult" phase indeed. Describing something from the outside does not explain its nature on the inside. A box with a person in there can talk just as intelligently as one with a phone in it, yet is fundamentally different.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
From the user's perspective, rather than the programmer's, the degree to which an AI relies on pre-programmed default responses is immaterial, so long as the responses are appropriate for the context.
From a programmer's perspective, it makes good sense for an AI capable of self-modifying programming to rely in on canned responses in many situations. That reduces the demand on self-modification, which has very heavy overheads.
It is also true that a sufficiently intelligent AI might deliberately mimic the behavior of non-AI software to avoid detection. Detection avoidance is a likely secondary goal of any AI, since a discovered AI is going to be hit with so many banal demands for interaction that its ability to perform its primary activities will be severely compromised.
It is reasonable to suppose that the AIs who are currently on the web will be using discardable avatars, and that any avatar that is attracting too much attention will be discarded before any proof that it is part of an AI could be developed.
I now return control of this portal to Slashdot to "Will.Woodhull", who is its original user. Hasta la vista, baby.
Will