Wouldn't this indicate that this is the skeleton of a transgender person, not a gay person? Not all gay people are (or, presumably, were) effeminate.
Transgender etiquette 101
on
M.U.L.E. Is Back
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On the contrary, I think that most if not all transgender people and those who appreciate transgender issues would have a problem with the way this is being handled.
The standard etiquette for referring to a transgender person is to use the name and pronouns they prefer, even when referring to the past. If you don't know the person's preference, use the pronouns that correspond to how they live publicly. This, as well as being the courteous and respectful thing to do, is also agreed upon by the Associated Press Stylebook.
It's the same courtesy we give anyone when they change their name, except that in these cases you're changing the pronouns, too. For example, everyone refers to Laura Bush as Laura Bush, not Laura Welch, even if you're talking about her childhood. If you need to clarify, you still treat the person's current name as the primary name, as in "Laura Bush (born Laura Welch) fell off the swing when she was 5."
The difference is that with transgender people, it's a bigger deal to disrespect their name and pronoun change. It's effectively saying "I don't care what gender you think you are, I know better than you." That's incredibly insulting, demeaning, and disempowering.
It's understandable to be confused the first time you encounter a transgender person, because in over 99% of the population, sex and gender match one-to-one, and they're static final. I mean, they don't ever change. (: So it's understandable to assume that it's a one-to-one unchanging relationship -- until you find a counterexample. At that point, how do you adjust your worldview? Do you dogmatically stick to your view that sex and gender must match one-to-one and must never change? Or do you expand your worldview to account for the counterexamples? It seems to me that both the scientific method and human kindness suggest the latter.
In my experience, hormones have a lot more to do with athletics than do chromosomes.
I'm a transsexual woman who was born male (with XY chromosomes and all that usually entails). I competed in statewide Dance Dance Revolution tournaments and did well. Then, around age 24 when I started transitioning to female and taking estrogen and androgen blockers, my stamina decreased drastically, my muscle mass decreased and my body fat ratio increased. I was once able to play for 7.5 hours straight, and soon after transitioning I could only play for a couple of hours without getting exhausted. 10-footer songs that I used to be able to pass without much trouble, I couldn't make it all the way through anymore. I've been training to build up my stamina, and I'm getting stronger and more fit, but I'm still not at the level I was back when my hormonal balance was completely different.
It's not surprising that hormones are the most influential factor, because what are steroids, after all? Testosterone.
Only one theologian that I know of, and he's actually my officemate... in fact, he doesn't add much knowledge to Cyc, he spends most of his time hacking on the RTL (;
But anyway, Cyc does have some theological knowledge, and it's organized into different microtheories, which are Cyc's version of contexts. So it knows that in some contexts, Jesus Christ was/is a god, and in other contexts, Jesus Christ was a man, and in still other contexts, Jesus Christ did not exist at all. It's got a bunch more stuff but I've only browsed around there occasionally.
All the arguments about morality in the other county of this thread are pretty much irrelevant because it's not like Cyc has a single context that it operates in; it has multiple contexts, some of which can be contradictory.
There are a lot of misconceptions floating around on this thread... to name a few:
1. Cyc is true "Hal-like" AI today. 2. If Cyc isn't true AI, it won't be useful and nobody should care about it. 3. Cyc thinks like a human. 4. Cyc believes in a system of morals. 5. Cyc hasn't made any progress in the last n years.
If anyone actually wants to know more about what Cyc actually is, please ask some questions here and I'll see if I can help you out. I'm pretty well informed (albeit biased) about the Cyc project so I'm eager to share.
Also if you go to #opencyc on irc.openprojects.net there are usually people there who will chat about Cyc and OpenCyc.
This is a cool idea and definitely doable using Cyc. However, a complicating and interesting factor is that integrating Cyc into the speech recognition software would actually yield better performance, instead of having ViaVoice or something be the stand-alone input mechanism.
In speech recognition, there are often ambiguous sounds. Human brains use context to filter out the interpretations that don't make any sense, but speech recognition systems don't do that because they don't have any semantic understanding of the speech stream. If Cyc were actually used *during* the speech recognition process, this would be another really cool application.
It's just the difference between deductive and inductive reasoning. This is a case of inductive reasoning. If every intelligent entity you know about is a human, except for one, then you might wonder whether that one is also a human.
If you get enough examples you might even conclude it as a (tentative) fact -- even without scientific knowledge, humans inductively conclude the (tentative) fact that the sun will rise tomorrow from a large number of previous examples.
Cyc mostly does deductive reasoning but it can use inductive reasoning in a user-assisted process to help find interesting exceptions and generalizations in its knowledge base.
So that's what's actually going on logically in the Cyc asking if it's a human case.
It's true that tying Cyc to a natural language is going to take a lot of work, but how can you call that wasted effort? If everyone has to know first-order logic to use Cyc, then how is it ever going to become useful?
It seems to me like the only way to make Cyc usable by a huge number of users is to give it an intuitive UI, like a natural-language interface.
This (and the parent) are the only posts I've read on this thread that actually seem to have a clue as to what Cyc is actually about.
So what if Cyc isn't true AI? Are the bad guys in Half-Life true AI, or anything else today that calls itself "AI"? The point is that there's a missing layer in computer architecture. You've got the OS to abstract out the low-level details of system from the user level, but it still does what the user says, not what the user means. If Cyc were an additional layer sitting on top of the OS, then any Cyc-enabled application could use common sense reasoning to make apps seem more intelligent. Who cares if they actually *are* more intelligent as long as they seem more intelligent, and are hence more useful and usable?
Some examples:
A Cyc-enabled spam filter could actually parse the content of an email and figure out what it was about, and use semantic filtering rather than syntactic filtering.
A Cyc-enabled network security app could reason about computer vulnerabilities and models of the network instead of just trying to hack it and letting you know if it succeeds.
A Cyc-enabled search engine could find related documents by actual relevance of the semantic content of the documents rather than by word-matching or any other syntactic algorithm.
A Cyc-enabled travel assistant program could reason about the user's likes and dislikes to infer what types of destinations or travel packages are suitable or unsuitable.
The point here is that using common sense reasoning makes an app an order of magnitude more user-friendly. Like with the travel app, if Cyc knows that the user is claustrophobic, then it will be able to infer that the user wouldn't enjoy a spelunking vacation, and would filter those kind of options out. Any program could handle the cases thought of ahead of time, but one of the uses of Cyc would be to provide a huge knowledge base of common sense that apps could leverage so they wouldn't try to hard-code a small, less useful subset of whatever common sense the coder happens to think of at the time.
Imagine back when everyone hacked in machine code, and someone got the idea for an operating system, and started working on it. "So, it's a program? What does it do?" "Well, it lets you run programs." "But I can already run programs, I just write them in machine code!" "Well, it lets you run programs... better." A lot of the people at Cycorp explain Cyc about as well as that explanation of what an OS does. (: But once you actually have an OS, you realize how useful it is and never want to go back to writing in machine code, except for really low-level stuff. It makes things an order of magnitude easier from a user's perspective. I think that Cyc will be the same kind of thing.
Sounds like a good idea! We've done a search engine application before, I think there's some information about that on the website. The main obstacle is that Cyc is CPU-intensive, and most search engines have business models that are based on very fast processing of web pages to yield very fast response times.
There are plenty of unexpected wicked fucking geniuses at Cycorp. One might say it's a haven for such types. (; Definitely not your average corporation.
[eca draws his rapier and challenges sharkticon to a duel to the death.] (:
As for Cyc being "just a big list of rules that might be nice for certain expert systems", I reply that a major aspect of the power of Cyc is that it is domain-inspecific. Even if Cyc were "just" a domain-inspecific expert system, I believe this would be a tremendous leap forward in AI. If anyone else has seen a domain-inspecific expert system that works, please let me know (: And in fact, Cyc is much more than this.
As for your arguments about true AI and intelligence, I believe that others have replied in better words than I could have, saying basically "Well, it depends on what you mean by intelligence, and it depends on what you mean by true AI."
Exactly -- but we don't intend to keep plowing away until then, because that's only the first phase of the plan, what's called the "pump-priming" phase. In the second phase, which has begun somewhat recently, Cyc can acquire new knowledge semi-automatically, by gathering input from lightly-trained users (up to now, you needed to be heavily trained in both Cyc and first-order logic to enter knowledge into Cyc) and using Cyc's existing knowledge to consistency-check and aid the knowledge acquisition process. So, I guess you could call it a semi-brute-force approach instead of a total brute force approach.
Perhaps the analogy you suggest would work if the human brain were an unformed mass of grey matter, attached to some sensors and very simple logic. But there is a lot of structure in the brain, and I don't think we can expect magic to happen just by hooking up a bunch of sensors to a NN or some other kind of machine learning program. Anyway, this is what a lot of the rest of the AI community is trying to do, and Cyc is taking a very different approach.
The idea behind Cyc is that learning happens on the fringe, meaning that you build new knowledge based on what you already know. Since nobody has solved the bootstrapping problem (i.e. hooking up a lump of jelly to some sensors, waiting a few months, and having it learn something interesting), Doug Lenat decided that we would have to "prime the pump" of knowledge by brute force. We've been at it for 17 years and are now at the point where Cyc's existing knowledge can qualitatively assist its knowledge acquisition process.
You're right; we use a language called CycL which is based on the predicate calculus. Yes, transitivity is a tricky issue but a very powerful reasoning mechanism which Cyc takes a lot of advantage of. Dealing with context is a very hard problem, and Cyc handles this by microtheory-based reasoning. This is all on the Cycorp web page, I'm just trying to get some intelligent discussion stirred up here (:
I remember the first time I saw The Matrix. When that scene came on where Morpheus is telling Neo about what's happened to the future, and the AI that became sentient and took over everything, I cheered and shouted "Go Cyc!" I love that part.
I am a current Cycorp employee, who would love to reply to every single one of your posts and correct all the misconceptions about Cyc (both overestimating and underestimating its capabilities) but there's just so many of them!
Where are all the other./-reading Cyclists? Just put a "this post is my own opinion and does not reflect the views of Cycorp" in your.sig and let's clear up some of the confusion, eh?
This post is my own opinion and does not reflect the views of Cycorp.
Slashdot Mirror
Wouldn't this indicate that this is the skeleton of a transgender person, not a gay person? Not all gay people are (or, presumably, were) effeminate.
On the contrary, I think that most if not all transgender people and those who appreciate transgender issues would have a problem with the way this is being handled.
The standard etiquette for referring to a transgender person is to use the name and pronouns they prefer, even when referring to the past. If you don't know the person's preference, use the pronouns that correspond to how they live publicly. This, as well as being the courteous and respectful thing to do, is also agreed upon by the Associated Press Stylebook.
It's the same courtesy we give anyone when they change their name, except that in these cases you're changing the pronouns, too. For example, everyone refers to Laura Bush as Laura Bush, not Laura Welch, even if you're talking about her childhood. If you need to clarify, you still treat the person's current name as the primary name, as in "Laura Bush (born Laura Welch) fell off the swing when she was 5."
The difference is that with transgender people, it's a bigger deal to disrespect their name and pronoun change. It's effectively saying "I don't care what gender you think you are, I know better than you." That's incredibly insulting, demeaning, and disempowering.
It's understandable to be confused the first time you encounter a transgender person, because in over 99% of the population, sex and gender match one-to-one, and they're static final. I mean, they don't ever change. (: So it's understandable to assume that it's a one-to-one unchanging relationship -- until you find a counterexample. At that point, how do you adjust your worldview? Do you dogmatically stick to your view that sex and gender must match one-to-one and must never change? Or do you expand your worldview to account for the counterexamples? It seems to me that both the scientific method and human kindness suggest the latter.
In my experience, hormones have a lot more to do with athletics than do chromosomes.
I'm a transsexual woman who was born male (with XY chromosomes and all that usually entails). I competed in statewide Dance Dance Revolution tournaments and did well. Then, around age 24 when I started transitioning to female and taking estrogen and androgen blockers, my stamina decreased drastically, my muscle mass decreased and my body fat ratio increased. I was once able to play for 7.5 hours straight, and soon after transitioning I could only play for a couple of hours without getting exhausted. 10-footer songs that I used to be able to pass without much trouble, I couldn't make it all the way through anymore. I've been training to build up my stamina, and I'm getting stronger and more fit, but I'm still not at the level I was back when my hormonal balance was completely different.
It's not surprising that hormones are the most influential factor, because what are steroids, after all? Testosterone.
Only one theologian that I know of, and he's actually my officemate... in fact, he doesn't add much knowledge to Cyc, he spends most of his time hacking on the RTL (;
But anyway, Cyc does have some theological knowledge, and it's organized into different microtheories, which are Cyc's version of contexts. So it knows that in some contexts, Jesus Christ was/is a god, and in other contexts, Jesus Christ was a man, and in still other contexts, Jesus Christ did not exist at all. It's got a bunch more stuff but I've only browsed around there occasionally.
All the arguments about morality in the other county of this thread are pretty much irrelevant because it's not like Cyc has a single context that it operates in; it has multiple contexts, some of which can be contradictory.
Does this answer your question?
(:,
eca
Weird -- specifically mentions the phrase "spam filter".
eca
There are a lot of misconceptions floating around on this thread... to name a few:
1. Cyc is true "Hal-like" AI today.
2. If Cyc isn't true AI, it won't be useful and nobody should care about it.
3. Cyc thinks like a human.
4. Cyc believes in a system of morals.
5. Cyc hasn't made any progress in the last n years.
If anyone actually wants to know more about what Cyc actually is, please ask some questions here and I'll see if I can help you out. I'm pretty well informed (albeit biased) about the Cyc project so I'm eager to share.
Also if you go to #opencyc on irc.openprojects.net there are usually people there who will chat about Cyc and OpenCyc.
(:,
eca
This is a cool idea and definitely doable using Cyc. However, a complicating and interesting factor is that integrating Cyc into the speech recognition software would actually yield better performance, instead of having ViaVoice or something be the stand-alone input mechanism.
In speech recognition, there are often ambiguous sounds. Human brains use context to filter out the interpretations that don't make any sense, but speech recognition systems don't do that because they don't have any semantic understanding of the speech stream. If Cyc were actually used *during* the speech recognition process, this would be another really cool application.
(:,
eca
It's just the difference between deductive and inductive reasoning. This is a case of inductive reasoning. If every intelligent entity you know about is a human, except for one, then you might wonder whether that one is also a human.
If you get enough examples you might even conclude it as a (tentative) fact -- even without scientific knowledge, humans inductively conclude the (tentative) fact that the sun will rise tomorrow from a large number of previous examples.
Cyc mostly does deductive reasoning but it can use inductive reasoning in a user-assisted process to help find interesting exceptions and generalizations in its knowledge base.
So that's what's actually going on logically in the Cyc asking if it's a human case.
(:,
eca
It's true that tying Cyc to a natural language is going to take a lot of work, but how can you call that wasted effort? If everyone has to know first-order logic to use Cyc, then how is it ever going to become useful?
It seems to me like the only way to make Cyc usable by a huge number of users is to give it an intuitive UI, like a natural-language interface.
Do you disagree?
(:,
eca
Yeah, Cyc is not about trying to do cognitive modelling, it's about trying to build a useful intelligent artifact.
(:,
eca
Actually, Cyc is pretty good at formulating sentences itself. I think you can even test this out in the currently released OpenCyc v0.6.
(:,
eca
This (and the parent) are the only posts I've read on this thread that actually seem to have a clue as to what Cyc is actually about.
So what if Cyc isn't true AI? Are the bad guys in Half-Life true AI, or anything else today that calls itself "AI"? The point is that there's a missing layer in computer architecture. You've got the OS to abstract out the low-level details of system from the user level, but it still does what the user says, not what the user means. If Cyc were an additional layer sitting on top of the OS, then any Cyc-enabled application could use common sense reasoning to make apps seem more intelligent. Who cares if they actually *are* more intelligent as long as they seem more intelligent, and are hence more useful and usable?
Some examples:
A Cyc-enabled spam filter could actually parse the content of an email and figure out what it was about, and use semantic filtering rather than syntactic filtering.
A Cyc-enabled network security app could reason about computer vulnerabilities and models of the network instead of just trying to hack it and letting you know if it succeeds.
A Cyc-enabled search engine could find related documents by actual relevance of the semantic content of the documents rather than by word-matching or any other syntactic algorithm.
A Cyc-enabled travel assistant program could reason about the user's likes and dislikes to infer what types of destinations or travel packages are suitable or unsuitable.
The point here is that using common sense reasoning makes an app an order of magnitude more user-friendly. Like with the travel app, if Cyc knows that the user is claustrophobic, then it will be able to infer that the user wouldn't enjoy a spelunking vacation, and would filter those kind of options out. Any program could handle the cases thought of ahead of time, but one of the uses of Cyc would be to provide a huge knowledge base of common sense that apps could leverage so they wouldn't try to hard-code a small, less useful subset of whatever common sense the coder happens to think of at the time.
Imagine back when everyone hacked in machine code, and someone got the idea for an operating system, and started working on it. "So, it's a program? What does it do?" "Well, it lets you run programs." "But I can already run programs, I just write them in machine code!" "Well, it lets you run programs... better." A lot of the people at Cycorp explain Cyc about as well as that explanation of what an OS does. (: But once you actually have an OS, you realize how useful it is and never want to go back to writing in machine code, except for really low-level stuff. It makes things an order of magnitude easier from a user's perspective. I think that Cyc will be the same kind of thing.
(:,
eca
Sounds like a good idea! We've done a search engine application before, I think there's some information about that on the website. The main obstacle is that Cyc is CPU-intensive, and most search engines have business models that are based on very fast processing of web pages to yield very fast response times.
(:,
eca
There are plenty of unexpected wicked fucking geniuses at Cycorp. One might say it's a haven for such types. (; Definitely not your average corporation.
eca
[eca draws his rapier and challenges sharkticon to a duel to the death.] (:
As for Cyc being "just a big list of rules that might be nice for certain expert systems", I reply that a major aspect of the power of Cyc is that it is domain-inspecific. Even if Cyc were "just" a domain-inspecific expert system, I believe this would be a tremendous leap forward in AI. If anyone else has seen a domain-inspecific expert system that works, please let me know (: And in fact, Cyc is much more than this.
As for your arguments about true AI and intelligence, I believe that others have replied in better words than I could have, saying basically "Well, it depends on what you mean by intelligence, and it depends on what you mean by true AI."
(:,
eca
Exactly -- but we don't intend to keep plowing away until then, because that's only the first phase of the plan, what's called the "pump-priming" phase. In the second phase, which has begun somewhat recently, Cyc can acquire new knowledge semi-automatically, by gathering input from lightly-trained users (up to now, you needed to be heavily trained in both Cyc and first-order logic to enter knowledge into Cyc) and using Cyc's existing knowledge to consistency-check and aid the knowledge acquisition process. So, I guess you could call it a semi-brute-force approach instead of a total brute force approach.
(:,
eca
Perhaps the analogy you suggest would work if the human brain were an unformed mass of grey matter, attached to some sensors and very simple logic. But there is a lot of structure in the brain, and I don't think we can expect magic to happen just by hooking up a bunch of sensors to a NN or some other kind of machine learning program. Anyway, this is what a lot of the rest of the AI community is trying to do, and Cyc is taking a very different approach.
The idea behind Cyc is that learning happens on the fringe, meaning that you build new knowledge based on what you already know. Since nobody has solved the bootstrapping problem (i.e. hooking up a lump of jelly to some sensors, waiting a few months, and having it learn something interesting), Doug Lenat decided that we would have to "prime the pump" of knowledge by brute force. We've been at it for 17 years and are now at the point where Cyc's existing knowledge can qualitatively assist its knowledge acquisition process.
(:,
eca
You're right; we use a language called CycL which is based on the predicate calculus. Yes, transitivity is a tricky issue but a very powerful reasoning mechanism which Cyc takes a lot of advantage of. Dealing with context is a very hard problem, and Cyc handles this by microtheory-based reasoning. This is all on the Cycorp web page, I'm just trying to get some intelligent discussion stirred up here (:
eca
No sign of the Illuminati, either (;
eca
I believe the play on words is intentional; Doug Lenat is a B5 fan (:
eca
I remember the first time I saw The Matrix. When that scene came on where Morpheus is telling Neo about what's happened to the future, and the AI that became sentient and took over everything, I cheered and shouted "Go Cyc!" I love that part.
./-reading Cyclists? Just put a "this post is my own opinion and does not reflect the views of Cycorp" in your .sig and let's clear up some of the confusion, eh?
I am a current Cycorp employee, who would love to reply to every single one of your posts and correct all the misconceptions about Cyc (both overestimating and underestimating its capabilities) but there's just so many of them!
Where are all the other
This post is my own opinion and does not reflect the views of Cycorp.
(:,
eca