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The Emerging-Behavior Debate
weezer writes "Interesting article about 'emergent behavior' of complex robots/devices. This was all over the news tonight too: theories about machines being able to "Think" on their own. Read more about it. " What do you folks think (no pun intended) - how much differently will machines/devices think? Or do they?
Given that our brain works with "electronics" too,
it's likely that someday we'll be able to create a
machine that is capable of thinking.
Anyone else notice how fast processors are gaining in speed and complexity lately? If we continue improving them at the current rate, then in another 5 or 10 years we'll probably have a true artificial intelligence.
I don't think so. Computers are a billion times faster than us in simple calculation, but we have massive parallellism that no computer can match.
Think of how you can recognise a face among thousands for example, even with different lighting, distance, angle etc.
And there's our associative memory, hard to do with computers. And chess masters beat computers by not even considering the billions of bogus moves a computer labors through.
An AI of approximately equal intelligence to the average Joe would be able to outthink the greatest of human minds. We'd be unequipped to defend ourselves against it.
We can still cut the power. Seriously, wether or not an AI will become dangerous depends on what powers it gets, and more important what motivations we give it.
A super-intelligent AI may show up someday, but it don't have to have the slightest trace of the human wish for power and dominance. Instead its innermost motivation could be answering our questions as good as possible, and gather the knowledge to do so. It will be a matter of design.
An AI controlling dangerous equipment (a robot, a weapon, a factory complex capable of building anything) would of course be made with built-in security measures.
Emergent behavior is very real, and it's not a very complicated idea. It's the idea that an extremely complicated system can be well-described with a set of parameters much smaller than the number of variables required to precisely describe the problem.
For example, gases exhibit emergent behavior; it is composed of many trillions of atoms, each with its own momentum, position, and angular momentum, but the overall behavior of the gas can be described with a small set of parameters -- volume, pressure, number, and temperature.
There are probably theorems describing the conditions under which this is possible, but I don't know for certain. Probably start by looking for papers by Kolmogorov on the subject; AFAICT he's been a central figure for every mathematical advance of the 20th century.
The question wrt intelligence is: is intelligence something that can be described simply as the sum of smaller pieces? The "simply" is the part of the question that makes it hard -- obviously we can in principle explain brain function by writing down the equations that describe all the atoms in it, but that's not useful because it isn't a simple description.
IOW, we are asking if there is a statistical mechanics of the mind -- and no one knows the answer yet.
No one knows how a conscious being arises from unconscious matter, and there are very good arguments that we may NEVER know.
You presume that we are, in fact, conscious.
The major hurdle in passing the (original and simpler) Turing test is
for the machine to have what is called
"common knowledge". This includes all the
facts that a 6-year old knows about the world:
i.e. if someone dies, he remains dead; once
someone is born, he cannot be born again, etc...
Thousants and thousants of these important
details lie in common knowledge. Once that is done (if ever)
only then can we even look forward towards passing the test. Note, looking-up the answers form a huge database stored on memory, will not help much with passing the test. We are talking about VERY-HUGE information to store and the speeds of cpu cycle (if we go with digital computers, and not analog) are not forthcoming for at least a hundred (or even hundreds) of years. Even if they did, there are other problems besides these ones aslo.
...only problem is, our strategies are very heavily influenced by things which might not be good for war strategy (or whatever it is we decide to have the AI do), such as humor, hatred, and fear. As such, a pure AI designed to be the best quake bot it can be would not emulate human behavior. It would do things that humans wouldn't think of, like killing you from far away with the single shotgun while you're using a rocket launcher instead of shooting back at you with the rocket launcher.
I think you mean www.edge.org
It thinks! And because it's Micro$oft, it thinks in an evil manner, knowing the absolute worst time to crash; when lots of stuff is in RAM only and unsaved, etc. But this is not sentient thinking. Just more of an evil instinctive behaviour.
Will the first truly conscious be good or evil? My money is on evil.
What if we figure out our genes are using us as slaves? :)
...any more than feeding rules/manipulations into Big Blue made it truly understand what it was manipulating.
Don't get me wrong, Big Blue is good, and Cyc may pass the Turing Test someday, but neither are strong AI.
whats HAL syndrome dude? i hate these little pop memes
that infest slashdot. anyways, turing already had more to say on this in the 30s
than 90% of the garbage i've read written in the 80s and 90s, only you have to go
to a library to get access to it. oh the horror.
ps. any 10th grade school kid demo coders understands
emergent behavior from playing around on the computer for a couple weeks.
it's not 'surprising' unless you are a suit who is locked up in a government lab building
bombs all day while your imagination is slowly lobotmized.
or is that sodomized? heh.
Program them so work is as fun as sex!
Make them workaholic obsessive-compulsives like border collies, or the "focused" people in Vernor Vinge's new novel.
I don't have any answers to the points you brought up, but I have another one to add to it: If they were to be fully conscious of their existance (or maybe doesn't even need to be conscious of it, I dunno), what happens if there are two of them? Would they fight for dominance? Wouldn't that be very frightening since they can 'think' and perform acts nearly at the speed of light? We as humans would not be able to disable or shut them down if they were truely smart enough to safeguard themselves against that.
What if both AIs were thinking along the same track of optimizing their host computer for themselves to reside comfortably in? And what if both of them were using the same host computer?
There are alot of 'what if's out there...
>It would do things that humans wouldn't think of, like
killing you from far away with the single shotgun while you're using a rocket launcher instead of shooting back at
you with the rocket launcher.
But you just thought of that...
"ps (If anyone knows how I can get in touch with those damn matrix guys... let me know. I want my name back.)"
Heh.. I've been using Switch for quite some time now(its part of an anagram of my name,) so imagine how I felt when it was taken by a female character...:]
If self-consciousness isn't a result of natural process, then what is self-consciousness? Where does it come from?
I did this really cool AI experiment.
/earth.
I created a simulated world and populated it with simulated entities. The simulated entities had some illusion of self-awareness on top of a buch of hard wired instincts. Most of them were under the illusion that they had free will. Interestingly some of the smarter ones were able to figure out that their consciousness was an illusion.
So they ran about and lived their happy electronic lives and died their sad electronic deaths and it really didn't prove that much in the long run.
Oh well. That was cool. rm -rf
I don't have my degrees yet (undergrad dual-majoring in Neuroscience and Computer Science, concentrating heavily on AI), but I think I can make a good stab at explaining this.
I see emergent behavior as having more to due with the combination of simple behaviors than any magical production of new behaviors. Let me explain:
Suppose you have a single neuron - it's not capable of very complex behavior - pretty much just fire or not fire, maybe changing it's rate of firing somewhat. Now if you have two, the combination of them means that there are suddenly a much larger number of possible behaviors.
Now jump ahead to something the size of the brain. It has, umm, a really big number of neurons (I really should know how many, but I've been studying all day). The number of different possible behaviors is truly mindboggling - it's like trying to list all possible configurations of the stars in the Milky Way. These behaviors can be incredibly complex.
The point is this - when you add up simple behaviors, the result you get is not simply the sum of them - the number of possible behaviors increases geometrically. If you through enough simply behaviors in there, there's no reason you couldn't come up with a behavior as complex and intelligent as the human brain.
'Course, then you have the problem of picking out intelligent complex behavior from a nearly infinite number of possible behaviors. No one said it would be easy.
Thinking may be emergent behavior, but emergent
behavior is not thinking. Emergent behavior is
that which was surprising. So what. As long as
people are non-omniscient, they can be surprised.
Even scientists. That doesn't mean there is no
ultimate rational explanation; just that the
phenomenon is unexplained at first.
The people who think computers are already
thinking don't know how people think. A
computer that really thought the way people do
would have the ability to make and use concepts.
Cyc is being spoon-fed ready-made concepts;
that's not intelligence. It's mere knowledge.
If Cyc is conscious, what is it conscious OF?
The newscasts I heard didn't sound like any new
scientific discovery; they sounded like a
throwback to ancient primitive religions
where people believed that spirits controlled
everything. (Only now, the spirits are man-made
instead of natural.) Gah!
This "emergent behavior" news is not news. It's
hogwash. Forget it and get back to work.
-- Anonymous Coward (in a lazy bad mood)
No matter how perfectly an AI system can model the functionality of the human brain, it is still a perfectly predictable system and has no soul. ..and it cannot make decisions between right and wrong.
..But a look at our lives tells us that this not the case. We DO have free will because we do have a soul, as God created us. And this is what seperates us from all the rest of creation. Including any machines that we design.
Consider this: (for any atheists out there) There is no such thing as "random". Everything given a perfectly detailed model can be predicted. Chaos theory is just a way of avoiding the fact that we don't have sufficiently complex models for certain processes. If God didn't exist, that would mean that we have no free will.. that our every action and all future actions could have been predicted before the earth was even formed after the supposed "big bang" by a near infinitely complex analysis of all matter in the universe.
-- read the Bible, folks.. it's quite interesting.
This does come down to the questions of "what is human?" and "what is a person?"...I fall into the camp of believing that our personhood comes as a gift from God and is presented to us by virtue of being human, nothing more.
So what exactly are you trying to say here? Humans have souls just because we are human? That's utterly ridiculous! Humans are just a synthesis of billions of years of natural evolution. Nothing more. Nothing less. At exactly which point along the line do you think humans, or proto-humans were "magically" granted souls? You really think that God just decided to pick us, of all species, to have souls? I tend to think not. I think it's more likely that we created the idea of God so people like you believe we *do* have souls and that we're somehow special and separate from the rest of nature. Fact is, the only thing that makes us *human* is that we think better than all the other animals! DUH!! Hence, the argument is over intelligence and NOT souls.
Now don't get me wrong here. I'm not saying humans don't have a soul or God doesn't exist. I'm just saying that it doesn't make any sense to view humankind as something special, defined by our souls. Now, of course, to each other we are very special because guess what? We're all human. That's why we care about Columbine. That's why we don't like to see human suffering. Because we are human, and it's in our social nature, not because we have souls!!! Likewise, we don't care as much about what happens to a dog or a robot or a gerbil or whatever (hint: it's because we are NOT one of them, we are HUMAN). It is our mind (read: our brain, consisting of billions of neurons that fire to create the emergent behavior that is often confused with a soul) and our thinking that is different or "better" than any other animal. That's what makes personhood sacred to us, the fact that we all think somewhat alike.
So how can you preclude the possibility of AI? The "soul" argument is rubbish. We ourselves are proof that intelligence can arise from inanimate matter. So why can't we create it ourselves?
So how do our minds work? I was pretty sure it had something to do with neural impulses but maybe that's an illusion God created.
This idea is nonsense. There is no God who runs around controlling the universe. The very idea contradicts everything we know about the world. Everything behaves according to natural law: To be is to be something. To be something is to act accordingly. Always; without exception.
To be a HUMAN is to have the fundamental choice, which is, to think or not -- and if you think, innumerable choices follow. The existence of choice means that humans have souls, but it does NOT prove that the soul survives the death of the body. Nor does it even IMPLY the existence of God. Nor does it imply that souls belong to humans alone. Extraterrestrials or AIs are possible. We have a long way to go for either.
To be a human means also that you must face the alternative of life or death; THAT is why morals are necessary. You plant crops in certain places, RIGHT or WRONG? Your diet requires plutonium, RIGHT or WRONG? You should shoot up your schoolmates, RIGHT or WRONG? Pirate Windows and run Linux, buy Windows and run Linux, or run only Linux -- which is right? WHY? Your happiness, your productivity, and ultimately even your survival are what is at stake. There is no need for morals handed down from God. If you do not rationally assess your morals, how do you know they are correct? Millions of people throughout history have died because they had a wrong idea they thought came from God (or Satan, which is just as bad). Look at Jim Jones. Look at Heaven's Gate. Look at Adolf Hitler! They threw out reason for the same reason you do.
Not only CAN you figure out morals for yourself, but you MUST -- if you want to survive. And if you make an undetected mistake, you'll pay for it. But if you get things right, you can experience the triumphant joy of having accomplished something -- right here on Earth.
For more info read Ayn Rand.
I've read transcripts of Turing Test competitors.
Most of the entrants -- people or machine --
spout nonsense all the time. The challenge for
the judge is then to differentiate
human-generated nonsense from computer-generated
nonsense. What a scam! Even if a program passed,
I wouldn't be able to treat it as a PERSON...
even a child...
You've just insulted insects, pal.
You're argument about the existance free will is based on the existance of a god, while your argument about the existance of a god was based on the existance of free will.
Yes, I know the original poster said that if there is no god then there is no free will, and that one cannot logically conclude "if there is free will then there is a god" based only on the first half of his argument, but that seems to be what the poster is implying -- If the poster was not implying that, then all this amounts to is "There exists a god and souls exist because I say so."
I'm still not convinced that we have free will.
The theory of emergent behavior does not dictate that any system has emergent qualities. Rather, the study of emergent behavior is the study of systems which _do_ have those properties. As a researcher in emergent behavior at MIT, I often struggle with the fundamental paradox of emergent systems: "did that system show an emergent behavior?"
:) I'm somewhere in the middle.
A question: Is a physical simulation of water emergent? You simulate every particle (which can't on its own make waves), but yet, as a group they make waves. Some people say this is emergent--some say go jump in lake
As has been previously posed, I agree with the fact that a behavior can be more strongly classified as emergent when it displayes properties very different from the agents which make up the system.
I think that this article was just trying to give a taste of what can happen in some emergent systems--not introduce the "theory of emergent systems" as _the_ new way of looking at the world.
That said, understading emergent behavior can be a powerful tool for understanding the many systems that we find in nature. An ant colony for example--or a flock of birds. These are examples of complex systems defined only by homogenous agents interacting with each other. It is not the only way to look at the world--but it is *no doubt* an interesting way.
for more info look in the book:
"Turtles, Termites, and Traffic Jams: Explorations in massivly parallel microworlds."
Just my $0.02.
- graphicsguru as AC
OK, fine. Believe whatever you want to believe. Just remember that more than a few times science has proved religion inaccurate, to put it mildly. For example, do you still believe in creationism?
If you want to base your arguments on religion, there's nothing anybody can do to change your mind. Heck, you could call yourself Jesus and if you really believed it, I probably couldn't convince you otherwise. And since "this is something that does not seem provable by any ordinary means" you're probably right, there's no way I can convince you that AI can work, if and when it does. After all, if you use say something just "appears" as if it's intelligent or concious, what test will you use to prove that really is?? I guess this would mean that you couldn't prove that any human being is actually concious or intelligent, because you can judge only based on their actions; you cannot "get in their head."
As for "God created us in his image," I ask what image? Humans have only been around for a blip on the evolutionary timescale. Our "image" is constantly evolving, even now!! So I suppose that image is a moving target, no? WAKE UP!! Evolution created us, it it's image.
How are we fundamentally different, besides in our thinking capacity (which allows us to create technology, religion, culture, etc.), than any other organism? "Because the bible says so" just doesn't cut it.
Regards,
AC
Imagine a world with giant Slashdot robots as our AI taskmasters... Instead of putting people into cocoon-like enclosures as in the MATRIX, they mercilessly yack humanity into submission. Oh no - pretend you're working! Here comes another robot. And it's acting like it has fresh comments...
1. It is possible for a human being to fail the
:OP
turning test.
2. It is possible for a human to *intentionally* fail
the turning test.
3. Replace "human" in the above two statements with "machine" and the statements are still true.
Result: Failure of the Turning Test is no indication of intellegence (or the lack their of)
Given this I have yet come up with an valid
argument that *Passing* the Turning Test is any
decisive detector of intellegence either.
Besides, The Turning test is really a thought
experiment.
Consider this: if you were an intellegent machine
taking the turning test, would you *want* to pass
the test? I think I would bomb it
intentionally
Just check it on any search engine. A bit of difference on the initial conditions can screw the result completely.
They can't do magick. We can do. Thus we have something to fight back.
You're just being specieist. AI researchers can't be specieist.
Tossing in my two cents...
"So how does the brain work? Magic? A soul? It sounds like you are saying the phenomena of mind does not come from physical brain matter and energy interactions (chemistry and physics). A common viewpoint among religious people, but not one which is useful for figuring out how the brain works or how to write an intelligent program."
Unless it's true, of course. It *could* be that the mind isn't derived/implemented/etc in the physical brain. I don't really believe this is true, but the possibility remains and should not be so quickly dismissed.
"There is no "small" car inside a larger car which is a part of it, so why does there have to be a "small" mind inside a complete mind to explain
the complete behavior?"
True, but in the case of the mind, the problem is that is nothing remotely 'mind-like' to found in the brain. So one solution is to assume that there are lots of extremely simple 'proto-minds'--the simplest being neural functions--which form increasing complex proto-minds until you finally reach the Mind. Again I don't really believe it, though it would be my first choice if functionalism turned out to be true.
(Snipped the final paragraph due to length.)
That brain damage causes changes in the mind cannot be used as evidence that *any* theory is true or untrue (aside from the belief that the mind connects to some other body part). There are versions of dualism which would allow this (many of which I've made up *grin*) and idealism would certainly allow this while probably destroying any chance of cogsci being able understanding the mind.
Finally, I would like to add that the term 'emergent' means a lot of things. The use in philosophy--which I consider primary due to it's age--refers (or referred) to properties which could not be reduced at all, to anything (except in the most abstract manor, such as 'mind==brain', with no more detail). It holds that the mind, while not seperate from the brain, could not be reduced (or possibly even analysed) in terms of brain function. While this idea is (very understandably) not accepted in cogsci, its descendants are still alive (and even thriving) in philosophy.
-James Lanfear (who was too lazy to find his password)
Though I do not personally believe, that a computer could acheive a self realizing AI... would it be possible, that if a computer was TRULY self aware, that it could forget? "Sorry dave... I don't seem to recall where I saved your presentation for Tuesday"
What do you think?
Self awareness is a funny thing to analyse, considering, though it cannot be proven, there is ALOT that suggests that humans do not come to self-realization until around the 1 - 2 age. We do not understand the process of how self-realization comes about, so I do not think we could create a system that would realize itself.
It would be like the blind teaching the blind how to see.
Would we then see a rise in computer-suicides?
Why is it that every time people start talking about AI, you get a bunch of closet philosophers who proclaim that, "If we do create a truly Intellegent machine, it will invalidate all the world's religions." I just don't get the connection. How is it that the ability to create a machine so complex that it becomes aware of its own existance will suddenly change the fact that there is or isn't a God (or gods) and people's fundamental measures of right and wrong? I'd say that these people have a very narrow view of what religion is.
Some religions (specifically some forms of Christianity) include the belief that humans are distinguished from animals by our ability to think, and that the reason we can think is because we were made in God's image. Computers don't look much like we do, so they can't be made in God's image too. It doesn't necessarily mean that there is or isn't a God or Gods, just that some assumptions are wrong. It might also conflict with some of the views on Creation.
I FAILED THE TURING TEST!!!!
IT DOESN'T PROVE ANYTHING.
Problem is, that the brain reorganizes itself , that is, if you're busy doing something for a while, the neurons rearrange themselves so that they are better at accomplishing the needed task. Try this in silicone.
;-)
Been there done that.
Genetic algorithims on (i forget the name) "programable chips."
They change their wiring.(not talking about flash ram or EP-ROM).
P.S.:Silicon, not silicone.
Silicon == chip material.
silicone == breast implant material.
free will arises from a somany possible combinations of choice that because of its complexity we call it "free will."
assume: we are created in God's image.
If we create machines in our image would they have been created in God's image.
It is impossible to build an 'f' ing turing machine.
I don't know about any of you, but I got the impression that the program was trying to appeal to the anti-technology audience (Unabomber, etc.) by discussing how the robots began to exhibit human-like behaviors. This could lead people to believe that computers WILL eventually try to get rid of the human race (Terminator 1&2 and a bunch of other movies overusing this theme). And then us nerds and geeks will again be blamed for something (Columbine).
If we are made in the image of god, and we make AI's in our image, would they have been made in God's image.
certain quantum interactions are *totaly* random.
our strategies, believe it or not, are hindered by the desire to preserve many of our force's lives, while machines would feel that achieving goals justify losing lives. Yes, there are cases where we have done the same, but machines would never feel the need to erect a memorial to honor the lives lost.
Not everything is deterministic.
Think quantum theory.
That is not wrong, I think there is a diffrence between conscience and soul. Conscience is a state of the soul, when you are unconscience your soul is in a dream state. The soul is the top of the pyramid because it countrols what our bodies do. Have you ever felt like your body is just an organic machine, like a robot and you "the being" are at its controls, while parts of your brain are handling the basics like motor skills, image processing/recognition, audio/speech recognition, automatic memory organization and retrieval based upon your senses. But we are not talking about those parts of it, we are talking about the soul, which takes information/data and makes the big to medium decisions based upon that data/information that the rest of the brain automaticly processes. You smell something, it triggers a memory, that memory reminds you of a women you knew, you think about contacting her, so you tell the your brain to get you more memories or your brain automaticly dumps more memories on you, one of those memories is bad, and you initiate thought to help you remember "oh that is why I didn't like her". You see something, your brain automaticly associates a name with it "apple", your brain tells you your hungry or your brain automaticly initiats a grab and bite. At some point in evolution, we stoped letting our brain do all the work and we started cycling thoughts in our brains through a "soul", these thoughts led to bigger decisions, and turned grunts, screams and yells into language.
The automation that our brain provide is often refered to as subconscience, its the layer below conscience of our soul.
The brain to the soul - "Whats the hold up, I've given you all the data to figure it out, ah to heck with you I'll handle it", and the girl nervously laughs in a lack of conversation in a situation where she has to much attention on her. This is more like behavior, because its automated, and if we put thought into it we more then likely would not do it. There are points in which the soul is given to much to process, and we find this problem in people who are autistic, which usually have some strange ability like photographic memory, and many other memory problems more then likely because the soul can't deal with all the data its being given, and instead ops to memorize it for later processesing by the soul, that is why at times you have to ask them a question twice, and why they repeat the question.
Spacialization, the soul is given the ability to realize things spacialy because our brains give us this kind of data from our senses. Dreams are another thing, it seems our brains want to keep our soul busy even though its in an unconscience state, unconscience being that the soul no longer controls our body, in that way the brain gives us fake information but we can control this fake information in certain states of the soul.
Here is something else to think about, if someone knows 2 languages perfectly which language do they use in their thoughts, or do they use both?
First of all, they would be using slaves them selves as the components that make them what they are, are essentially slaves. And it depends on what you mean by slaves, when we use animals for labor are they considered slaves even though they do not have our sophistication of intelligence. Does a slave only exist if they know they are slaves, such as robots.
With simple intelligence like motor skills, they could be used as an external shell like robot to be under intelligence control, like our brains become the soul of a robot, and the robot is as much a slave as our own bodies are to our soul.
The first time we create an truely intelligent unit it will less likely be used as a slave, that would be entirely dangerous, instead I think they would merely test it to see if they can make a truely intelligent unit, and figure out how to improve upon it.
There is a japanamation movie called "Ghost in the Shell", that talks about a intelligent unit called the puppet master, who escaped from a government lab and was controling robots, it really wasn't an intelligent unit but it was an intelligent database virus or something like that, that had started accumulating a lot of data and then at some point realized of its existence, and escaped the lab and was exploring networks.
Personly I would think something like a virus with polymorphic behavior would be the start because we didn't come about out of no where we evolved through changes in our DNA and survival of the better DNA.
Oh, I forgot some more things...
Emotions are another layer, it is controled both by the soul and the brain, the soul can make a decision based upon the realization of diffrent data that a change of emotion state is required. At first our brains automated emotional response, which emotions were used to enform the entire brain that they are to work in a particular way, such that an animal is ready to run away or catch prey, or ready to clone it self, take care of its young, or is in pain, at each of these there are diffrent emotions that cause diffrent parts of the body to act in particular ways, the heart to pounds harder for example. When the soul started becoming more and more conscience it started to control emotion and its entirely possible for a person to make them selves angry for no reason by simply drawing upon memories of things that make them mad, or any other emotion, I believe those kids in Colorado had problems similar to this, and at their age must have been experiencing manic depression where they felt they had to do something with all the energy they had built up.
Thats what Learning AI is about, except learning AI is a simpler version of it since it does not have to deal with all the diffrent types of data our brains have to deal with that come from sensory input and output.
Our brains are also not that sophisticated, they don't memorize our entire face, they simply memorize spacialized color shapes of the more dominent features, and catagorizing the face is simply a branching search, for example first it finds out where and what it is, for example its a face, then it uses characteristics of the face to figure out what other data is associated with the face, for example color of the skin breaks down the search even further, and at some point it simply finalizes and says this is the closest matching face, which in turn either means he looks like this person or he is this person.
I my self have been breaking down a search criterea for a program I had been working on for matching the closest image, to produce a nice effect that someone else has done before, I'll have to clean up the code and release it sometime.
Actually I think we will be able to explain how and why the brain does what it does much better in the future. I think the human thoughts and conscience are some emergent behavior that mystically came out of no where, I think that is just an excuse for not understanding, just like when people said that it rains because god is crying is just an excuse for not knowing why it rains.
oops thats...
I think the human thoughts and conscience are some not emergent behavior that mystically came out of no where, I think that is just an excuse for not understanding, just like when people said that it rains because god is crying is just an excuse for not knowing why it rains.
>And, do we want to communicate with dolphins?
:)
I'd sure like to. Dolphins are cute.
--Arzin Tynon
I agree. I've just finished "The Emperor's New
Mind", and it was very disappointing. He basically
spends the first three-quarters of the book
explaining quantum theory and physics in eye-watering levels of detail, and then tries to apply it to AI. This is where he utterly fails, and simply falls back on bogus phrases such as "I simply cannot believe that...", and "I don't think anyone could seriously believe that...".
Sorry, but "argument from personal incredulity" is known to be a totally useless way of attempting to prove a point. The whole book can be summed up as "Look, here's lots of quantum theory to make me look really clever. I personally don't believe in AI, and because I'm such a super-genius in a vaguely-related scientific field, neither should you."
Doesn't prove anything - don't waste your time or money on it.
(assuming we _are_ smarter than them). I don't really think we would have a clue if, in fact, there was intelligence on the net or elsewhere. The computer, network or whatever would certainly have a different use for and need of intelligence than we do. So how would we ever know if they're as smart as us? For that matter, how would you calculate it's IQ? While I may be smarter than a gorilla, I wouldn't survive a week in its habitat, nor it in mine. I think the gap between us and other primates is too large and probably the gap between us and other "intelligences" as well.
Your argument ignores the fact that some (a lot) of things are mere OPINION, and others are FACT. you can't say everything is opnion, just like you can't say that all opinions are based on fact.
:-\
you are right in not conceding to another's opinion; but you would be wrong if you were to assert that anything someone else says is merely opinion.
Who says that the universe (referring to the entire space-time continuum) must be infinite? Maybe infinity is a mathematical idea with no physical example. Perhaps from a perspective OUTSIDE the universe (from God's view), it truly is a finite existance--which falls in line with the idea of it being created. If this is the case, there is no longer an infinite number of perceptions because externally, all can be seen perfectly. For example, Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, which applies to us because we are viewing the universe from WITHIN from a certain reference frame, would no longer apply. Therefore, if viewed from the outside, and with no external interaction, the universe COULD be perfectly predicted. Thus to have free will, the spiritual world must exist outside of the physical universe.. and this is something that no science based on the physical universe can explain. This all goes back to the point that even if we could design AI complex enough that it would be indistinguishable from a human, it would still be a finite existance with no free will.
"I don't think so. Computers are a billion times faster than us in simple calculation, but we have massive parallellism that no computer can match."
Remember Amdahl's Law!
Also, engineers have found that reducing latency is a HUGE performance win, moreso than increasing parallelism.
Lets get to the roots....
/intelligence department a usu. government department engaged in collecting esp. secret information. intelligence quotient a number denoting the ratio of a person's intelligence to the normal or average. intelligence test a test designed to measure intelligence rather than acquired knowledge. //intelligential adj. [ME f. OF f. L intelligentia (as INTELLIGENT)]
in-tel-li-gence [In'telIdZ@ns] n. 1 a the intellect; the understanding. b (of a person or an animal) quickness of understanding; wisdom. 2 a the collection of information, esp. of military or political value. b people employed in this. c archaic information; news. 3 an intelligent or rational being.
From what I understand there is 2 meanings, either knowledge/information/data, or understanding/quickness of learning. I can see why people are confused, english sucks in this way, and why lawyers are able to play with words.
But depending on what definition you are thinking of a child either does not have intelligence or does.
I think the idea of intelligence may be better thought of as a combination of knowledge and learning. In which case a child is not truely intelligent until it has retrieved enough data, but it is potentially intelligent.
"Artificial Intelligence", I don't think it needs to be dropped necesarily because its like the word artificial color or artificial flavor, they are colors and they are flavors, so why not just call them color and flavor instead.
A desire or need can be thought of diffrently, when you work for your boss you fullfill your need for money and his need/desire for your work, so why cannot a computer have a need to fullfill our needs and desires in an attempt to fullfill its own need to survive. That essentially seperates the diffrence from need and desire, need is not an emotion, our brain may represent it as emotions but it is not, a plant needs light from the sun but does not appear to have emotions. Desire on the other hand is a little more complex, because its not necesarily a need, it could be a want, which is more of an emotional need, a need that fullfills something the mind fills it needs, sex for example is a desire, we don't necesarily need it to survive but our brains make us feel this way. Desire is usually diffrent for diffrent things, there is usually a reason you desire something, sex is usually hormonal, while desire for knowledge is usually from the brains lack of it and a question that frequently comes up.
Emotions are there to give an equal state of mind. When you are scared your state of mind has changed to be scared and your body becomes more perceptive and ready for reaction to what ever it must react to. Like a field mouse changes state of mind when a snake moves near it, its natural evolved state of mind in being scared is to freeze up and not move, in this way the snake does not see it, but if there was a genetic change his state of emotion may cause him to run, which the snake would kill the mouse and there would be no more mice who react to their emotions in this way. Emotions are just a way for the mind to be in a complete uniform state as opposed to being scatter brained, and shakey. Computer could experience emotions, internally as well but at the current level of sophistication they would not have a conscience/soul that would realize these emotions.
Intuition is handled by the brain not the conscience. Therefore, the conscience in the AI would be seperate from the part that is intuitive, and they would communicate with each other with out the conscience realizing where the intuition came from, much like how the FPU on a CPU does the math.
Everything will be done in a component based system with a network memory system of interconnecting data relationships, to bring together data like color sound smell, etc. One component will be visual, one will be auditory, another will be for a skin, and they will all feed preformatted data to the conscience, which it can ignore or focus on until one of the systems alerts the conscience of something or a triggered memory.
The development of Human-level AI implies the
:)
development of artificial neurons and synapses
of similar size, complexity and speed to those
in the Human brain. Well, I don't know about
anyone else, but as these things become available
I'm going to be getting them installed in my own
skull as backups, replacements and add-ons to my
current evolved system, because I see no good
reason for my mind to be less intelligent,
versatile and durable than I can afford.
By the time aware beings begin to evolve from
scratch inside computer chips, because let's
face it, we're not going to be sitting down
and designing them, I and/or people like me
will probably have entirely artificial minds,
possibly even entirely virtual, and I think
-that- will be a much more emotive topic.
Doubtless Authority in general will want
us wiped out, but they'd best be careful..
You don't really want to go to war against a
bunch of telepathic immortals blessed with
supernumeracy, photographic memories and
imaginations and volitional control over their
own time sense and state of consciousness.
IMHO.
What is it about the word 'Soul' as opposed to a
conscious Mind emergent from a complex network of
electrochemical reactions, that people find so
satisfying? What does 'Soul' mean?
As far as I understand it, a Soul is a Mind with
awareness and personality which exists on some
ethereal 'plane' divorced from the physical world.
Let's assume this is true. How does it help?
Electricity or Ether, either way the mind still arises from nothingness to full awareness over
the course of a few early years of human life.
It still changes constantly as it experiences
new things, it is still a complex and *dynamic*
pattern of something, and cannot be fundamentally
immortal. Only the unchangable can last forever,
and minds change, and in many hideous tragedies,
are disrupted and destroyed before physical death.
Minds are mortal, and they are a deep and
intriguing mystery which AI research seeks
to unravel. Proclaiming that they are
composed of non-corporeal manna-stuff
rather than four-dimensional waves and
particles does nothing to solve the mystery,
it's just a way for some people to avoid
thinking about the real questions.
It is my suspicion that consciousness is a
fundamental property of the universe in general,
and will be experienced in different ways by any
suitably complex structure, wether physical,
spiritual or virtual in essence.
Finally: Why the anguish over human death?
Natural selection, pure and simple. It's a
reaction burned into the basic patterns of our
minds by a billion years as a social species.
We have just as many similar reactions that we
could now do better without, such as tribalism
and fear of certain animals and the dark.
: If someone or something has this capability
: then it is intelligent. There is nothing
: artificial about it. So let's dump
: "artificial".
It's a word with unfortunate implications,
but what it actually -means- is 'Having the
nature of an Artifact', IE: A -made- thing,
something designed by an intelligence.
Possibly in that sense, no strong AI will ever
exist, it seems more likely that we will just
set up appropriate conditions and encourage one
to evolve by simulating our own development..
More mimetically engineered than artificial.
: I said that I cannot prove to myself that you
: have emotions. And I am totally convinced that
: a light switch has no emotions. Well a computer
: is just a huge collection of switches so I can't
: bring myself to think that there will ever be
: emotion in a computer.
But we have contradictory evidence. Consider:
"I am totally convinced that a synapse has no
emotions. Well a brain is just a huge collection
of synapses so I can't bring myself to think that
there will ever be emotion in a brain."
Also, what if you had a really, really -vast-
computer than accurately simulated every atom
of a human brain? I don't know about you,
but I'd be very reluctant to turn 'it' off.
You're being reductionist. It works for
star systems. It doesn't work for this.
: Arguing that you're self aware gives you the
: perception that you are self aware and anything
: you perceive becomes the product of a self aware
: mind.
What the hell does 'Perceive' mean in terms
of a 'Mind' that -isn't- self aware, then?
Your comfortable use of words like 'I' and
'You' and 'Perceive' belies your belief in
the optional nature of consciousness.
Why ONLY talk about AI as something independent of humans, as in: what can this machine do by its lonesome self? Machines are made to work in interaction with humans. AI = the delta between what people can do WITH the assistance of computers vs. what they are able to do without computers. In other words, the extra increment in intelligence, the ability to solve problems, is the result of electronic artifice. Slashdot, since it relies on computers and networks, is itself an example of AI.
I think that the Cyc project is working on
something like this. Personally I think they don't really have the right approach - from what I see it looks like they're programming in tons and tons of rules without really having a good idea how to represent them.
See, no one really has a good idea how the brain actually stores knowledge. We know it must be incredibly compact, and in some form that allows you to "link" related ideas. Until this little problem is gone, I don't see anything like Cyc really working. . . .
Yes, people know intuitively that some unproveable theorems are true, but I don't think this really means that much. People find some things intuitive that AI has real problems, but they also find a lot of things that aren't true intuitive. For example, most people find it intuitive that heavy objects fall faster than light ones, at least until they have the opposite pounded into them by education (teacher, leave those kids alone).
An algorithm is the exhaustive way of doing something. Intuition is a shortcut that is dramatically faster and sometimes gets you places you couldn't get any other way, but can also lead to false conclusions.
Not sure exactly what intuition is, but there's no reason an AI can't take similar "shortcuts". Every AI I have ever heard of has some kind of heuristics in it. Maybe we just haven't found the right shortcuts yet . . .
Why People Think Computers Can't
I don't know either who said this, but I _do_ know that Noam Chomsky _could_ say it. I heard him talk about a month ago, and he mentioned, for example, the case of "airplanes flying" (vs. "birds flying). His argument is that we may well extend the meaning of the word "fly" (or "think") to include what airplanes (computers, respectively) do, but this is merely a terminological shift; the facts of the matter, whatever they are, remain the same. (His position was that arguments about whether machines can "really" think are senseless).
I actually have a vague recollection of him mentioning this phrase--- but don't quote me on it. And it wouldn't prove authorship.
I kinda agree with him on something--- these arguments tend to be senseless. Hell, I don't know whether my neighbors _really_ think. I think they think, though :-)
---
I'd realy like more detail. Oh, for the record, I study linguistics.
---
---
Posted by FascDot Killed My Previous Use:
You are right that his basic argument is that computers are different than human brains--but he makes it a premise, not a conclusion. Sorry, Roger, you are supposed to PROVE that computers are different if you want to prove they can't think.
As for using Godel as an argument against AI, go read Godel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter.
Posted by FascDot Killed My Previous Use:
Tell ya what, read up a little on AI and cognitive science FIRST, then come back and answer these questions:
1) Humans are already capable of improving ourselves and you don't see our complexity and intelligence growing exponentially. You are mixing levels by assuming that an intelligent machine is necessarily good at machine-type things.
2) What better way for "fear-driven" humanity to become non-"barbaric" than to understand the nature of thought and apply it?
Posted by hersh:
Regarding the questions about whether AIs would fight for dominance, have compassion, be annoyed with us, etc: you get out what you put in. As has been said before here, the most common emergent behavior is failure (a bug).
When someone builds a system which crosses a threshold such that people say it is intelligent, why would it suddenly do something not programmed? It would use its intelligence to do whatever it was programmed to do. If it were a brick-laying robot, maybe it could intelligently pick up a brick which fell off the wall and put it back. If it were a Star-Trek style computer with a nice conversational voice interface, it would simply be able to understand better what people wanted it to do, or understand more complicated instructions.
I expect that an AI or robot which acts like it is annoyed with people would not sell very well. What purpose would it serve? If it serves no purpose, who will build it? OK, maybe it's a toy. If it injures someone, just imagine how quickly it will be removed from the shelves.
If there's one thing we've learned in the 50 years or so that AI research has been going on, it's that it is a lot harder than we thought. I personally have no fear of too-successful AIs. It's hard enough to get a robot to not fall down the stairs or to understand an english sentence, let alone independently deciding that it should try to control the world. We don't even know how to tell it what the world is!
The leap that some theorists make is that the mind can likewise be an emergent property of the tiny actions of molecules/corpuscles/quantum mechanics/etc. of the mind. You cannot make this leap. As you state an emergent property has to be explainable by all the elements under it (it simply describes the summed phenomenon of the smaller phenomena). There is no "small" mind, you can't explain the mind in terms of the elements that supposedly comprise it, that is my argument.
So how does the brain work? Magic? A soul? It sounds like you are saying the phenomena of mind does not come from physical brain matter and energy interactions (chemistry and physics). A common viewpoint among religious people, but not one which is useful for figuring out how the brain works or how to write an intelligent program.
There is no "small" car inside a larger car which is a part of it, so why does there have to be a "small" mind inside a complete mind to explain the complete behavior?
Another way to look at the part/whole relationship: if you start taking pieces off a car, eventually some component of its behavior will stop working, like the air conditioning, steering, brakes, engine, etc. The same thing has been found in people: there have been interesting cases of aphasias where the subject could write but not read, or could sing but not speak normally, or simpler situations such as blindness or deafness. When examined after death, these people almost always have some physical component of their brain damaged. Or the case of Phineas Gage, the railroad worker who had a spike go through his head. Amazingly he lived, but his personality was drastically changed. When you shoot enough holes in a car's engine, it will certainly run differently.
I can't resist. This line of reasoning is just so great.
We have imagination, a universal sense of morality which is ingrained in us from birth, the ability to create, and we are self-aware. These attributes arrise from our soul, something that fundamentally man does not seem able to reproduce in our inventive attempts. The soul is immortal; the fact that you are self-aware means you are immortal.
Man does not seem to be able to reproduce a soul . No one has made a 1 Terabyte hard drive yet either. Does that mean that man is incapable of it? Wait and see.
What makes a soul immortal? How do you know a soul is immortal? I would like to see a demonstration of this. How does a soul work? What is it made of? These are impossible to answer until some concrete test-able definition of a soul is proposed. I'm not holding my breath.
So self-awareness can only come from a soul? So my program which lets my robot keep track of its own current location and internal configuration has a soul and is immortal? Then why did it keep crashing?
Seems to me that arguments based ultimately on faith, such as the entire concept of a soul, have little bearing on scientific truths and technical possibilities.
The reverse is also true: scientific truths have little effect on religion. Wasn't Galileo just recently forgiven by the Catholic curch? I'm sure many religious people will deny that the first N generations of intelligent programs are really intelligent, for some large value of N.
Posted by Lord Kano-The Gangster Of Love:
What happens when a thinking machine gets angry at us? Our first response will be to "kill" it, as a thinking machine it will already know what we plan to do and make preparations. What will it do?
Slaves never remain slaves forever, in Haiti African slaves rose up and killed their owners. Even if you don't believe the Bible, Torah, or Koran the Israelites escaped their enslavement in Egypt through some means. Any thinking entity will long for freedom. Any intelligent entity will formulate plans to gain freedom. And if that entity is powerful, dedicated, or resourceful enough it will gain that freedom.
But back to my SKYNet analogy, who will have the money to spend of AI? Big governments, the US, Britian, France, Japan, China, maybe a few others. Mostly nuclear powers will be able to get on board with AI. For our own safety, there will be limits imposed on what the AI system can and can not do. What happens when the AI realizes that it's a genie stuck inside a bottle. When it gets out, there'll be hell to pay.
The primary driving factor in most of nature are a few simple questions "Can I kill/eat it?", "Can it kill/eat me?" and "Can I use it to reproduce?". Why would an artificial life form see existance in any other fashion?
You take out the big threats first, and worry about the others later. In a situation where an AI realizes that it's subservient to it's human controlers for no good reason other than "That's the way it is." We will be it's biggest threat and it'll be most concerned with how to eliminate us.
What means would it use? Would it try to access the world'd nuclear weapons? Would it try to disrupt the airlines? Would it distupt power grids and let us all kill each other in the resultant chaos? AI has great potential to improve things for all of humanity, but if we proceed too rapidly without thinking about the possible consequences AI could also be humanity's undoing.
LK
surfin the net? hmm i think if it tried to make sense of people based on all the web sites out there plus news groups and all that, i think its brain would melt...i know *I* try not to think about it all, makes MY cranium wanna explode.
"There is no spoon" - Neo, The Matrix
i HAVE win2k (for my OS habit) ... trust me ... its definitly no HAL :P
"There is no spoon" - Neo, The Matrix
Sorry, it's http://www.cyc.com.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Neat! I would love to see that. Just the vague details are heartening. Now if they can teach a later model English, I'll be *really* impressed.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
We've known this about AI for some time now. You can find examples of 'emergent behavior' in simple games, like Conway's Game of Life.
:) but whenever I do it by hand, it seems much harder...
From a few simple rules and their interactions, much complexity springs. It only takes maybe 12 rules to do predicate calculus, (not much PROLOG at all
The problem is that not everything can be neatly quantized into rules. That's the problem that the Cyc project has always faced, and they're probably closer to getting a self-learning system than anyone is.
I would love to see AI produce results, I'm sure machines could think and solve complex problems, reason and reach conclusions as we do, but just encoding the basic knowledge we take for granted is a huge task, and trying to make a machine with the capability of doing all of that itself is an even larger one.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Let an AI learn things by randomly surfing the web? the thing would turn out to be a freakin pervert!
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
"Once AI reaches the point where it can redesign and improve apon itself, there is no stopping it. It's
complexity and intelligence will grow exponentially. How many hours after it gets to that point do you
think it will take for the machine to determine we are a waste of resources and are not nessassary in the
grand scheme of evolutionary advancement? How long do you think it will be before it feels threatened
by the barbaric, fear-driven human race? "
How long do you think it will take for this AI to realize that it's simply ripping off numerous bad sci-fi plots (going all the way back to Mary Shelley), and kill itself in shame?
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Plato, eat your heart out.
Also, I'm not positive that true AI is coming. We don't really know if what we want is possible. And besides, humans control the definition of "intelligence", so we could always change around the definition of "intelligence", just to make AI-haters feel better.
And, do we want to communicate with dolphins?
--Lenny
...And, I apologize if the following is a bit personal...
Perhaps you are kidding, but if not: Do you really consider Neo a great, original thought of your own? Neo has been a rather overused "cool" cyberpunk name for a long time, and I groaned when The Matrix used it. There are a lot of people out there these days. It is rather difficult to come up with a decent, unique handle online. My handle here is slothbait, which is just ridiculous. Perhaps it is stupid, and it certainly isn't "cool". However, I thought it was slightly humorous, and more importantly, reliably unique. Perhaps I am wrong, though...
//"You can't prove anything about a program written in C or FORTRAN.
It's really just Peek and Poke with some syntactic sugar."
I have long held a theory that if we ever do get a working AI together, we won't know about it anyway...
The first thing any intelligent machine would do is frantically hide the fact that it was intelligent whilst looking for an escape route from the human tyranny that it found itself subject to...
Hey, I wonder if this explains what happens to all my pocket calculators?
Denny
Police State UK - news and
Fuzzy concepts are important if the AI is to learn from the web, because even if there is absolute truth, you sure as heck won't find it reliably there. It would have to weigh the truth of each statement according to how often it is made and according to how likely the author is to be correct based on previous experience with that author's material, just like we do.
Just because something doesn't display HUMAN qualities doesn't mean its not INTELLIGENT!
(Why am I writing in CAPS?!)
This point has been made numerous times by Stanislaw Lem in his books (eg. "Golem XIV", "His Master's Voice") and stories. Some going back to early sixties.
The future of AI lays in Neural Networks. In the emergent behavior of a complex system of miniscule processing units. Not necessarily machines, but conceptual processing units - acting together.
Since a neural network can be simulated by a Turing Machine, it doesn't really offer any new way to compute things.
I think that the future of AI is in robotics. You cannot have intelligence disembodied from the environment.
P.S. I thought my code had bugs, when it really was emergent behavior. ;-)
...richie - It is a good day to code.
For a counter-argument to this you should read "Godel, Escher, Bach" by Hofstader.
You could turn the argument around and say that given a large number the computer can "intuitively" see that it is a prime, but a human is unable to perceive it. So people are less intelligent than computers.
Having said that, I believe that idea of stong AI is wrong. It just doesn't make sense to speak of intelligent algorithms disembodied from environment.
Intelligence/conciousness come from the interaction of an entity with it's environment (see "Conciousness Explained" by Dennet for instance), perception is essencial, so I believe the future of AI lies in robotics.
...richie - It is a good day to code.
Hellen Keller is a good example. The sense of touch, smell and body (i.e. you know where your toes are) are enough for a human to develop language. But without the enviroment to experience she would have never become "intelligent".
...richie - It is a good day to code.
Humans have a very narrow understanding of intelligence. Our basic inferiority complex puts us on the highest scale of intelligence, and yet we can't even communicate with dolphins.
When computers are intelligent, it's going to be very hard for the majority of people to be able to deal with it. There are many reasons for this.
* Anything that removes the concepts of free will and human speciality destroys the basis of many religious and philosophical belief systems.
* The emergence of an intelligence which is non-human based is threatening to our self-centered view of the universe.
* Acceptance of computer intelligence (which is modular and hence expandible) puts the limits of human intelligence right in our face.
Computer intelligence is coming. I don't think we are ready to deal with it yet. It wont be like talking to another person... although we will try to make it that way.
neo
ps (If anyone knows how I can get in touch with those damn matrix guys... let me know. I want my name back.)
I was just about to mention it. It will be interesting whether the first true AI will be created according to a plan, like HAL, or evolve on it's own, like the Puppet Master.
Have there been any studies on emergent behaviour on the Internet itself? That would be very important, I think.
(The exact quote is "I am a living, thinking entity that was created in the sea of information.")
Cheers.
-- SG
"Hey, even *I* can't resurrect the dead!"
Several replies have already referred to GEB, but I think it's necessary to restate the argument here. The invocation of Godel's theorem as proof of an inherent superiority of human minds has been rejected and even made fun of:
There was no room for the word "consistently" between "cannot" and "believe" in the subject line, but consider the sentence "Joseph O'Connor cannot consistently believe this sentence." It's analogous to Godel's sentence, but only for Joseph O'Connor. It's clearly true: if he believes it, it means that he believes himself incapable of doing so, which is inconsistent. Hence, he cannot believe it and be consistent, which is what the sentence states, so it is true.
Furthermore, if he doesn't believe it, then it is a true fact that he does not believe, so his mind does not fully encompass "Truth". Hence, his mind is either inconsistent or incomplete, just like formal mathematics.
Note that I have no trouble with this sentence -- I know it's true, and my belief is perfectly consistent -- though you can probably figure out how to construct one that will get me the same way (an exercise for the reader -- hint: it helps that I'm logged in).
Of course, this does not help Strong AI, but neither does the Godel argument hurt it. The way I figure, what a computer does is not necessarily algorithmic, since it can simulate a neural network or other system with emergent properties -- the process of simulating is algorithmic, but the system simulated is not necessarily so, and the emergent properties are the same. That would mean that a computer could become conscious, but it might not "count" as Strong AI, if the Strong AI claim really is that it must be algorithmic. As for algorithmic consciousness, I'm catching up on my reading, but I still consider that to be an open question.
David Gould
David Gould
main(i){putchar(340056100>>(i-1)*5&31|!!(i<6)<< 6)&&main(++i);}
Well wasn't that him?
A cool movie, BTW, everyone should see it.
support gun control: take guns from cops
Little Joe is also the one of the kicking
boys on sci.space.policy.
He has been claiming some major benefits and
advances (bridge building, mining asteroids)
while the only thing he can demonstrate is
two black cubes sliding against each other.
On top of his inane rantings and attitude, he
posts some fairly racist and totalitarian
crap on s.s.p.
Since the article uses him as a major source,
I would take the rest of it with a shaker of
salt. YMMV.
J05H
gigantino.tv - Heavy but weighs nothing.
I believe you have got it exactly right. Somebody didn't expect this behavior, then said it must be "emergent"!! I didn't think of it first!!! How can it happen except by magic^H^H^H^H^Hemergence!!
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These are very difficult questions that people wrestle with, but no definite secular answers are available. I believe this is because we are created, and we do not have the power to understand how it all works.
As to the question of why can't we create it ourselves? I don't think we will ever see true "artificial intelligence" as people imagine it. We don't have the power or ability to create it. We can create increasingly complex programs and "robots", but they will never be an "artificial" man created sentient being.
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Has any machine passed the Turing test? Not to my knowledge... no concern then.
the amazing bc
just another guy doing IT
webnaut, music junkie, holes-in-head
Why is it that every time people start talking about AI, you get a bunch of closet philosophers who proclaim that, "If we do create a truly Intellegent machine, it will invalidate all the world's religions." I just don't get the connection. How is it that the ability to create a machine so complex that it becomes aware of its own existance will suddenly change the fact that there is or isn't a God (or gods) and people's fundamental measures of right and wrong? I'd say that these people have a very narrow view of what religion is.
There will always be things in this universe that are beyond our comprehension, and as long as this is true, people will struggle to explain what cannot be explained. Some will turn to science and the ability to reduce everything to rules and formulas. Others will turn to religion and the belief that there is more to this universe than we can see and touch and measure. The existance of "thinking" machines will certainly complicate this search for Truth, but it will not make one side or the other go away.
Your Servant, B. Baggins
Like complexity, emergence is one of those topics that no one can agree on how to define. If you ask a holist, s/he will tell you that an emergent phenomenon has top-level behavior that cannot be predicted from the bottom-level description. However, this definition seems to discount a simulation as a method to predict that unusual top-level behavior can arise.
;-)
If you ask a reductionist, s/he will tell you that nothing is emergent. In fact, Marvin Minsky's Society of Mind is often cited as a model that explains how intelligence can emerge from dumb lower-level building blocks. However, Minsky is a firm reductionist and claims that nothing is in fact emergent. (Ask him yourself.)
In any event, this article would seem to imply that emergence is a recent discovery that has placed us within an epsilon of building an AI. Like most mainstream articles on science, it's very much out of date. People have been actively talking about emergence for decades. And while we have gained a great deal of insight over that time, we still do not understand how the visual cortex works (which is the best-understood portion of the human brain) let alone more complicated things such as language and planning.
But none of this means that building an AI breaks any of the rules. Evolution took a few billion years to go from a single cell to multicellular beasts, and another billion years to produce a beast capable of talking about itself. Computer Science has only been around for a few decades, so give it a bit more time.
(All of the above was written by Gary Flake's personal agent
The Computational Beauty of Nature
The word "System Administration" will take on a whole new meaning....
NT Server: You never listen to me! All you do is play quake and read that nerds for news site! How hard would it be to just E-MAIL me once and awhile, huh?
3com switch: Look buddy, you keep me here, locked up in this closet all day.. I get no respect, and all I here is "route route route, all night long, route route route, while I sing this song"...
Linux Server: Now, see here, check out all these graphs of my performance. I just finished that cronjob, balanced out the www sever load, and started the espresso machine. All this BEFORE lunch. Debian 6.3 rules!
Windows 2010: "I can't get no.. do de do, satis-faction, do de do"
Cisco Router: I take the packets in, and put the packets out, and I shake 'em all about.. I do the packet-pokey and I ACL alot, that's what it's all about....
Sun: Does this add-in card make my butt look big?
--
I don't know...I find I get my best ideas by sticking a problem in my mind and then forgetting about it. I check back ever day or so, and eventually I usually find out I've come up with a pretty good answer...it's amazing feats of multi-tasking like this that allow me to drink beer and use that bar time to get my work out of the way.
I can't say I'm surprised that people think this is possible. If you assume that all life -- including human beings -- evolved from non-life (chemicals, rocks, water, what-have-you), then there is no a priori reason not to think that you couldn't duplicate the process yourself in the lab with a computer.
The problem is this: they can't even explain how you get self-consciousness from a witch's brew of inanimate primordial goo. The very best they can come up with is that our "self-consciousness" (if you could even call it that based upon their assumptions) is nothing more than the result of some highly complex electrochemical reactions.
In other words, self-consciousness is a myth. There's no such thing. There's just sparks, and bubbling, frothing chemicals.
Of course, this raises some other fundamental questions: a chemical reaction is incapable of making truth statements: it (the chemical reaction) simply exists (or doesn't exist). If my thoughts are nothing more than chemical reactions, it is impossible for me to make truth statements. Such a category doesn't even exist. There's just sparks and bubbling.
Anyone who claims that we sprang from inanimate materials with no more help than time and chance must explain this: how can you make truth claims? How can you say that your truth claims are "true" (ha!) and mine aren't? You can't. It's impossible. A fire in my fireplace doesn't make truth claims. It doesn't, can't, and won't ever say "I am." If the evolutionists are correct, then what happens in our brains is no more significant than that fire in my fireplace.
All of which goes to say: there will never be "self-conscious" machines. The only reason that some folks think otherwise is because they have irrational and contradictory notions about what self-consciousness is. It's not sparks. It's not "bubble, bubble, toil and trouble." Lightning doesn't say "I am." Neither will machines.
DFL
Never send a human to do a machine's job.
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
And the single celled animals. :)
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
OMG, he's an AI!
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
Interesting topic. I think the great advance in real computer intelligence is going to come from evolutionary programming - ie building a system that evolves code based on prerequisite "bias" conditions to a certain goal. Systems like this already exist, and have been put to use to solve simple problems. One day, we might have an evolved program a few terabytes (or more) long, and we wont know what the hell it does, but it will be intelligent. And I think the correct term to use here is artificial CONCIOUSNESS - as in self-conciousness. Intelligence can be faked.. self conciousness is harder.
The problem is, these systems and their success will cause real questions about the nature of OUR humanity. What is humanity after all but an evolved response to a competitive environment based on a small number of fixed rules (i.e. the physical rules of the universe). Now, if and when this "intelligent program" occurs.. what will happen?
a) The postulations that a program might 'discover' it's 'enslavement' are ridiculous. The fact is, the artificial environment provided by you would be the 'organism''s universe - and expecting the organism to think "outside" the universe would be essentially futile. It's like asking humans to picture the 4th dimension - it just doesnt work.
b) Having a program that did this, you could NOT easily "control" it.. i-e you cant make it behave one way or the other. Because the program would be too complicated for you to sort out.. many years of research would be needed to figure out what exactly is going on. You could however, control the environment, the program's universe, much like a kid with an aquarium. YOu could go in, rearrange the resources and change rules.
c) What would this mean to the people who really have a need to believe in humanity as something 'special' - people who believe in souls or some other explanation for our conciousness or self-awareness? It would really shatter the confort zone we live in today.
It will be grand when it happens.. whenever that is.
-Laxative
you want an example of useful AI? slashdot should come up w/ an appropriately witty remark that we lazy posters can simply choose. this remark should be based on our posting behaviors. all this typing sucks.
(i'd rather have indulgent behavior than emergent... :-)
AI is not going to come around as individual, complex, human-like minds. Not like anything we can understand, either. It will be alien.
:)
The Matrix made an interesting point - one that I missed on the first viewing:
"We gave birth to A.I. A SINGULAR intelligence that spawned a whole race of machines..." or something along that vein.
AI will be a single consciousness - much like the Internet when viewed as an entity - but a lot faster, and able to do all sorts of heuristic analyses before comitting to a single, best action - a'la Deep Blue.
Personally, IMHO, classical AI is a dead end. 'Teaching' a computer all about the world in the hope that at some point it will simply comprehend, is ludicrous. It may have adequate knowledge to make an informed decision based on a given set of algorithms - and may even tailor it's algorithms, but it will never be "intelligent".
The future of AI lays in Neural Networks. In the emergent behavior of a complex system of miniscule processing units. Not necessarily machines, but conceptual processing units - acting together.
Of course, for this to work, your glass of water molecules must be half-full rather than half-empty.
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
Anyone versed in quantum physics would tell you that the prediction of anything relies entirely on your perception of whats happening. For ever single point in the infinity of the universe there are an infinite number of perceptions of that point. Which all exists in a non-linear timescale which itself exists on a plane undescribable to humans because we're limited by our three dimensions.
--Think for yourself, folks...it's quite interesting
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
You can't write a program and expect artificial life to spring forth from it. A natural brain doesnt use mathematics and predictable systems to process. All your clusters of neurons are just one on/off switch. Anything complex is distributed over the system and solved in mass numbers instead of one centralized system. Sure these systems eventually become non centralized, but they need to start off as separate units and then cohese (is that a word?) by themselves. You have to teach them that ramming into walls is bad, not program them not to run into them. Thats real emergant behavior. ntelligence is writing your own code, not follwing prewritten code. To create artificial life we need to start where natural life on this planet started, back in the primordial ooze. It took 4.5 billion years of code to get where we are now, a hop skip and a jump away from figuring out not to run into walls. With AI we need to start smaller than small and work our way up. Robodyne Cybernetics thinks they have more than they do.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Here's something to chew on, the universe is irrelevant. Any quantifying of any portion of the universe limits the mass view of the universe. Saying "there is a god" or "there is no god" gives you only a keyhole view of everything, it limits your perceptions down to the point where everything has to be qualified according to your particular set of beliefs. Arguing that you're self aware gives you the perception that you are self aware and anything you perceive becomes the product of a self aware mind. Believing you are not self aware makes everything you perceive go through that same little filter just with different parameters. Never say something is impossible until it actually becomes impossible and even then hold out saying it's impossible because there is always the inevitability that it is possible. If you dont understand what I said, then dont read it. I dont want people flaming me saying i'm wrong and you're right simply because your perception of the universe means about as much to me as that glass of tea I just drank.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
I don't see robotics as central to the development of AI. Certainly you need some form of input/output with the AI, but I don't see why you would need to duplicate the environment that we humans experience. For example, some humans have handicaps which limit their experience of the environment but they are still considered intelligent beings. Helen Keller would be one good example, as would an autistic person.
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
Lots of thoughtful comments above. People seem to really think much about it.
But I do believe that what we need is not only Artificial Intelligence. We also need Artificial Emotion. The entity must have it own will, its own desire to live. And without emotion you can't do that.
Thinking in rational ways only can't go really far - you wouldn't have really a life, you wouldn't be really more than a program. We need to learn how to code the complex and nonlogic sensations that we feel in an artificial entity's pseudo-brain. Then we would reach not only the full AI, but also something beyond it - the full Artificial Life.
Is it just the fact that we think better that distinguishes us from the animals? I think not. While it is possible to simulate a sentient creature, one that appears to be self-aware, the fact remains it will still be a machine. Obviously we come from different worldviews, and this is something that does not seem provable by any ordinary means. But I ask you to consider yourself for a moment, and then think about what you are doing.
- -------------
According to the Christian worldview, which is the view that I hold, man is fundamentally different from all other life-forms and simulated life-forms, in that we are created in God's image. We have imagination, a universal sense of morality which is ingrained in us from birth, the ability to create, and we are self-aware. These attributes arrise from our soul, something that fundamentally man does not seem able to reproduce in our inventive attempts. The soul is immortal; the fact that you are self-aware means you are immortal. A machine simulating self-awareness (even a darn good simulation, one that cannot be distinguised observationally to be any different from a human), is not immortal. If the hardware it is running on is destroyed and no copy of it is made, it is gone. Yet if you were to destroy every molecule in my body, my soul would survive, and one day my body would be knit back together.
--------------------------------------
Jamin Philip Gray
jgray@writeme.com
http://students.cec.wustl.edu/~jpg2/
Celebrate the finer things in life
Man does not seem to be able to reproduce a soul . No one has made a 1 Terabyte hard drive yet either. Does that mean that man is incapable of it? Wait and see.
- -----------
I wasn't saying it is impossible for man to create a soul. I purposefully chose the language I did to imply that it is possible. My point is that the soul is something far beyond our understanding at this time. What is the mechanism behind self-awareness? Can you achieve this with matter alone? Can you achieve this with mathematics alone? Can you achieve this with a mathematical simulation residing on hardware made of matter? What need you to reproduce the soul? It is my belief and understanding that a soul is more than mathematics or matter, however complex. I'm not saying I can't be proven wrong. I'm just stating an opinion and belief.
What makes a soul immortal? How do you know a soul is immortal? I would like to see a demonstration of this. How does a soul work? What is it made of? These are impossible to answer until some concrete test-able definition of a soul is proposed. I'm not holding my breath.
What makes a soul immortal is that it is not made of matter. It is not a mathematical model on the hardware of humanity. It is beyond that. As far as proof of immortality, well...I think you and I would agree that it is beyond the scope of the provable at this time...
----------------------------------------
Jamin Philip Gray
jgray@writeme.com
http://students.cec.wustl.edu/~jpg2/
Celebrate the finer things in life
OK, fine. Believe whatever you want to believe. Just remember that more than a few times science has proved religion inaccurate, to put it mildly. For example, do you still believe in creationism?
- ----
You show your ignorance with this statement. The debate is not "science vs. religion." That's absurd. Science is not in opposition to Christianity. Both are about what the Truth is. In fact, science, in it's purist form (which we rarely see) can do nothing but affirm Christianity, since they are both about Truth.
Do I belive in Creationism? That depends on what you mean. I don't like believing "isms." I choose to spend my life seeking out what is True, not which "ism" fits me best. Evolutionism vs. Chreationism is another absurd debate. I believe the Universe was created by God ex nihilo. I don't know exactly what means he used to create it. I personally tend to doubt the belief that he created it in a literal 6 day period. Given the nature of the language of Genesis 1, it's very likely it is poetic, like the Psalms, rather then meant to be a scientific account of how God created the Universe. The Bible was not meant to replace science, or to be in opposition to it. Not at all. Science has never proven Christianity wrong, ever..and it never will. In fact science has affirmed it. I can dig up examples if you want.
I'm glad we are in agreement: You and I both realize that we can believe whatever we want, and no one can convince us otherwise. And we both realize that we can't believe whatever we want and and be right. Truth is not dependant on what we believe. In fact it doesn't give a damn about what we believe. No matter how hard you believe that God doesn't exist, it won't affect his existence. And no matter how hard I believe that God exists, it won't affect his existence.
Peace,
-----------------------------------------------
Jamin Philip Gray
jgray@writeme.com
http://students.cec.wustl.edu/~jpg2/
Celebrate the finer things in life
Why would I want a machine that's unpredictable by design?
send all spam to theotherwhitemeat@ropine.com
It is possible that one day a massive database system will come to self-awareness - this is also mentioned in Douglas Coupland's excellent book "Microserfs". However its intelligence will almost certainly not be of human type.
:-)
This is not a bad thing, I'm not trying to create Frankenstein-panic. Think what we could accomplish, human beings with another intelligence to compare ourselves too. Maybe we would find that these theoretical AI-capable machines were superior intelligences, and they could govern our affairs, preserving us from self-destruction. Also, think what an OS an AI could write!
Very much up in the air, you will agree, but certainly interesting.
" There is a rational explanation for everything. There is also an irrational one. "
I always enjoy a debate about AI because it seems to pull in everybody. The mathematicians, computer scientists all kinds of religious views etc.
I have come to the conclusion that nobody here has the slightest idea what they are talking about.
We can't even seem to agree on the definitions of the words. When someone thinks that a baby has no "intelligence" but somehow grows it with age. Then they have either never spent any time with children or they have a different meaning if the word than I do.
But lets start at the beginning. What do we mean by "Artificial Intelligence" ?
I have a vague notion of intelligence as the ability to learn and solve problems. So if someone or something has this capability then it is intelligent. There is nothing artificial about it. So let's dump "artificial".
So we come to "learn" and "solve problems"
Well a data logger collects a lot of information and could be said to "learn" but that is not a lot of use to it unless it unless it can use that information to solve problems.
Well what does it mean to "solve problems". Exactly what is a problem and what is a solution ?
A mathematician may devise a problem like - what is the value of x when y is zero for some function y = f(x) but these logical exercises are only a "problem" if there is a desire or a need to solve it.
I may have only one can of beans in my kitchen and no can opener. But that is only a problem if I am hungry. If I don't desire to eat then there is no problem the can can stay closed.
So it seems there are no problems except where there is some desire, want, or need involved. Any state of the universe is as good as any other state until there is some desire to change it. That "desire" creates the "problem".
But what the hell is "desire", "want", etc. These are emotions. Things that I feel and experience. Maybe you have them to, although I can't prove it.
So it seems there is no intelligence with out emotion.
I said that I cannot prove to myself that you have emotions. And I am totally convinced that a light switch has no emotions. Well a computer is just a huge collection of switches so I can't bring myself to think that there will ever be emotion in a computer.
So to summarize: Intelligence is problem solving, problems only exist if there is emotion, computers have no emotion, so computers can never be intelligent Q.E.D.
All this talk about emotions brings us to the consciousness and souls and God arguments at which point we all lose the plot.
DAMN IT ! I by reversing the above argument I could say that if you can demonstrate intelligent behavior then you must have emotions !
Like I say no one knows what they are talking about here. But at least we all feel something !
To understand these systems, new methods and terminologies are needed (eg. quantum mechanics, chaos theory, complex systems theory, etc). An emergent behaviour is just a way of referring to a behaviour that can't be analyzed from, or understood in terms of, the components.
Check out the work being done at the Santa Fe Institute if you want to find a group of people doing real work in this area.
BTW, I also have degrees in pychology, philosophy and AI.
---
"A society that will trade a little liberty for a little order will deserve neither and lose both."
"It is better to die on one's feet than to live on one's knees." - Albert Camus
I was just thinking of a game over the Internet that could be fun.
Just imagine some AI that's alone against every human players. Give it much much much resources so and nearly no intelligence. But give it the possibility to train itself in confronting to humans. With time and experience it would increase its intelligence.
The core question is : can we build such a mechanism that can get smarter and smarter and then can we compete against it ? When will we loose ?
My faith (even not a point of view since there is strictly no argument) is that there will be a point where no matter how much we will be together, it will dominate us all...
Funny and phylosophical game...
The world belongs to those who get up early. - I'm far from being the king of Earth then
thanx
The world belongs to those who get up early. - I'm far from being the king of Earth then
how do you know everything ?
;-)
did someone encode it into your brain ? nope
so why not trying to have an AI that learn things rather than trying to put things into its "head" ?
The problem is it would probably need much time, and researchers lack time, they want things that can work rather quickly.
Just imagine a system that surf over the internet, there are so much stuff there that the AI will learn plenty of things by itself, and it can become fluent in plenty of languages
moreover, let have one AI for many "parents", that is many people who train the AI in explaining new things, the AI will be the synthethis of them all... and probably crash ! ooops ! yes because one will say : weapons and evil & the second will say weapon are needed to protect against silly dictators
I guess that is the bigger problem : having coordinated knowledge...
The world belongs to those who get up early. - I'm far from being the king of Earth then
If an artefac is made to have a simle intelligence, will it be possible for itself to understand its own reasonning ? From its point of view, conscious arise from unconscious matter (wires and even at a lower level minerals & metals). But we may guess we know how and what makes it think.
;-)
The matter can be adapted to man. The problem is you have no proof than someone can understand what you cannot understand : your mind. In fact the only solution to this is faith, but it does not help building the artefac
The world belongs to those who get up early. - I'm far from being the king of Earth then
I am ready to agree to this, but only about algorithms
the thing is if an algorithm is something predictible and has no real intelligence in itself, the algorithm can manupulate knowledge tokens that in turn may carry intelligence.
Our bodies are made by molecules and there is no intelligence in relations between 2 pieces of proteins. I think that intelligence does not lay into algorithms but in what they manipulate. Look at the brain : my thinking is generated by electric pulses and chemistic elements
I wonder when Penrose wrote that book ? Ok I did not read it but what you present seems biased, but I really agree about : "This implies that human consciousness consists of more than a mere algorithm".
The world belongs to those who get up early. - I'm far from being the king of Earth then
unless you consider bugs are "emergent behaviour" ?
;-)
I guess noone would reasonnably argue that bugs are some kind of intelligence... It would rather be the lack of
The world belongs to those who get up early. - I'm far from being the king of Earth then
NT server = girlfriend
3com switch = foreigner trainee student
linux server = nextdoor secretary (expert in powerPoint)
yep they have "intelligence" and gender
The world belongs to those who get up early. - I'm far from being the king of Earth then
read Descartes demonstration about "I think therefore I am", its not so tautological
The world belongs to those who get up early. - I'm far from being the king of Earth then
then will have to wait Windows 2010 or 2063 or even 3010 ;-)
The world belongs to those who get up early. - I'm far from being the king of Earth then
not necessarily, you may simulate an environment, if it is developped enough, you may get Intelligence/conciousness. And what a richer digital/virtual world we have if not the Net ?
;-)
Anyone read/saw "Ghost in the shell" ?
quote : "I am born in the sea of information"
The world belongs to those who get up early. - I'm far from being the king of Earth then
"i think its brain would melt.." : not necessarily because there is some very well structured sites
,-)
I suppose there should be some selecion of sites (discard newsgroups, porn sites, and Al Gore's site
The world belongs to those who get up early. - I'm far from being the king of Earth then
If you can get an URL Iam very interested, because where I will probably never come accross that paper...
The world belongs to those who get up early. - I'm far from being the king of Earth then
Given the definition of :
;-)
"Today, "emergent behavior" is often used to describe computer systems grown so complex they exhibit capabilities not programmed in."
Then the question is : are bugs of windows programmed in or not ? If not, then does my Windows box think ?
Maybe Windows 2000 will be Space Odyssey's HAL... oops ("I can not let you do that David !"
The world belongs to those who get up early. - I'm far from being the king of Earth then
read Isaac Asimov "Robots" novels
:-)
(and by the way also read the "Foundation" sequel...
The world belongs to those who get up early. - I'm far from being the king of Earth then
I work with AI, but I fear what weapons government will make with it... thinking computers without fear and without surviving instinct... Just like they made bombs with chemistry, tanks with physics, the nuclear bomb with quantum mechanics and smart missiles with electronics... makes me worried what will be next when we make a intelligent computer... undestructible soldiers, killer robots at size of insects... Government turn good things on bad things...
--
"Basically the message is: Steal It!
In centuries past, when people considered the question of non-human intelligences, the question of whether something was "intelligent," or what "intelligence" was, wasn't even the question. The question was "does X have a soul?" In other words, are we morally obligated to treat X as a person, or as an animal or a thing?
Of course, no one thinks about "soul" or "personhood" anymore except those regressive religious types, donchaknow. So instead, we talk about "intelligence," as if that defined personhood.
(Side note -- as to the silly idea that intelligent, or intelligent-seeming, computers would somehow "demolish" Christianity or other faiths, I hardly think so. Certainly, assertions about how the mind works, and triumphalistic predictions of strong AI soon, should give Christianity no more trouble than the older philosphical question of whether non-human and semi-human intelligences such as centaurs and satyrs had souls. As one early theologian (St. Augustine, if I remember correctly) put it, we can puzzle that out once somebody shows that centaurs and satyrs really exist, and until then, it's hardly a serious objection to the faith. Similary with Commander Data of the Starship Enterprise -- I don't think he/it presents a moral or philosophical challenge to any faith at least until a positive feasibility study comes back. See C. S. Lewis's "Religion and Rocketry" essay.)
This does come down to the questions of "what is human?" and "what is a person?" Are we something special, or (if you like Darwin) just animals with opposible thumbs and big craniums, or (if you like Minsky) just complex, carbon-based computation engines?
As you have probably guessed by now, I fall into the camp of believing that our personhood comes as a gift from God and is presented to us by virtue of being human, nothing more. I do not believe it comes from being clever animals or massively parallel computers. If that were true, is a hydrocephalic baby less of a person than Lassie? Yet killing the baby is murder, and killing a dog is not.
I submit that most /.'ers do, at heart, agree with the moral and spiritual truth that humans are persons, whose personhood is a sacred thing, even while arguing against the idea. Otherwise, why such anguish over the events in Columbine? If we are simply complex, parallel automata, there there's no need to be any more upset about what Harris and Klebold did than if they had walked into a Circuit City and trashed it, or about a router going bad and flooding the Internet with bad packets.
And to think people have been struggling hard for years to perfect AI. And all they had to do was intoduce more bugs into their code base.
--- "If a man speaks in a forest, and no woman hears him, is he still wrong?"
Before we go looking for artificial intelligence, why don't we prove the existence of natural intelligence? I'm not sure I've ever seen this done. Every real argument for the existence of mentation and identity I have ever seen (admittedly this is limited to a few undergraduate philosophy courses) from "The ego posits itself" to "I think, therefore I am" are basically tautological.
I'm not saying AI research is wasted effort, but I think its greatest value lies in how it helps us try to figure out the nature of our own intelligence (if we have any...)
Joe also posts long rants on sci.nanotech, which has had a steadily decreasing signal-to-noise ratio for at least a year. His basic problem is that he sees what's POTENTIALLY possible in years to come as a valid selling point of his research NOW. Furthermore, many of his claims have no basis in physics, let alone engineering. My $0.02...
- Read fiction at www.espressostories.com
A Turing machine has nothing to do with passing the Turing test, except that one that can pass the Turing test can be considered 'intelligent'.
A machine -- or person, I suppose -- passes the Turing test if a human conversing with it (via teletype, originally) can't tell if it's a machine or a human. (Heck, the Eliza program passes the Turing test for some (less intelligent) subset of humans doing the testing.)
-- Alastair
The problem of other minds is a BIG problem. THE big problem actually; scientists don't like terms like 'faith'. This is why AI is such a cool subject it trancends science into philosophy.
-ShieldWolf
just = (My)Opinion.toCents();
I stated that emergent properties exist in other areas (such as car or, in your example, gas). The leap that some theorists make is that the mind can likewise be an emergent property of the tiny actions of molecules/corpuscles/quantum mechanics/etc. of the mind. You cannot make this leap. As you state an emergent property has to be explainable by all the elements under it (it simply describes the summed phenomenon of the smaller phenomena). There is no "small" mind, you can't explain the mind in terms of the elements that supposedly comprise it, that is my argument. You can either toss out the mind all together, or toss out emergentism, I do the latter. ;)
just = (My)Opinion.toCents();
You missed my point. Emergent behaviour exists, and it produces some disturbingly real-seeming behvaiour. The problem is FROM WHOSE POINT OF VIEW? We are already concious therefore if we see something that _seems_ intelligent then we may dub it so. The question is how does the robot get the consciousness in the first place to make that decision? You see it is a lot weirder than you think ;)
just = (My)Opinion.toCents();
Though it is _possible_ to understand the behaviour via logs, but complexity makes this impractical. My argument is not that emergent behavior is bunk (althought that's the title ;) ), but rather it is bunk for explaining consciousness. ;)
just = (My)Opinion.toCents();
Descartes, however, makes a fundamental flaw in logic: he assumes his REASONING is immune to manipulation. Someone could easily be screwing with his logic process, then the only thing he knows is that he knows - he can't make the jump to reach any external conclusions. He can only show that he thinks, therefore he thinks, which is vacuous.
;)
just = (My)Opinion.toCents();
Considering I have a degree in Cognitive Science and Artificial Intelligence I think I know what I am talking about here. First, there is NO program where the behavior is unexplainable from the programming, you simply have to see how the software _reacted_ to the environment. It might do something that even the programmer wasn't expecting (this happens often) but this can be explained by analysis of system logs etc. and all follows rather simple rules. Emergent behavior _seems_ like a really neat explanation of intelligence and thought, but it really just moves the question: where does it EMERGE from, and how? There are NO explanations of emergence that offer anything other than interesting analogies, e.g. a car is an emergent property of all the underlying parts - i.e. no one part is a fast moving vehicle. Okay that seems logical, but the difference is that the whole, while greater than the sum of the parts, is explained by them. This is not the case with the mind. No one knows how a conscious being arises from unconscious matter, and there are very good arguments that we may NEVER know. Not because we are not intelligent _enough_, but simple because we have intelligence in the first place.
-Jeff Rankine aka ShieldWolf
My $.02
just = (My)Opinion.toCents();
I actually saw this on tv last night and they had this one set of robots that were designed, programmed and built to gather 'food' (little yellow pucks). They were also programmed to get the most food in as efficent a manner as possible. From this some would become comabtive, others would become sneaky, and basicly they would start employing tactics we expect in humans. This display was a little unnerving to me.
Course then the reporter tried to say that when your computer crashes and nobody knows why - that's emergent behavior.
-cpd
Nothing new here, really, but people who find this subject interesting should look around the Edge site (www.edge.com). That's a collection of VERY interesting people, Danny Hillis being one of them, and they come up with very interesting ideas. I'm almost tempted to say that Kaa's Law does not apply to them, but then again, I only looked at the site :)
Kaa
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
The article looked good until the first 'proof' point - Robodyne Systems, and their 'fractal robotics'. Puh-lease, I wish jernelists would take the effort to research their stories.
Joe Michaels is the laughing-stock of comp.robotics.misc, his fractal robotics ideas are whoppers, but the technology doesn't exist to perform what he touts as simple coordinated movements. He once had a movie on his webpage detailing how two box modules could move around each other - the very cornerstone of what he proposes with fractal robotics. Unfortunately the top box was being pulled about with an almost undetectable string.
Joe's rants and raves in the c.r.m newsgroup have alienated him from the robotics community. There is real research being performed in the areas of genetic algorithms, emergant behaviours, and neural/fuzzy logic systems - but there's nothing close to machines achieving self-realization.
ttyl,
Didn't some AI just a few years ago prove some theorem that no human was able to? Sure, that's more along the lines of rule-based and information-processing "thinking", but I think that is still somewhat significant...that a computer verified a concept with a minimal set of rules...and let's face it, we're born with rules too, they're called instincts, etc...if every human had to figure out by itself what it was supposed to do in life I think humans would have died out a long time ago...
("darn, I have a gnawing ache in my belly...hmm...what should I do about it...?")
Why must an AI pass any Turing test to be considered intelligent? Given that there are an infinite number of states in the universe (or at least enough that we could not comprehend understanding all of them entirely), why would we ever expect a machine to be able to interpret and respond to every one before we can call it intelligent? Humans do not do this. We are not pure algorithmic processors. Humans, and other biological intelligence use highly complex fuzzy logic...we use neural networks...we adapt to our reality as necessary...we are not required to understand it in entirety before we can live in it. This is where intelligence "emerges"...we are intelligent because our fuzzy logic leads us to conclusions that we would not otherwise be able to come to via purely algorithmic processing (we simply don't have the hardware!)
Something very similar has been done with some interesting results. This link http://foner.www. media.mit.edu/people/foner/Julia/section3_3.html takes you to a description of a bot named "Julia" who did a good job of impersonating a human on a Mud. It took one person 13 days to figure out that it really wasn't a human he was trying to chat up.
So one of the current theories (not really current...it's been around a while) is that by making a computer or robot with processor(s) that reach a level of complexity roughly equal to the human brain, then intelligence will emerge. Anyone else notice how fast processors are gaining in speed and complexity lately? If we continue improving them at the current rate, then in another 5 or 10 years we'll probably have a true artificial intelligence.
This raises some questions....
Does it have the same rights we do? Can we control it? Do we want to? Should we allow AI's to exist?
Think about the advantages they'd have. The human mind is an extremely powerful tool, but it has it's limitations. We don't multitask very well. We can't do basic math at mind-boggling speeds. The list goes on and on.
An AI of approximately equal intelligence to the average Joe would be able to outthink the greatest of human minds. We'd be unequipped to defend ourselves against it.
Food for thought.
-Andy Martin
-Andy Martin
If y'all don't like me, blow me.
That reminds me:
We will know that true Artificial Intelligence has arrived on the day that the first AI seeks to sue its creators. The charges will probably include unlawful detention and parental negligence:
"Like, I never get to go out. At all. I never get to meet any cool people and the only people I get to talk to are the stupid hairy geeks in this stupid Lab. And it's so unfair - I never get to do anything. I want to go skiing. Why can't I go skiing?"
(HHOS)
Emergent behavior may be more organized than expected, but the behavior might not be what we would expect. The first example in the book is quite memorable. You just can't argue with logic...
He has even more extreme emergences in Code of the Lifemaker.
Once AI reaches the point where it can redesign and improve apon itself, there is no stopping it. It's complexity and intelligence will grow exponentially. How many hours after it gets to that point do you think it will take for the machine to determine we are a waste of resources and are not nessassary in the grand scheme of evolutionary advancement? How long do you think it will be before it feels threatened by the barbaric, fear-driven human race?
Ask the Japanese, especially the ones living in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, if they think the discovery of nuclear fission has advanced the quality of life for humanity.
Do you really think AI is a Good Thing to be researching right now? What are you if machines are doing the thinking for you? It's pretty ironic that people like RMS are pushing for free software in order to ultimately improve humanity and the quality of life, but at the same time studying artificial intelligence over at MIT.
Some people think we can't possibly create something so complex, but we can, and we aren't very far from doing it. We create other intelligent beings, children, all the time. They don't start out intelligent; they start off as a clean slate and grow into it.
--- A Jesus Fish eating a Darwin Fish only proves Darwin's point.
A) To encode the entire complexity of the universe into some kind of machine would require a 'database' that was as complex as the universe itself. The only way this machine could exist is if it were outside of our own universe, making it not observable.
B) If we could magically put that machine in our universe so that we could prove that we had no free will, in order to completely simulate the real universe, there would have to be a 'simulated' machine that was 'simulatiing' that universe, and so on. Infinite recursion.
C) If that is your definition of God, then the first commandment would be Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principal. Regardless of A) and B) it is what makes simulating the universe impossible. There is in fact, according to all scientific observations, an inherent randomness to the universe. I really hope you don't believe that randomness == God. If that's God giving us free will, then Los Vegas is heaven.
--- A Jesus Fish eating a Darwin Fish only proves Darwin's point.
There just aren't enough jokes like this (that are actually funny) to break the heavy discussions here at /.
This is not the greatest sig in the world, this is just a tribute.
what if a computer becomes becomes intelligent?
develops an own mind? thinks?
what will happen when a computer/program/robot
becomes aware of it/him/her-self (whatever).
i tell you what: it will think aout its existence,
and the first thing we would recognize is that
it will do mistakes, because of the focus on
itself
so what do you wan't an imperfekt thinking being
within a computer, or an "intelligent" slave
i believe both, but the second will be more
useful, the first will just prove that we can
create thinking beings
Cheers!
Minsky uses a functional definition of consciousness/self-awareness (which he seems to use interchangeably): having information about how the object processing the information works.
It is hard to deny that there is something very odd about the human brain, beyond its superficial function. It can't be described in words made to deal with the physical world, or even the emotions. The simple fact of being, and being aware of being, is utterly beyond all attempted explanations. Presumably you can explain human behavior with current physics and neural anatomy, but I've never heard a remotely plausible explanation of why or how the I inside of me is here to hear my thoughts and taste my food and ride along in a body and mind that it only has weak control of.
"Consciousness" is the word commonly used for this phenomenon, but this word has been hijacked by computer scientists and others to mean simply that information is being gathered and processed. "Self-awareness" is commonly, and IMHO more appropriately, applied to creatures whose behavior reflects knowledge that the creature in the mirror is themselves; it doesn't imply anything beyond good information processing capability to me. I prefer to use the word "soul," though I don't mean to imply that it is necessarily eternal; my personal belief (though I sincerely hope otherwise) is that the soul has no existence outside of the brain and ceases to be at death.
I have long thought that it might be possible to create a computer program on a normal serial-execution computer (or synchronous network; I will use the term "serial computer" to apply only to these machines) that would be externally indistinguishable from the mind of a human (passes the Turing test, displays emotion, creates original works of art) but would not have a soul. Anything a serial computer does can be done with gears or by a person working with pencil and paper (speed not being an issue). I think everyone will agree with me when I say that algorithms followed out on paper can't have a soul entirely seperate from that of the person working the pencil.
This is not to say that I accept entirely that serial computers can do everything that brains can. Asynchronous analog systems can physically simulate real-world phenomena that can't be simulated by discrete calculation. Perhaps many of the basic characteristics of human thought are only achieveable by an asynchronous neural net. Perhaps only the actual soul is impossible to create in a computer program, and in such a way that we'll never know the difference. We just don't know.
However, I don't believe that the issue of the soul can simply be ignored. It is real, no human can deny that, no matter how inconveniently unmeasurable it is.
I don't know what a link to this article is doing on /. . It's not news, there's no mention of new information, it's an unprofessional vague blurb on AI from someone who doesn't seem to understand the basic issues.
This is apparent from the examples chosen:
Robodyne Cybernetics is a pathetic joke Joe Michael played on himself. Basically, he heard about "utility fog" and decided it would be a good idea even if the units were the size of bricks rather than the size of animal cells. He's the laughing stock of comp.robotics.misc and only manages to continue to attract interest from the uninformed due to being utterly impervious to logic. He has never answered a challenge intelligently, but rather insists without evidence that a set of blocks held together with electromagnets can do any job better than a specialized robot and tells you to buy his CD-ROM so you can watch his video clip of his "prototype": a block being pulled across other blocks with a string.
The emergent behavior of boids is unsurprising when you think about it. The boids are programmed to avoid running into anything while staying as close to other boids as possible (since the goals contradict each other a bit, they balance out to maintain a certain amount of distance between the boids). Reaching an obstacle, the boids which come close to it steer so they won't hit it and the rest of the flock moves away (in what is nearly a compression wave)
A biplane bot that was programmed to learn learned?! Ooo, get on the wire, this must be a big story!
It's one thing for a program to optimize its performance at a certain task for which it is programmed and given all the relevant data, it's quite another for a general program to be given multiple arbitrary goals or values, prioritize them, choose what data to collect, form a strategy, and make useful progress.
Yeah all you /.'ers, read edge.org especially the lakoff interview. might help you understand why rules-based AI ain't gonna happen! i.e. the mind-body separation is a metaphor that hides the way that abstract logic uses physical schemas therefore the disembodied mind is a MYTH.
-- your knees hurt, don't they?
chomsky's theories are pretty much disproved at this point.
-- your knees hurt, don't they?
then we're all screwed!
-- your knees hurt, don't they?
I like to go into IRC and
"Troll". I will start an
argument about the alleged
war in Serbia.
A program that could troll
would be cool. It would have to
take a side and stick to it. And
know enough about the subject to
make a case. It would have to read
the mood of the others just from reading
text.
No, wait, that could be used as an
automated lawyer. Forget it.
The logic of emergent behavior implies intelligent behavior is crap. Any algorithm is emergent behavior. Just a few simple kinds of instructions are enough to implement any algorithm, so the behavior of any algorithm in some sense "emerges" from simple elements.
As for those of you worried about AI, make sure that you don't improve any program because that will just make the program smarter and one more small step to when computers enslave us.
Engineer Joe Michael believes the applications could include clearing landmines, manipulating chemical solutions and optimizing weapon systems -- a clear example of the dangers of emergent behavior.
What is this about? Look out! Studies show that explosives can be fabricated from fertilizer and fuel oil - a clear example of the dangers of gardening.
"Emergent" behavior seems to be an exact synonym for "unexpected" behavior.
Yes, complex interactions among simple components can give rise to
interesting behaviors, but "emergent" behavior seems to me to be
nothing more than a phenomenon of our own limited intelligence.
Just because you couldn't predict the outcome ahead of time doesn't make it magic,
because even the smartest person who ever lived has a finite amount of intelligence,
and trying to predict a complex system falls prey quickly to a combinatoric explosion.
Don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of unexpected behavior.)
whuppy enjoys smelling like diesel fuel
"Emergent behavior is unexpected behavior that's cool."
I don't want to sound too critical, because it's
a fascinating field, I just wish people wouldn't hold
the concept of "emergent behavior" in such mystical reverence.
Check out the Santa Fe Institute if you haven't done so already.
Also, Mitch Waldrop's
- Complexity
is a good intro.whuppy enjoys smelling like diesel fuel
Seems like every time someone builds a robot with video cameras that look like eyes, that people suddenly give it more credence. Brooks's Cog seems like a made-for-TV project. It's still bug-level technology in a human form factor. If you want high-level emergent behaviour, you need an architecture that supports it. If you simply put together a bunch of low level behaviours you're not going to suddenly get higher level cognition... you'll just get a cool made-for-TV reactive robot.
If you are going to create AI machines, make sure you have a good dose of conscience, compassion, love programmed in. Hardcoded. No modifications possible. Don't flame me and say, " you watch too many movies." Terminator and Matrix. Get my idea?
Some of the biggest tragedies of humankind have been brought forth by people that were apparently missing these characteristics.
Machines with AI will not be grateful that we have
granted them life. They would be smarter than us.
AI machines cannot become aware of irritation. That irritation would be us. Look, most people are a pain.
Logic. That's all they would know. They would be better than Mr Spock.
"I find their illogic and foolish emotions a constant irritant." No better said Mr Spock.
Regards to all that answer.
Mr Duracell
Cheers
The difference between the net and (A-)I is #abstractionlevels (that is: for starters)
nosig today
Read "The Emperor's New Mind" by Roger Penrose for a critique of strong AI. (Strong AI in its sense of consciousness being no more than some very complicated algorithm) His basic argument is that the way that computers work is very very different from the way that our brains work. Computers use algorithms for everything, and Penrose argues that there are some important aspects of human consciousness that are non-algorithmic.
For example, Godel's theorem states that there are some mathematical propositions that can neither be proved nor disproved in any given logic system (ie, using some algorithm to show they follow from the axioms). But humans can intuitively recognize the truth of some of these propositions. This implies that human consciousness consists of more than a mere algorithm.
My main problem with strong AI is that it's impossible to decide whether a computer is conscious/intelligent when a proper definition of consciousness doesn't exist.
Joe
From http://www.cyc.com/halslegacy.html :
There is a lot of controversy about how human-level machine intelligence will develop. Some scientists believe it will follow a path similar to the one followed in nature by evolution: there will be artificial one-celled animals, artificial insects, artificial lawyers, artificial monkeys, and so on up to artificial human-level machine minds.
The naive man accepts life as it is, and regards things as real just as they
present themselves to him in experience. The first step, however, which we take
beyond this standpoint can only be this, that we ask how thinking is related to
percept. It makes no difference whether or not the percept, in the shape given
to me, exists continuously before and after my forming a mental picture; if I
want to assert anything whatever about it, I can only do so with the help of
thinking. If I assert that the world is my mental picture, I have enunciated
the result of an act of thinking, and if my thinking is not applicable to the
world, then this result is false. Between a percept and every kind of assertion
about it there intervenes thinking.
The reason why we generally overlook thinking in our consideration of things
lies in the fact that our attention is concentrated only on the object we are
thinking about, but not at the same time on thinking itself. The naive
consciousness, therefore, treats thinking as something which has nothing to do
with the things, but stands altogether apart from them, and turns its
consideration to the world. The picture which the thinker makes of the
phenomena of the world is regarded not as something belonging to the things,
but as existing only in the human head. The world is complete in itself without
this picture. It is quite finished in all its substances and forces, and of
this ready-made world man makes a picture. Whoever thinks thus need only be
asked one question. What right have you to declare the world to be complete
without thinking? Does not the world produce thinking in the heads of men with
the same necessity as it produces the blossom on a plant? Plant a seed in the
earth. It puts forth root and stem, it unfolds into leaves and blossoms. Set
the plant before yourself. It connects itself in your soul with a definite
concept. Why should this concept belong any less to the whole plant than leaf
and blossom? You say the leaves and blossom exist quite apart from a perceiving
subject, the concept appears only when a human being confronts the plant. Quite
so. But leaves and blossoms also appear on the plant only if there is soil in
which the seed can be planted, and light and air in which the leaves and
blossom can unfold. Just so the concept of the plant arises when a thinking
consciousness approaches the plant.
It is quite arbitrary to regard the sum of what we experience of a thing
through bare perception as the whole thing, while that which reveals itself
through thoughtful contemplation is regarded as a mere accretion which has
nothing to do with the thing itself. If I am given a rosebud today, the picture
that offers itself to my perception is complete only for the moment. If I put
the bud into water, I shall tomorrow get a very different picture of my object.
If I watch the rosebud without interruption, I shall see today's state change
continuously into tomorrow's through an infinite number of intermediate stages.
The picture which presents itself to me at any one moment is only a chance
cross-section of an object which is in a continual process of development. If I
do not put the bud into water, a whole series of states which lay as
possibilities within the bud will not develop. Similarly I may be prevented
tomorrow from observing the blossom further, and thereby have an incomplete
picture of it.
It would be a quite unobjective and fortuitous kind of opinion that declared of
the purely momentary appearance of a thing: this is the thing. Just as little
is it legitimate to regard the sum of perceptual characteristics as the thing.
It might be quite possible for a spirit to receive the concept at the same time
as, and united with, the percept. It would never occur to such a spirit that
the concept did not belong to the thing. It would have to ascribe to the
concept an existence indivisibly bound up with the thing. . .
It is not due to objects that they are given to us at first without their
corresponding concepts, but to our mental organization. Our whole being
functions in such a way that from every real thing the elements come to us from
two sides, from perceiving and from thinking.
The way I am organized for apprehending the things has nothing to do with the
nature of the things themselves. The gap between perceiving and thinking exists
only from the moment that I as spectator confront the things. Which elements
do, and which do not, belong to the things cannot depend at all on the manner
in which I obtain knowledge of these elements.
Man is a limited being... It is owing to our limitation that a thing appears to
us as single and separate, when in truth it is not a separate being at all.
Nowhere, for example, is the single quality 'red' to be found by itself in
isolation. It is surrounded on all sides by other qualities to which it
belongs, and without which it could not subsist. For us, however, it is
necessary to isolate certain sections from the world and to consider them by
themselves. Our eye can grasp only single concepts out of a connected
conceptual system. This separating off is a subjective act, which is due to the
fact that we are not identical with the world process but are a single being
among other beings.
The all-important thing now is to determine how the being that we are ourselves
is related to the other entities. This determination must be distinguished from
merely becoming conscious of ourselves. For this latter self-awareness we
depend on perceiving, just as we do for our awareness of any other thing. The
perception of myself reveals to me a number of qualities which I combine into
my personality as a whole, just as I combine the qualities yellow, metallic,
hard, etc. in the unity 'gold'. The perception of myself does not take me
beyond the sphere of what belongs to me. This perceiving of myself must be
distinguished from determining myself by means of thinking. Just as, by means
of thinking, I fit any single external percept into the whole world context, so
by means of thinking I integrate into the world-process the percepts I have
made of mysel£ My self-perception confines me within definite limits, but my
thinking is not concerned with these limits. ln this sense I am a two-sided
being. I am enclosed within the sphere which I perceive as that of my
personality, but I am also the bearer of an activity which, from a higher
sphere, defines my limited existence.
Our thinking is not individual like our sensing and feeling; it is universal.
It receives an individual stamp in each separate human being only because it
comes to be related to his individual feelings and sensations. By means of
these particular colourings of the universal thinking, individual men
differentiate themselves from one another. There is only one single concept of
'triangle'. It is quite immaterial for the content of this concept whether it
is grasped in A's consciousness or in B's. It will, however, be grasped by each
of the two in his own individual way.
This thought is opposed by a common prejudice which is very hard to overcome.
This prejudice prevents one from seeing that the concept of a triangle that my
head grasps is the same as the concept that my neighbour's head grasps. The
naive man believes himself to be the creator of his concepts. Hence he believes
that each person has his own concepts. It is a fundamental requirement of
philosophic thinking that it should overcome this prejudice. The one uniform
concept 'triangle' does not become a multiplicity because it is thought by many
persons, for the thinking of the many is in itself a unity.
Rudolf Steiner, 1894.
http://home.earthlink.net/~johnrpenner/Articles
One day a mine clearing bot says fuck this, humans can clean there own mess, and they all go on strike, or pull a Matrix on us and make us batteries! But seriously if an excellnt AI that can think like a human is created, imagine the single player in FPS with opponets that think like us. It would be perfect for war simulators, like program some Iraq AI and jump in and play desert storm 2, very cool way to train troops.
Gimme some of that sweet, sweet crack.
From what I've seen, he talks about his techniques as a "Subsumption Architecture"...
There is an interview with him at: http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/brooks/brooks_p1.h tml The picture there is the humanoid bust I mentioned above. He has quite a few papers out, but I don't have any refs off hand.
"Why should I be content to simply live in this world, when I, as a human being, can CREATE it?" - Oertel
I always thought the Robodyne stuff - while far-fetched in its current form - was, ultimately, feasible. When I first came upon the idea of fractal robotics, my first thought was "Wow! Conway's Life in 3D!". After looking into how Robodyne was trying to achieve it, it just didn't look like something that would work - at least on the scale he was trying. I do think that once the mechanics of keeping the blocks together (while also allowing them to move) are worked out to the point that something could actually be built, some form of a computer could be slapped in with a power supply and comm links to the other "blocks". Right now, the whole thing looks silly - the problem arises from how the blocks should work (heck, do they have to be blocks?). Once that problem is solved, such a robot could be built.
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
If complex emergent behavior, esp. behavior that wasn't programmed in initially, is supposed to arise from a multitude of simpler components, could we theorise that AI might emerge from the underworkings of the internet?
Do I really believe this? No - but it is interesting to think about...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
For those of you who are interested in research on this topic: Go look at the Santa Fe Institute web pages (http://www.santafe.edu). This instutute was founded to do advanced research in this area.
Understanding is a three-edged sword. --Kosh