Heh, I admire the indignation, but you do realize that to the rest of society the Dungeons & Dragons and furry/anime/cosplay crowds are nigh indistinguishable?
(yes, I'm one of the people who would've appreciated a line in the summary about what the hell GenCon is)
It seems obvious to me that you won't get anywhere, ever, if you attempt to tackle the entire problem at once. You have to start with a piece of it, and expand that.
Sure. I just don't agree that computational tools are "a piece of" artificial intelligence.
We have computer programs that can check mathematical proofs, and there have been programs that created proofs from nothing on their own. Is that not a step in the right direction?
I see no evidence that it is. Why would we assume that computational tools designed to solve a specific problem have any bearing on the larger problem of autonomous intelligence?
A lot of the role of the human in using the machine as a tool is in converting the outside world into a form the computer can interact with. If that's not a reasonable role for the human in developing the very beginnings of AI technology, I don't know what is.
Sure, that's a part of it. However, currently humans play a few more roles in these situations: coming up with the problem, analyzing the problem, designing a solution to the problem, programming the computer to specifically solve that problem, and then the stuff you mentioned.
But I ask simply this: where would you start?
I would say that worrying about hardware speed at this point is a little premature, without some kind of theoretical understanding of intelligence. Some inkling as to how human intelligence works would also not go amiss. I am not saying that no work is being done in this direction, just that not much has been achieved yet. Which is fine - as far as problems go, it's difficult to come up with something harder.
And haven't a few of the very first baby steps been taken already?
I would argue no - all the examples you've mentioned are solutions created by humans executed on computer hardware.
At least to me, it seems that to demonstrate intelligence you would need to produce something (in terms of effect, or output, or behavior) "new", in the sense that it wasn't directly provided by the designer. Ray Kurzweil wrote some software a couple of years ago that writes passable poetry - is that the first step in artificial artistic expression, or a clever programming gimmick?
So yes, I do think that we are a few truly major theoretical breakthroughs away from being able to honestly say that we are studying artificial intelligence.
But when can it be said that a computer is smarter than a human?
When a computer can do something better than a human without first being programmed by a human with a way to do it, and then operated by a human to actually perform the task?
Let's take everyone's favorite example: chess. Here's how I would define the point where computers surpass humans at chess:
1) A team of engineers is given the task of designing an AI. No one says a word about any specific applications for it.
1a) Once the programming is complete, the AI has no further interaction with its designers, of any kind.
2) The AI is given the rules to chess. In English.
3) The AI can reliably defeat human opponents of moderate ability.
4) After some amount of practice, and possibly hardware expansion (but not chess-specific hardware), a single instance of such an AI can reliably defeat the reigning human world champion.
Does that sound like a reasonable time to concede that AI has surpassed humans in chess?
How many decades away do you think we from this happening?
Well, I guess if you have some specialized software to manage the whole operation, you could wire together a billion car ECM/ECUs and have a functional computer of sorts.
Exactly my point - you have to do something specifically targeted at creating a computer to make a computer out of cars. If you are just tying them together because you want to move a U-Haul trailer that's a billion times larger than usual (OK, analogies aren't my strong suit) you aren't going to spontaneously get a computer.
Likewise, if you don't understand intelligence you can't create it just by making an existing system infinitely more complex.
My point being, the problem is our current hardware isn't fast/cheap enough to run the kind of AI software they invision will mirror human intelligence.
Sure. But, don't you think that having no clue about how to produce such software will also be a stumbling block? I mean, it seems that out of the two, the faster hardware problem is probably the easier to solve.
And at the risk of getting a bit philosophical: has anyone actually proven that a Turing machine (never mind an actual computer) can simulate human intelligence? I don't have any philosophical objections to the idea, but, do we know that that's the case?
A lot of work to be done on AI before we need to start worrying about hardware speed, is all I'm saying.
Passing the Turing test? (Fatally flawed because it's not double blind, btw.)
The Turing test is not "flawed" - it's a thought experiment on the nature of intelligence. I don't think anyone would seriously claim that passing any specific Turing test would be sufficient to prove that a program is intelligent.
Though I see no reason why it couldn't be blinded properly: take 30 people and 30 computers, randomly assign them to 15 chat rooms of 4, poll them about their conversation partners at the end, and then resolve their IDs to human/non-human. Of course the humans will know they are human, but I don't see how that will make a difference; after all, the computers are tested for their ability to mimic a human who knows that they're participating in a Turing test.
Now, the Meta-Turing Test, on the other hand, I think is bullet-proof: an entity can be considered as intelligent if it creates and applies intelligence tests to subjects of its own creation.:)
Please do not take this personally, but I don't think neuroscience is particularly important to AI.
Sure, If we restrict the argument to just the ability to fly, I agree that human plane design has surpassed birds.
My question is: if you take someone who's absolutely baffled by how birds manage to fly, would that person be able to design a functional airplane?
If you are trying to construct a system of some kind, wouldn't trying to understand the only example of such a system that you have, be a good place to start?
Excuse me.. who are you? You're saying RAY KURZWEIL hasn't been paying attention to AI developments?
I don't need Wikipedia for this, just from the linked article I can tell that Ray Kurzweil either (a) has no clue about current AI developments, or (b) willfully misrepresents them in order to sell his crappy science fiction posing as "futurism".
The difference is that in 20 years we may have sufficiently powerful hardware that the software can be "dumb", that is, just simulating the entire physical brain.
You expect to be able to simulate roughly 1.4 x 10^26 atoms in 20 years? We can't simulate one today!
Don't get me wrong, I love the can-do attitude that producing intelligence is basically a matter of ordering a couple of extra blade racks from Dell, but I can't help feeling that the scope of the problem tends to get underestimated around here.
At least not yet. I can't believe that the sort of bullshit that Ray Kurzweil keeps peddling gets taken so seriously.
There is a lot of talk about computers surpassing, or not surpassing, humans at various tasks - does it not bother anyone that computers don't actually posses any intelligence? By any definition of intelligence you'd like? Every problem that a computer can "solve" is in reality solved by a human using that computer as a tool. I feel like I'm losing my mind reading these discussions. Did I miss something? Has someone actually produced a sentient machine? You'd think I would have seen that in the papers!
What's the point of projecting that A will surpass B in X if the current level of X possessed by A is zero? There seems to be an underlying assumption that merely increasing the complexity of a computational device will somehow automatically produce intelligence. "If only we could wire together a billion Deep Blues," the argument seems to go "it would surpass human intelligence." By that logic, if computers are more complex than cars, does wiring together a billion cars produce a computer?
Repeat after me - The current state of the art in artificial intelligence research is: fuck all. We have not produced any artificial intelligence. We have not begun to approach the problems which would allow us to start on the road to producing artificial intelligence.
Before you can create something that surpasses human levels of intelligence, one would think you'd need to be able to precisely define and quantify human intelligence. Unless I missed something else fairly major, that has not been done by anyone yet.
The full text for this isn't freely available (and I'm certainly not paying for it just to argue with a troll), and you can't tell much about a study from just the abstract.
Except to note that:
a) There's no mention of Milgram-type experiments (which is actually good; they are fun experiments, but absolutely useless for interpreting something like this).
and
b) Even their conclusion finds "no differences in response between... the X-rated, sexually explicit, nonviolent film, and the no-exposure control conditions". And this is from the group that set out to show how horrible, horrible media makes men want to murder women.
so...
c) What the hell is the point of providing a paper that states the exact opposite of what you were claiming?
That right there is motive. He killed her to keep her from going to the police.
Perfect! Why waste time on trials and evidence when we have conjecture?
One would otherwise intuit that we right wingers, feeling so obviously threatened by the notion of empowered women, that, we would be more open to Hans's point of view, and similarly, lefties would be sticking up for Nina in droves.
You do realize that circumstantial evidence is a perfectly valid type of evidence? Plenty of murderers are convicted largely, or solely, on circumstantial evidence.
Not that I have any deep insight about this case, just pointing out that calling something circumstantial doesn't make it go away.
knowing that Ron Paul would not win due to electronic voting and biased media
Yes, those are the only two reasons why he could possibly not win the nomination (and after that, the election, of course). In that order. God damn electronic voting keeping Ron Paul out of the White House. Damn Diebold.
And people wonder why some complain about Ron Paul supporters being annoying.
Browsers don't cache the W3 DTDs, they don't even download them to begin with.
I was including that under the general category of "caching", ie storing something locally because you know you'll need it. Come to think of it, I doubt if browsers use them at all.
I was kinda hoping it wouldn't get resolved, too. I was foreseeing 2-3 years of nothing but "reality" programming that would eventually disintegrate in a giant implosion of suck, taking the whole industry down. Then the writers could go back to writing books, and we could all go outside, or something.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, and Jack Thompson is just the sort of Champion of the People to do it!
Heh, I admire the indignation, but you do realize that to the rest of society the Dungeons & Dragons and furry/anime/cosplay crowds are nigh indistinguishable?
(yes, I'm one of the people who would've appreciated a line in the summary about what the hell GenCon is)
It seems obvious to me that you won't get anywhere, ever, if you attempt to tackle the entire problem at once. You have to start with a piece of it, and expand that.
Sure. I just don't agree that computational tools are "a piece of" artificial intelligence.
We have computer programs that can check mathematical proofs, and there have been programs that created proofs from nothing on their own. Is that not a step in the right direction?
I see no evidence that it is. Why would we assume that computational tools designed to solve a specific problem have any bearing on the larger problem of autonomous intelligence?
A lot of the role of the human in using the machine as a tool is in converting the outside world into a form the computer can interact with. If that's not a reasonable role for the human in developing the very beginnings of AI technology, I don't know what is.
Sure, that's a part of it. However, currently humans play a few more roles in these situations: coming up with the problem, analyzing the problem, designing a solution to the problem, programming the computer to specifically solve that problem, and then the stuff you mentioned.
But I ask simply this: where would you start?
I would say that worrying about hardware speed at this point is a little premature, without some kind of theoretical understanding of intelligence. Some inkling as to how human intelligence works would also not go amiss. I am not saying that no work is being done in this direction, just that not much has been achieved yet. Which is fine - as far as problems go, it's difficult to come up with something harder.
And haven't a few of the very first baby steps been taken already?
I would argue no - all the examples you've mentioned are solutions created by humans executed on computer hardware.
At least to me, it seems that to demonstrate intelligence you would need to produce something (in terms of effect, or output, or behavior) "new", in the sense that it wasn't directly provided by the designer. Ray Kurzweil wrote some software a couple of years ago that writes passable poetry - is that the first step in artificial artistic expression, or a clever programming gimmick?
So yes, I do think that we are a few truly major theoretical breakthroughs away from being able to honestly say that we are studying artificial intelligence.
But when can it be said that a computer is smarter than a human?
When a computer can do something better than a human without first being programmed by a human with a way to do it, and then operated by a human to actually perform the task?
Let's take everyone's favorite example: chess. Here's how I would define the point where computers surpass humans at chess:
1) A team of engineers is given the task of designing an AI. No one says a word about any specific applications for it.
1a) Once the programming is complete, the AI has no further interaction with its designers, of any kind.
2) The AI is given the rules to chess. In English.
3) The AI can reliably defeat human opponents of moderate ability.
4) After some amount of practice, and possibly hardware expansion (but not chess-specific hardware), a single instance of such an AI can reliably defeat the reigning human world champion.
Does that sound like a reasonable time to concede that AI has surpassed humans in chess?
How many decades away do you think we from this happening?
Well, I guess if you have some specialized software to manage the whole operation, you could wire together a billion car ECM/ECUs and have a functional computer of sorts.
Exactly my point - you have to do something specifically targeted at creating a computer to make a computer out of cars. If you are just tying them together because you want to move a U-Haul trailer that's a billion times larger than usual (OK, analogies aren't my strong suit) you aren't going to spontaneously get a computer.
Likewise, if you don't understand intelligence you can't create it just by making an existing system infinitely more complex.
My point being, the problem is our current hardware isn't fast/cheap enough to run the kind of AI software they invision will mirror human intelligence.
Sure. But, don't you think that having no clue about how to produce such software will also be a stumbling block? I mean, it seems that out of the two, the faster hardware problem is probably the easier to solve.
And at the risk of getting a bit philosophical: has anyone actually proven that a Turing machine (never mind an actual computer) can simulate human intelligence? I don't have any philosophical objections to the idea, but, do we know that that's the case?
A lot of work to be done on AI before we need to start worrying about hardware speed, is all I'm saying.
Passing the Turing test? (Fatally flawed because it's not double blind, btw.)
:)
The Turing test is not "flawed" - it's a thought experiment on the nature of intelligence. I don't think anyone would seriously claim that passing any specific Turing test would be sufficient to prove that a program is intelligent.
Though I see no reason why it couldn't be blinded properly: take 30 people and 30 computers, randomly assign them to 15 chat rooms of 4, poll them about their conversation partners at the end, and then resolve their IDs to human/non-human. Of course the humans will know they are human, but I don't see how that will make a difference; after all, the computers are tested for their ability to mimic a human who knows that they're participating in a Turing test.
Now, the Meta-Turing Test, on the other hand, I think is bullet-proof: an entity can be considered as intelligent if it creates and applies intelligence tests to subjects of its own creation.
Please do not take this personally, but I don't think neuroscience is particularly important to AI.
Sure, If we restrict the argument to just the ability to fly, I agree that human plane design has surpassed birds.
My question is: if you take someone who's absolutely baffled by how birds manage to fly, would that person be able to design a functional airplane?
If you are trying to construct a system of some kind, wouldn't trying to understand the only example of such a system that you have, be a good place to start?
you forget that Google can be thought of a sentient being
Well, sure. In the same way that I can be thought of as dating Heidi Klum.
No one can actually force you to restrict your thoughts to things that have some sort of grounding in reality.
It does not have sense of self, but you assume humans do.
Heh, isn't sense of self the one and only thing that philosophy has manage to actually prove over the last 2,500 years?
Excuse me.. who are you? You're saying RAY KURZWEIL hasn't been paying attention to AI developments?
I don't need Wikipedia for this, just from the linked article I can tell that Ray Kurzweil either (a) has no clue about current AI developments, or (b) willfully misrepresents them in order to sell his crappy science fiction posing as "futurism".
Which one is it?
The difference is that in 20 years we may have sufficiently powerful hardware that the software can be "dumb", that is, just simulating the entire physical brain.
You expect to be able to simulate roughly 1.4 x 10^26 atoms in 20 years? We can't simulate one today!
Don't get me wrong, I love the can-do attitude that producing intelligence is basically a matter of ordering a couple of extra blade racks from Dell, but I can't help feeling that the scope of the problem tends to get underestimated around here.
At least not yet. I can't believe that the sort of bullshit that Ray Kurzweil keeps peddling gets taken so seriously.
There is a lot of talk about computers surpassing, or not surpassing, humans at various tasks - does it not bother anyone that computers don't actually posses any intelligence? By any definition of intelligence you'd like? Every problem that a computer can "solve" is in reality solved by a human using that computer as a tool. I feel like I'm losing my mind reading these discussions. Did I miss something? Has someone actually produced a sentient machine? You'd think I would have seen that in the papers!
What's the point of projecting that A will surpass B in X if the current level of X possessed by A is zero? There seems to be an underlying assumption that merely increasing the complexity of a computational device will somehow automatically produce intelligence. "If only we could wire together a billion Deep Blues," the argument seems to go "it would surpass human intelligence." By that logic, if computers are more complex than cars, does wiring together a billion cars produce a computer?
Repeat after me - The current state of the art in artificial intelligence research is: fuck all. We have not produced any artificial intelligence. We have not begun to approach the problems which would allow us to start on the road to producing artificial intelligence.
Before you can create something that surpasses human levels of intelligence, one would think you'd need to be able to precisely define and quantify human intelligence. Unless I missed something else fairly major, that has not been done by anyone yet.
The full text for this isn't freely available (and I'm certainly not paying for it just to argue with a troll), and you can't tell much about a study from just the abstract.
... the X-rated, sexually explicit, nonviolent film, and the no-exposure control conditions". And this is from the group that set out to show how horrible, horrible media makes men want to murder women.
Except to note that:
a) There's no mention of Milgram-type experiments (which is actually good; they are fun experiments, but absolutely useless for interpreting something like this).
and
b) Even their conclusion finds "no differences in response between
so...
c) What the hell is the point of providing a paper that states the exact opposite of what you were claiming?
Nice trolling, anyway.
I for one find anyone flaunting certification X to be an annoying twat
Hey, that's CCAT to you!
It has been shown that watching porn will make people more likely to allow another person to be hurt.
I would be very curious to see this paper.
(There's incoherent rambling, and then there's incoherent rambling that states some pretty tenuous claims as fact)
Whereas, for example, cows are kinda lame - they just stand around and chew all day - so it's OK to eat them.
I love how people rationalize their random choices of which animals are edible and which are just too damn fuzzy-wuzzy lovable to eat.
For the record, I'll eat anything (as long as it's made out of meat).
Those two don't coexist too well. Usually you end up with a bigger oppressive one (for a while, then it's back to a bunch of small weak ones).
I shall create an entire race of Weighted Companion Cubes!
Crap, now I have to get the game just to do that - thanks a lot!
That right there is motive. He killed her to keep her from going to the police.
Perfect! Why waste time on trials and evidence when we have conjecture?
One would otherwise intuit that we right wingers, feeling so obviously threatened by the notion of empowered women, that, we would be more open to Hans's point of view, and similarly, lefties would be sticking up for Nina in droves.
That logic is unassailable.
You do realize that circumstantial evidence is a perfectly valid type of evidence? Plenty of murderers are convicted largely, or solely, on circumstantial evidence.
Not that I have any deep insight about this case, just pointing out that calling something circumstantial doesn't make it go away.
Don't you mean "@ssimilated"?
knowing that Ron Paul would not win due to electronic voting and biased media
Yes, those are the only two reasons why he could possibly not win the nomination (and after that, the election, of course). In that order. God damn electronic voting keeping Ron Paul out of the White House. Damn Diebold.
And people wonder why some complain about Ron Paul supporters being annoying.
Browsers don't cache the W3 DTDs, they don't even download them to begin with.
I was including that under the general category of "caching", ie storing something locally because you know you'll need it. Come to think of it, I doubt if browsers use them at all.
Browsers cache the DTDs.
There, you can now stop posting your hilarious "jokes".
Bionic Woman could not have possibly been affected by the strike - there is no way that someone was getting paid for writing that.
I was kinda hoping it wouldn't get resolved, too. I was foreseeing 2-3 years of nothing but "reality" programming that would eventually disintegrate in a giant implosion of suck, taking the whole industry down. Then the writers could go back to writing books, and we could all go outside, or something.
Yeah, it was a fairly tenuous hope.