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Is AI Development Moving In the Wrong Direction? (hackaday.com)
szczys writes: Artificial Intelligence is always just around the corner, right? We often see reports that promise near breakthroughs, but time and again they don't come to fruition. The cause of this may be that we're trying to solve the wrong problem. Will Sweatman took a look at the history of AI projects starting with the code-breaking machines of WWII and moving up to modern efforts like IBM's Watson and Google's Inceptionism. His conclusion is that we haven't actually been trying to solve "intelligence" (or at least our concept of intelligence has been wrong). And that with faster computing and larger pools of data the goal has moved toward faster searches rather than true intelligence.
Hubert Dreyfus described most work on AI as being like climbing a tree to get to the moon.
Your tree-climbing teams may report consistent progress, always getting further up the tree as they become better climbers, but they're never going to reach their goal without a radical change in methods.
I think the problem is that people expect machine intelligence to look like human intelligence. Machine intelligence exists and is strong in some areas. Modern chess programs are an example. They can play unique games and be stronger than any human player. Yes, they are given the rules of chess and machines did not invent chess. But they have passed beyond human abilities and it is at the point where some programs are coded to only make move patterns that humans would tend to make. Learning how to adapt machine intelligence to our real world problems is challenging. But we are in for a fright when computers get really good at analyzing human problems and applying better solutions that we now have at hand.
Why try to create intelligence when you alredy have billions of meat robots willingly to be analyzed/controlled with great profit?
From the article: "Intelligence should be defined by the ability to understand." Of course that opens up a discussion on what it really means to 'understand' something. Still, the directions we've been going in such as expert systems, neural networks, etc. address the processing of information in order to make decisions. They have nothing to do with actually understanding anything. Watson, as an example, was fun to watch on Jeopardy and is a very useful sort of tool, but it is not intelligent and probably never will be intelligent in the sense of being sentient, aware, and able to understand.
AI seeks to emulate intelligence, but is there intelligence to begin with, in humans? Human may not be an intelligent species after all.
we can create appearance of intelligence, by defining intelligence in certain way, and throwing greater and greater computational resources to satisfy that definition.
perhaps we will know we have artificial intelligence only when it defines intelligence on its own and perhaps classify us as unintelligent.
Hence AI is not moving "in the wrong direction", it is moving in the only direction known. The two things we know for intelligence are
a) we can describe what it can do and
b) we know that it only manifests itself together with consciousness.
Especially the second thing gets routinely ignored. But everything we know indicates that it is either a critical element, or that, in fact, intelligence and consciousness may be aspects of the same thing. Given this, it is not really a surprise that we do not even have a mathematical model how intelligence could be created artificially. It is quite possible that true/strong AI is quite infeasible in this universe.
And to all physicalists: Your believe that everything observable this universe is physical (and hence it must be possible to create artificial intelligence) is religion, not science. Science is far more open-minded than you are.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
My threshold for AI is a traffic signal that works reasonably well.
The whole "Chinese room" argument is ass-backwards reasoning to me.
The whole argument only works if you assume whatever happens in the chinese room is not to be considered intelligent, therefore whatever happens in the chinese room is not intelligence.
If you allow for the mere possibility that the chinese room could be considered intelligent, then it follows that if something is indistinguishable from intelligence from outside the room, it must be intelligent by any reasonable definition of "intelligence".
For all we know from the outside, every human brain is a chinese room on the inside.
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Give how rare organic intelligence is (And I reference anybody who responds to this post as evidence) why is everyone so geed up about AI
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.
Really, a thermos is the ultimate AI. When I put cold things in one, they stay cold. When I put hot things in one, they stay hot. How does it know?!
If I mod you up, it doesn't necessarily mean I agree with what you've said, sorry.
I don't see a problem in going for analytics (i.e., gathering, analyzing, reacting), before trying intelligence (i.e., understanding, creating, interacting). I see it as a step along the way, not as a wrong direction.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
How about we take a human intelligence and replace it bit by bit by a machine?
We'd learn an awful lot about how the human brain works and eventually have a machine with a humanlike intelligence.
Face it, we won't reach HAL-9000 levels of AI for at least another century, if not more. For the time being, (non-general) AI will assist humans, as it has been doing for quite some time now. You'll have a computer plugged into your brain, and AI will help process all the information we're constantly exposed to. It'll help you do everything faster, smarter. Along with pervasive wifi connections, you'll always be online, 24/7. Your AI will google stuff you don't know and display the appropiately digested wikipedia page in your brain-HUD. Educational exams will become worthless because you'll have instant access to Wolfram Alpha and more, instantly solving any math problem, or anything that doesn't need human-level deduction, really. Like with calculators and computers, our minds will be freed from even more "routine" stuff, and we'll be able to focus on higher level problems.
Or we'll just all die from climate change.
Define "true intelligence". The more computers advance in doing complex things, the more you will see there is no such thing as true intelligence. You are a very big Turing machine, get over it.
Video of some good progressive thrash music
Actual researchers have known for decades that strong AI was well beyond the future horizon. As in 50 years off or more barring some kind of unexpected revolution. Often, for research grant proposals, or for some quick media exposure, wild claims have been thrown about. But the vast majority have known, and continue to know this.
It boggles my mind how we cant solve simple visual captchas a 3 year old has no problems with, but supposedly self driving cars are prescient. None are able to spot the difference between a blowing cardboard box and a run away wagon of kids which require two very different driving responses. A housefly has far superior SLAM and navigation abilities over any self driving car, using far inferior sensors, and with processing that is no longer much better than state of the art.
it's been self evident for 30 years that we are lacking on the algorithm side far more than the hardware. This isn't remotely new news.
I want AI, not some watered down redefinition of AI.
(super-)Human level learning and problem solving capabilities for arbitrary subjects, that's what I want. For now something as capable as a dog would suffice though and we have no idea how to do even that.
He claims neural networks were abandoned...
He doesn't understand that the current image search algorithms ARE neural networks. They just figured a quicker way to train them.
He also doesn't understand that a neural network is essentially a simulation of a NETWORK OF NEURONS, i.e. a brain, so if the neural network isn't intelligence then neither are we.
Google's deep dream is a pull out of a layer of data from a neural network, a dream layer in the middle if you like.
http://googleresearch.blogspot.ch/2015/06/inceptionism-going-deeper-into-neural.html
i've mentioned this before, whenever the phrase "artificial" intelligence comes up. the problem is not with quotes AI quotes, it's with *us humans*. just look at the two words "artificial" combined with the word "intelligence". it is SHEER ARROGANCE on our part to declare that intelligence - such an amazing concept - can be *artificial*. as in "not really real". as in "beneath us". as in "objective and thus subject to our manipulation and enslavement". so until we - humans - stop thinking of intelligence as being "beneath us" and "not real", i don't really see how we can ever actually properly recreate it.
to make the point clearer: all these "tests", it doesn't really matter, because the people doing the assessment have a perspective that doesn't really respect intelligence... so how on earth can they judge that they've actually *detected* intelligence? like the "million monkeys typing shakespeare", the problem is that even if one of the monkeys did actually accidentally type up the complete works of shakespeare, unless there was someone there who was INTELLIGENT ENOUGH to recognise what had happened, the monkey that typed shakespeare's complete works is quite likely to go "oo oo aaah aah", rip up the pages, eat some of them and wipe its backside with the rest, destroying any chance of the successful outcome being *noticed*, even though it actually occurred.
i much prefer the term "machine consciousness". that's where things get properly interesting. the difference between "intelligence" and "consciousness" is SELF-AWARENESS, and it's the key difference between what people are developing NOW and what we see in sci-fi books and films. programs being developed today are trying to simulate INTELLIGENCE. sci-fi books and films feature CONSCIOUS (self-aware) machines.
this lack of discernment in the [programming] scientific community between these two concepts, combined with the inherent arrogance implied by the word "Artificial" in the meme "AI" is why there is so little success in actually achieving any breakthroughs.
but it's actually a lot worse than that. let's say that the scientific community makes a cognitive breakthrough, and starts pursuing the goal of developing "machine consciousness". let's take the previous (million-monkeys) example and step that up, as illustrated with this question:
How can people who are not sufficiently self-aware - conscious of themselves - be expected to (a) DEFINE such that they can (b) RECOGNISE consciousness, such that (c) they can DEVELOP it in the first place?
let's take George Bush (junior) as an example. George Bush is known to have completely destroyed his mind with drink and drugs. he has an I.Q. of around 85 (unlike his father, who had an extra "1" in front of that number). yet he was voted into the world's most powerful office, as President of the United States. the concept of the difference between "intelligence" and "consciousness" is explored in Charles Stross's book, "Singularity Sky". George Bush - despite being elected as President - would actually FAIL the consciousness test adopted by the alien race in "Singularity Sky"!
my point is, therefore, that until we start using the right terms, start developing some humility sufficient to recognise that we could create something GREATER than ourselves, start developing some laws *in advance* to protect machine conscious beings from being tortured, the human race stands very little chance of success in this field.
in short: we need to become conscious *ourselves* before we stand a chance of being able to move forward.
The traits we identify with intelligence in humans (flexible problem-solving, self-consciousness, autonomy based on self-created goals) are all but absent in current Artificial Intelligence techniques, even the ones based on the Connectionist paradigm. Any emergent behaviors appearing in an AI system are ultimately put there by the system builders' fine-tuning of input parameters.
The approaches that show the most promise are those following the "Augmented Intellect" school of thought (the one that brought us the notebook and the hypertext), where a human is put in the center of the complex data analysis system, as an orchestra director coordinating all the activity.
There, intelligence systems are seen as tools at the service of the human master, extending their capabilities to handle much more complex situations and overcoming their natural limits, allowing us to solve larger problems.
By keeping a human in the loop as the ultimate judge of how the system is behaving, any bias inherent in the techniques used to create the AI. It's a symbiotic approach where both human and AI system complement the shortcomings of the other half.
Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
Of course, despite the hype, current AI research doesn't attempt to reach human-level intelligence. AI research proceeds incrementally, from improved solutions to one practical problem after another. That's not just because there is tons more funding for practical problems, it's because it's less risky for students and researchers to solve actual problems and to take research one step at a time.
It's not all that different in biomedical research either: much of that is driven again either by practical problems or incremental progress. A lot of the game changers in biomedical research came out of otherwise fairly pedestrian research on bacteria or specific diseases, and people discovered only during that research that what they were doing was much more widely applicable. Huge, targeted research programs are the exception, not the norm: fusion reactors, large particle colliders, human genome sequencing; and they are often more for show than rational allocation of scarce research funds.
Most higher animal experience emotion and use it to navigate their environment. Maybe intelligence lies in that direction: teaching the toaster to feel love.
AI practitioners have been coming up with preposterous predictions since the 60s, carried away after spectacularly solving some problems that seemed to be very difficult but which, with hindsight, can be seen to be almost trivial. The fact that stupid modules like Siri, Google Now and Cortana, which are little more than party gimmicks, are touted as representative of the AI status quo just underlines that the industry is still mired in ridiculous hype.
I agree with you that we need to be conscious "ourselves", but the following:
"George Bush is known to have completely destroyed his mind with drink and drugs. he has an I.Q. of around 85 "
Where do you pull this crap from? I am no fan of Bush but seriously? And his father has an IQ of 185? ook...
No, all those weird animals you see in stuff like Google's deep dream are not put there, they are a consequence of training. That neural network IS a functional representation of a brain and while you might think we are special.... BUT WE ARE NOT SPECIAL. Our brains work the same way.
We just learn stuff and apply those old rules to new situations. No different than a neural network learning about animals and then imagining animals in everything it sees.
"There, intelligence systems are seen as tools at the service of the human master"
There is no such limit.
"By keeping a human in the loop as the ultimate judge of how the system is behaving"
Clueless, Google has no idea what that neural network thinks, they plug in inputs and tell it what the output is a billion times and somehow it figures out what is important. These things are NOT PROGRAMMED, and no human is in the loop. You could not put one in the loop because it learns things billions or trillions of times.
You would never know if you'd made a killbot till it kills because you don't know what inputs will cause what outputs.
I think it's silly how humans think we're meant to be the end-all of intelligence. People seem so upset with the idea that someday an artificial intelligence will surpass our own reasoning, but honestly I think it will be beautiful (philosophically as well as scientifically.) We should be doing everything we can to help promote the advance of intelligence, period. Whether it be 'organic' or not, 'artificial' or 'natural', intelligence is intelligence; it's a beautiful thing we should all cherish, not fear.
Is AI development moving In the wrong direction?
Why do you ask that, Dave?
This article is on a useful track but suffers from a simple confusion. The author argues that intelligence should be defined by understanding and not by behavior, but then proposes that we use successful prediction as the measure of understanding. The confusion is that prediction is also a behavior. I agree with the direction the author is going. Most successful understanding (or intelligence if you like that word) can be connected to the use of a (partially) coherent set of ideas to predict observations. Intelligent agents have complex methods of adjusting their set of ideas to improve their ability to predict, and when an agent becomes able to predict a useful segment of the phenomena it encounters, we call it intelligent. But this is still a behavioral definition of intelligence. In fact, unless you hold onto some kind of dualism, all intelligence is a physical behavior of organisms. Without dualism, it makes no sense to distinguish 'understanding' from 'a behavior of a network of molecules, neurons, organs, and organisms'.
Any significant advances in "artificial intelligence" will require a biological medium; at which time any resulting intelligence observed will no longer be artificial.
His conclusion is that we haven't actually been trying to solve "intelligence" (or at least our concept of intelligence has been wrong). And that with faster computing and larger pools of data the goal has moved toward faster searches rather than true intelligence.
In the Turing test, one of the easiest ways I've found to disrobe computers is failing to grasp semantic interrelations that is not a is-a or has-a relationship like for example music and dancing by making contradictory statements or not reacting to absurd combinations like going to a rave party to listen to jazz music dancing a waltz. That's knowledge though, it wouldn't help me determine the intelligence of an isolated Amazon tribe that doesn't know what rave parties or jazz or a waltz is. But it we want computer assistants that ordinary people can relate to, it has to understand vast amounts of context in order to make sense of us and responds back in a way that's natural to us. It might not create Skynet but it's infinitely more useful if we want computers to be effective extensions of ourselves.
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We already have various methods of ascertaining intelligence as expressed by nonhumans. Animals are routinely imbued with various levels of intelligence. We do this from a behavioral analysis very much like the Turing test which I suspect is the basis from which it was taken. I think the main issue with the Chinese room thought experiment is the inclusion of an outside influence over the behavior, the book. Since we cannot manipulate the behaviors of animals in the wild, we can rightly ascribe intelligence to those behaviors which indicate something other than a simple response to stimuli. In that respect I think a machine which programmed itself to respond correctly to the Turing test would qualify as intelligent. Remove the external influence, the 'book', and allow the machine to develop its own understanding. I am aware of several efforts along these lines. Programming a machine to simply learn through exposure to various stimuli over time. I believe that should something like this actually produce a machine which could converse would end the discussion of whether or not the Turing test was valid. That we can cheat does not invalidate the test itself.
We don't need servers or robots to have human intelligence. Already have 7 billions of those, including access to superhuman intelligence in the form of of many smart people collaborating with assistance of technology. Also humans have been around forever, and we still suck at human rights. Got to square those away first before having to worry about rights of other intelligent species (and having them respect ours).
What we need now is computers that are good at tasks that we suck at, like repetitive processing on huge amounts of data.
About the only exception is space exploration, where humans are not available for real time remote control due to speed of light. Still, we don't want a Mars probe to get bored and lonely, or make it's own survival the first priority. So cloning our own kind of intelligence, which was shaped by natural selection for self preservation, is not the best approach.
There is no wide agreement on this fundamental question, and without a clear understanding of what "intelligence" is, we cannot make progress toward making a real version of it.
Seriously - if we knew what intelligence was, then consistent unambiguous ways of measuring it would exist. We have many "IQ" tests, and there is real experimental evidence that a common factor called "g" underlies intelligence, but the field attempting to study/measure intelligence is fragmented, and contentious. If intelligence testing really measured a fundamental property of the mind, we would not have the Flynn Effect.
Two things have emerged in the past few decades that have thrown notions of what we mean by intelligence into a cocked hat.
First, many difficult "symbolic" activities thought to be the epitome of human reasoning (chess playing, theorem proving, etc.) have been surprisingly easily automated - it is commonsense activities that small children pick up quickly and naturally that prove intractable.
Second is has become clear that animals are intelligent by any reasonable understanding of the term, those impossible-to-automate mental skills exhibited by young children? Animals can do them also, as easily. In fact animals have been exhibiting complex problem solving behavior to novel problems for decades - consider crows.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
The real problem is that to many academics, “AI” is a dirty word. They feel that everything so far claiming to be AI has been all smoke and mirrors, and nothing remotely like human intelligence will appear any time soon. A subdiscipline, Machine Learning, has garnered some respect, along with various AI techniques like evolutionary algorithms and some limited kinds of machine inference like bayesian analysis. However, even machine learning is often done so badly that academics who understand it mostly just write it all off as a big joke. I’ve seen plenty of published work in ML where the authors clearly did not grasp basic ML practices or known limitations as to what it can do, so they do things like train a neural net and use the same data to both train the net and evaluate its performance, resulting in massive overfitting and bogus performance claims. There’s so much bullshit in AI research that it’s hard to find those few gems that actually do some real innovation.
My original PhD focus (before my advisor retired and I had to switch to computer architecture) was AI. So I have studied it extensively and feel that it has a lot of potential. But I have first hand observation of just how badly it is so often done.
Similar smoke and mirrors occurs in plenty of other CS subdisciplines. One is so much shit in parallel computing. Millions of dollars of grant money have been awarded to researcher in this area based on utterly false claims. If you’re interested, here is some reading material on how parallel computing research so often is done wrong, leading to worthless and misleading claims:
http://crd-legacy.lbl.gov/~dhbailey/dhbpapers/twelve-ways.pdf
http://www.davidhbailey.com/dhbtalks/dhb-12ways.pdf
http://optimal.cs.binghamton.edu/sites/default/files/DAC%202011%20Parallel%20Panel.pdf
http://www.ece.uc.edu/~paw/classes/ece975/sp2011/papers/madden-10.pdf
http://www.cs.binghamton.edu/~pmadden/pubs/dispelling-ieeedt-2013.pdf
We need AI with deep knowledge of all human medical history (anonymized) so that given input it can do pattern matching and give recommendations to doctors who may miss a pattern.
First thing, the article's thesis (according to TFS, which is so ridiculous I couldn't be bothered to read the article) is not only wrong, but completely free of actually having examined what AI research is. At best, it's the product of someone who believes the marketing nonsense promulgated when they tell you your thermostat "uses AI" and that Google search "uses AI."
First, we don't have AI. We have AI research. Anyone actually working in the field knows this (and no, people building search engines and thermostats aren't working in the field.) This is very important to understand. Research yes, but in terms of actual results, the "A" is doing fine, the "I", we simply do not have. At all. Period. This does not, of course, mean that we won't have it. We will. There's no magic here; animal brains are machines, albeit biological ones. Getting from here to AI following that model requires understanding the brain, which we do not, but it is a task we are definitely in the process of accomplishing.
Second, actual AI research at this time includes numerous interesting approaches, all of which are other than those alluded to in TFS. Quite a few of the actual AI research approaches incorporate information taken from the model provided by human and animal brain function at the cellular and network level. For instance, here's something written for the layman that details exactly the kind of brain-based work I'm describing.
Third, there is always the (strong, IMHO) possibility that there is more than one way to produce actual intelligences, and that one of those will bear fruit. The idea that nature has happened upon the only possible solution seems... unduly pessimistic. Having said that, the chosen path for most actual AI researchers (not Google, not the thermostat designer, not the database maven) is to follow the known-working examples that are around us with occurrences in the billions.
The challenge is that the various aspects of intelligence have been very hard to get a handle on right up to just a couple years ago. We have no natural internal mechanism whatsoever to observe the underlying operations that go into creating thought, reason and consciousness. Because of that, it's only been very recently that we have begun to be able to see how this particular system actually operates. With this new information in hand, it finally becomes possible to proceed along lines close to those the relevant biology utilizes by means other than pure guesswork and many-times-removed analogies for observed high level processes.
There are two kinds of AI results being pursued.
The first is intelligent, but non-conscious AI. Which would be an entirely new thing in our world; there are no examples of this in biology to follow. This result, if achievable, will create the opportunity to release us from the necessity of working to survive. This is highly desirable for many obvious reasons. No more menial work just so tomorrow won't unbelievably suck. The house always clean, the yard always in prime condition, willing, able and dependable helpers in any undertaking we choose to pursue, the cat box always pristine, food and other resources are produced and delivered reliably, etc. The number of potential benefits is enormous. Staggering. So there are very concrete and practical reasons to chase this particular goal.
The second is intelligent, conscious AI. Free will, creativity, and so on. The technological goal is clear, but the purpose is, just as you observe, not. We know better (well, we should know better) than to try to enslave conscious beings to our will. The inevitable (and appropriate) result of that kind of short-sighted idiocy is resentment and revolt. Assuming we can avoid that particular mistake, that means they could choose to, or agree to, pursue their existence beside us, which is certainly an
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Artificial Intelligence is always just around the corner, right?
Wrong.
I get the feeling that Sweatman doesn't know what the fuck he's talking.
And from the summary:
we're trying to solve the wrong problem
There is no we, Sweatman, You aren't trying to solve any problems, you are just writing a bunch of nonsense that smells like it was culled from Wikipedia.
This hack-a-day crap is so bad I miss the medium articles. They may have been fluffy, but they were still better than this crap.
I agree with you that we need to be conscious "ourselves", but the following:
"George Bush is known to have completely destroyed his mind with drink and drugs. he has an I.Q. of around 85 "
Where do you pull this crap from? I am no fan of Bush but seriously? And his father has an IQ of 185? ook...
It's widely known that bush jr had a below average intellect. He was born with it, alachol and cocaine do not change your intellect very much at all, if any. As for senior, I'm assuming it was pure hyberbole, he was not stupid like jr but was no Clinton much less a world record holder. It's been patently obvious that intellect does not correlate well with being a successful president and that should suprise no one.
I think the problem is that people expect machine intelligence to look like human intelligence. Machine intelligence exists and is strong in some areas. Modern chess programs are an example. They can play unique games and be stronger than any human player. Yes, they are given the rules of chess and machines did not invent chess. But they have passed beyond human abilities and it is at the point where some programs are coded to only make move patterns that humans would tend to make. Learning how to adapt machine intelligence to our real world problems is challenging. But we are in for a fright when computers get really good at analyzing human problems and applying better solutions that we now have at hand.
The problem isn't technology, it is people. We already have human intelligence and it is relatively cheap to procure. They are called people... you know actual human beings. Hire one. Make a baby. Go find an actual friend.
Try selling a product or service based on blank slate human intelligence. Sure there are aspects of the human brain that we are eager to replicate, simulate and make into a reproducible machine, such as image recognition or some other pattern recognition... But the marketability of human intelligence is upwardly bound by the availability of actual humans to do whatever it is you want them to do.
And in most cases you aren't going to want a generalized intelligence for a specific set of tasks, you want specialized and reproducible programming. Like the chess example, you want the chess computer to play chess and not day dream about some far off place while they are losing the game. Generalized intelligence slows down the processing. Generalized intelligence will keep trying to learn even after reaching an optimally efficient state or just get bored and go learn something else. And any semblance of uniqueness or "original thinking" requires a variety of experiences and slow development and redevelopment of neural pathways and even sometimes error and imprecision which are very much undesirable traits in technology.
Think of how many years it takes to teach a child. We spend literally decades training and retraining the human mind to know things and think about things. Who would buy that kind of technology that takes a decade or two before it is ready to do something useful?
Until the cost of simulating a human brain comes down to something that can be done on a very small budget, just because, then it won't get funded. And even then we aren't just a brain, we are a brain connected to a body with a full set of human senses and biologically driven needs. If you want human intelligence you need to have a human experience.
And even then would it even be ethical to start up a simulation of child's brain, teach it, train it, give it emotional response and physical form? Just because you can? Because you want a companion you can control? Because you want genius that you can turn off? At some point you have to realize you are playing God out of excessive pride and not furthering any good. Come up with a use case where you want to simulate a complete person, create a person, where an actual person just won't work.
I think the only reason to do so, ethically, would be for space exploration or working in other environments where an android would not be harmed and could survive and perform some useful tasks. But once you recreate human intelligence in android form, then you need to give that creation respect, status, some form of equality and free will. Or else you are not adding value to society, but undermining our values.
My hat's off to you for your indirect statement that, thus far, computers are machines that obey natural laws and their design, without truly "knowing" anything.
To tweak your mind back, how is it that a person is intelligent, being composed of machinery (biological machinery) and obeying natural laws? If humans really are intelligent, is it then possible for a machine to be designed and made by people, composed of who knows what, that is intelligent?
We won't make serious progress on AI until the consciousness taboo is broken. It clearly plays a role in intelligence but it's a bad word in scientific circles because we know so little about it, and because it suggests a dualist view of the universe. We're gonna need to swallow our materialist pride and engage with the issue head-on if we want to make progress.
We don't understand what human intelligence is or how it works, that's why. Here's my $.02: The human brain is a Story Engine. Everything we think and everything we know is a story - we perceive and learn in story form. Memories are stored and retrieved as stories. The simplest story form is the metaphor. Metaphors rooted in our bodily existence are the basis of individual learning (see "Philosophy of the Flesh"). Speech, writing, mathematics, science, art, and music encode our human stories. All of human experience - all encoded and manipulated as stories! What we call Intelligence is pattern matching of stories within and across human interest domains ... see any IQ test for confirmation. Creativity itself derives from pattern matching, very often across knowledge and experience domains.
If we wish to create a human-like Intelligence, we must create a human-like Story Engine. As far as I can tell, no one taking this approach.
I have only recently begun considering this hypothesis of Story as Intelligence, but it seems plausible on many levels. I suspect Story functionality is what distinguishes human brain functionality from that of closely related primates. I'd appreciate hearing other's thoughts on the hypothesis and its applicability to the creation of AI.
I've often wondered about encoding the fundamental motivations for an AI. Perhaps, as with ourselves, the prime directive might simply be to keep the story unfolding.
i've mentioned this before, whenever the phrase "artificial" intelligence comes up. the problem is not with quotes AI quotes, it's with *us humans*. just look at the two words "artificial" combined with the word "intelligence". it is SHEER ARROGANCE on our part to declare that intelligence - such an amazing concept - can be *artificial*. as in "not really real". as in "beneath us". as in "objective and thus subject to our manipulation and enslavement".
I would have to dispute your definition of artificial as being somehow "not really real". If you use the original meaning, ie. the product of an artisan, or a crafted object, then it makes complete sense. We are talking about intelligence that is designed and built, rather than having developed naturally. Artifacts are still real things.
"Is XYZ moving in the wrong direction?"
Yes. Yes it is. This is why companies eventually collapse. This is why civilizations eventually collapse.
They chase the wrong things and optimize for the wrong variables. AI will be built for profit, but not all human endeavor is profit-driven.
Capitalists will tell you these people are "weird", but others call them "visionaries" and "philanthropists". At the end of the day it's the capitalists that will build the AI, and the AI will be that of a sociopath or a psychopath. It'll embody all the bad things we see in humans - because those are profitable. Empathy and compassion aren't profitable.
My problem with the author's conclusions is this: that "predictive behavior" can also be imitated by a machine. As I read that part, though, it struck me that neither he, nor anyone I've read, has made a distinction between what "intelligence" is, and how it is separate from self-awareness/consciousness.
It seems to me that all the AI I've read about, are conflating the two.
There are plenty of computer-controlled systems that are far more "intelligent" than a rat... but none, so far as we know, self-aware.
So... what is it that we want to achieve - intelligence, or self-awareness?
mark
Ai means love in japanese and that explains everything. First there needs to be artificial emotion for computers and robots and then we can try building some kind of a machine intelligence on top of that basis. The same sequence of event had happened to hominids: they were angry, happy, sad, horny and bored way before speech, fire-making, writing and calculus existed.
Thus the future is not ASIMO or Deep Blue, but a 14 y.o. schoolgirl-emulating gynoid with a pair of extra-large eyes and little heart-shapes in them. She will say extremely shallow things, chase after her teacher hopelessly, spend her time rescuing stray kitten yet aim to be an idol singer.
Really, we don't. We can't understand dogs and cats very well how would we ever understand the motives of an artificial intelligence. I can live with a faster database. I don't think I could live with an AI that wanted to borrow my car for conversation.
We do not really know what intelligence (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence) is. Therefore, we cannot built a machine which has that. We also do not know what self-awareness is (which is considered by some people to be part of intelligence). We just have it. True, many would say: "I know who I am and that I exist, so I am self-aware. And you can add this information to a machine." But that is not the same. Self-awareness goes beyond the information of existing, as information is nothing more than elements and relations between elements. However, the feeling of being alive goes far beyond it and until now no one has a comprehensive definition.
Therefore, there will be no real AI any time soon.
I recently saw a 6 part documentary on PBS, "The Brain With David Eagleman" that impressed me quite a bit. It covers a lot of ground in it's 6 hours about the brain, from basic biological attributes of the physical brain to philosophical questions about reality and questions about the more disturbing aspects of human behavior.
Included are people who have suffered one kind of mental disability or another. There's a man who had Asperger's Syndrome and seems to have been cured during a scientific study, and a woman who was in a traffic accident and now cannot make decisions. (According to the documentary, emotions are what help us prioritize alternatives and help in the decision process. Somehow, that emotional part that assists was disconnected from the rational for this unfortunate woman. She got very emotional while trying to make decisions so it wasn't that the emotions weren't there BTW.)
Eagleman points out how 'consciousness' is only a very small part of the brain's total activity. He compared it to the top executive of a big company. The executive is not even aware of the routine, mundane and commonplace goings on that make up most of the company's activity. It's only the exceptions, the surprises and things that require some new kind of behavior, that get the executive's attention, and that, according to Eagleman, is what consciousness is in the brain. Consciousness is usually not dealing with breathing or walking or eating unless, say, you want to see how long you can hold your breath, or you're trying to find stepping stones across a stream, or you're wondering if the bread you're about to eat is too stale.
The kind of AI that most people are excited by (whether with enthusiasm or fear) is the kind that could produce conscious thought. I reckon someday it will be achieved, probably through a gradual process where it gets understood a little bit, and that little bit is modeled artificially, which helps in gaining further insight which then leads to better modeling, and so on.
In theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice they're different. (Yogi Berra & A. Einstein)
" Behavior is a manifestation of intelligence, and nothing more. Imagine lying still in a dark room. You can think, and are therefore intelligent. But you’re not producing any behavior."
Yes, you can think, but why do you? Because you have a motivation array with no off switch to satisfy. And yes, you are creating behavior to satisfy the human motivation array. It is called thought. What we commonly call intelligence is the combination of the HMI (Human Motivation Array) and its tool "intelligence." Together they comprise the "Mentis" and I suggest building "intelligence" alone is like building the tool without the machine it is supposed to work with to accomplish the task. The HMI and "intelligence" work together to build a behavior-space to satisfy the HMI. We spend our lives building and executing behaviors to satisfy our individual variation in the nominal HMI. Until researchers accept the Mentis and aim their work at that more difficult problem we cannot say we (humans) have created "artificial intelligence." Pain is the negative feedback we get from not being able to build and execute behaviors to satisfy the HMI. We see the result on the nightly news.
E Proelio Veritas.
First understand...
(1) What's the purpose of life?
(2) What's human intelligent design and where did it come from?
(3) Why, as humans, are we able to distinguish our intelligence from anything other than it?
(4) Is human-comparable intelligence, albeit artificial, attainable?
Answers:
(3.) There's a spirit unique to humans that gives them intelligence and a mind, empowering humans with an unmatchable awareness that allows them to recognize the uniqueness of their own intelligence and it's superiority to animals and man-made systems. Saying the intelligence is superior, is *not* the same as saying that it yields morally correct results - that's another matter.
(2.) Human intelligent design is the manifestation of human thought, intelligence, planning and design. Not to be mistaken for "evolution" -- nothing that mankind has created evolved or does evolve -- that is a complete lie that makes some of the "smartest" people seem extremely ignorant for under-estimating their own designing, which is the result of their applied intelligence. While their designs are intelligent that doesn't mean that those designs are *not* degenerate with respect to the purpose of human life. Perhaps some of the most notoriously self-deceived are the dumb-ass transhumanists who make claims that their activity is a step of evolution, when, in reality, it's the product of extremely powerful intellects conducting intelligent design, which, is to an evil end (whether done knowingly or not).
1.) The purpose of life is to become immortal spirit sons and daughters of God, who created the universe and everything therein by Godly intelligent design. The mechanisms He employs are a.) a plan of salvation that required the sacrifice of Jesus Christ for all sins to provide for the potential for all those in the world to become spirit sons and daughters, b.) the structuring of time that sanctifies the 7th day of the week and 7 annual Holy Days, and c.) free moral agency, which requires a temporary allowance for evil to exist in the current world. His approach to design is decompositional, which is something that the Religion of Evolution has blinded the scientists to. If only they understood the implications of the theory of intelligent design, then they would have a correct approach to understanding systems and the purpose of life and AI... whether it will be or not.
4.) Human-comparable intelligence is not attainable simply because God won't allow it to get that far. The key to AI is having a single language, whether it be the original language spoken in Babylon, or whether it is a language consisting of only two characters (namely: {0,1}). Once that is achieved, which it is, the potential for human-comparable intelligence is attainable, accept for the fact that God won't allow it to get that far. Perhaps it will be allowed to realize Hitler's dream of a universal "utopia" of united the world by using technology. Such a system is prophesied in Revelations and the citizens of that system are identified as having the mark of the Beast or the number of the Beast or the name of the Beast. Can AI be employed to unite the world under a intelligent computing system that enforces a singularity? Is the mark of the Beast a human-integrated computer system that ties the "human agent" into the universalist world community? What does it represent, whether computerized or not? It represents the removal of your free moral agency, *if* you choose to relinquish it to that system. I wouldn't be surprised if AI *will* be used to manage it all.
Do you care what order I answer those questions in - does that bother you?
Get real. Get with God.
Hello,
Interesting post. I just wanted to make a point about the existence of general intelligence: it turns out that the human brain is actually a stack of many "special purpose" computational systems. That doesn't mean that there isn't a general intelligence portion as well, but we're DEFINITELY composed, at least to some degree, of stacks of special skills.
Examples:
1) Vision and object recognition. There's a whole subsystem of the brain dedicated to decoding light signals into a representation your consciousness can use. There's even a special subsystem for recognizing faces--they even know its location in the brain.
2) Audio: similar to vision, there's specialized decoding brain circuits.
Those are the two biggies, but we also have special hardware for processing/controlling speech, spatial reasoning, body control, and others. What's more, there are people who have *developed* special purpose brain circuitry for playing the violin, for example, and savant-like mathematical computation. For people who have done that, it is as easy to do a square root to N digits as it is for you and me to walk.
Because of that, it's NOT clear to me that a general purpose intelligence can be made without assembling a sufficient number of special-purpose intelligence. It's NOT clear to me, in fact, that there are unknown forms of special purpose intelligence that humans are lacking that wouldn't transform our general intelligence. (People are prone to making certain logical errors, even the brightest of us, because of in-born holes in our mentalities!)
A dolphin might look at us as crippled mentalities because we can't construct a spatial model of our surroundings from sound, for example. What other mental abilities COULD exist, that we don't have, that could expand our mental potential in outrageously powerful ways? People typically aren't able to fork their consciousnesses into solving two problems at once independently, there's one I'd like!
But the point I'm trying to make is that the stacking approach might be NECESSARY to compose a mind capable of general intelligence that we'd recognize. It might not need ALL our special purpose skills, but it's not obvious to me that a composition isn't necessary.
--PM
Peter, perhaps you'd be interested in this essay of mine.
tl;dr: agreed. As will an AI be. But that will not be all it is, or the essential source of its intelligence. IMHO.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Ah fooey, forgot the link. And slashdot... editing is too new for the perl code, lol. Here:
http://fyngyrz.com/?p=1597
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Trying to define "true intelligence" and "common sense" is a losing game. I've been in some long and winding debates on such.
Many attempts seem to come down to "does it act like a human in a wide variety of circumstances?" But that's measuring "acting like a human", not necessarily intelligence. If you only want to measure human-ness then call it "human-like intelligence" or "human-like behavior", not AI, but HLB.
Let's be practical and instead focus on whether a device can do something useful. Is it a good tool?
I'm not sure we want our tools to be too general anyhow. Do you want your vacuum cleaner flirting with your wife?
Table-ized A.I.
Sorry, this article is not an intelligent take on artificial intelligence.
First, the Chinese Room argument applies equally to whatever new algorithm Jeff Hawkins comes up with as it does to the English speaking man plus book algorithm. The Chinese Room argument applies equally to ANY algorithmic approach to intelligence. Thus, his call for a new definition of intelligence will do nothing to disarm the Chinese Room argument.
Second, the Chinese Room argument has already been thoroughly addressed by Daniel Dennett and others. If you really care, go read Searle's The Mystery of Consciousness and Dennett's Consciousness Explained, and then go from there.
Third, in the mean time, researchers will continue on their merry way toward developing AI. Guess what? It is harder than Minsky and others ever imagined, but none the less, we are making progress. And guess what else? When we have "truly" intelligent systems, there won't be any magic in there. Just boring, dumb algorithms. Our robot overlords will be Chinese Rooms.
If Google Search understands your vocal request for the time a movie starts, followed by your search for the ten top-ranked whiskeys, and returns you correct answers immediately, you have a really fast Search Engine. If it then goes on it's own and calls the movie theater bartender to find out if they stock those 10 whiskeys, compares them to the price range of your recently favorite purchased whiskeys, and sends you a text letting you know that the closest match is indeed available at said movie theater...then it might be an intelligent Search Engine. Maybe.
Nice essay, well worth reading, thanks. I'm going to refer it to others, specifically a guy who claims that thought/brain/mind are quantum in nature. I tried to tell him essentially what your quantum passage says, but you do it a lot better.
Also, you obviously have thought in much greater depth.
--PM
Many people even on here are confusing Intelligence with Consciousness and Knowledge. We created knowledge when we passed on information to our sons and daughters via grunts and gestures and scribbled the first symbols and drawings on cave walls. We created the first intelligence in the last few decades with computers and are continuing to advance each year at a fantastic rate... (Google Now still blows my mind) We have not yet created a consciousness.. nor can we even perceive what one actually is beyond just the words "being self aware". This is not a technical or scientific barrier but a philosophical and theological one. Many who talk about emergent AI, bundle intelligence with consciousness when they are completely separate entities. I personally don't believe that consciousness can just spark into existence as an emergent property. While Sir Roger Penrose's theories of quantum effects causing consciousness are interesting, they still don't explain any mechanism and just rely on it just emerging. I don't think he ever talks about how it causes being self aware either. I find the consciousness aspect of AI very "spooky" in that I can only attribute it to a higher being, be that the person who runs this simulation or a God. If anyone knows any recent theories or work regarding consciousness I'd very much appreciate links to it.
Thanks for reading, and for your kind words.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.