I would encourage the Mozilla team to maybe put their weight behind making Firefox a better browser.
From the very first moment that Google decided that Firefox was no longer their flagship way for users to access their ads and decided to throw all their weight in their own branded browser, the prospect of Firefox being the dominant browser received a death blow.
Once a mega-corp puts resources into figuring out how users handle the product and tweaking it, and then advertise it as their preferred platform as they did with Chrome, there's no way for a non-profit to compete - in particular when the said mega-corp retired their funding and considered them a competitor.
Tech experts might had kept using the same old versions if the product didn't evolve; but there's no money in that, and Firefox would have eventually stalled anyway. They desperately need to find a new market to attract an interested corporate backer that will support them in the long term, if they want a chance to stay relevant.
Oh, and I forgot - emergent behaviors of complex systems are not subject to the limitations of Turing-machines completeness; such behaviors are not described as symbols within the system, so they cannot be "diagonalized" (which is the basis for the limitations of formal systems such as Turing machines halting problem and the GÃdel's theorem in mathematics).
We don't know whether the "emergent computation" of distributed automata systems is more powerful* than Turing's computable functions, but we have no reason to believe that they are equivalent. A systems that performs computation through emergent adaptations rather than manipulation of symbols might be strictly more powerful.
*(We know it's not less powerful thank's to Rule 110 being Turing-complete; anything a symbolic computer can do, a cellular automaton can do as well).
It seems that our only core disagreement is regarding whether awareness can emerge from a combination of the physical that we already know about, or whether it requires a yet undiscovered phenomenon (what you call "extra-physical") that would influence them.
There's nothing "magical" in emergent properties of complex systems being able to adapt to their environment in intelligent ways, or producing elaborate results; the only thing that seems magical is how such complex behaviors can appear out of very simple, unrelated rules - but it can be seen happening everywhere, if you know where to look. See for example how Conway's Game of Life produces persistent, moving structures out of single-cell activation rules, or how the parable of the polygons gives raise to segregation from individual decisions that are not particularly racist.
Such emergent behaviors may indeed be influenced an react to an external environment, in special when the survival of the whole system depends on it (have you seen ant colonies fighting an aggressor?) - survival of the fittest means that only systems able to adapt will be around for long; so the well-tuned systems are self-selected, and those without the "magic" property will disappear. So this model too works without unfounded ideas, just like yours; and it doesn't require any "undiscovered particle", while your model requires postulating a sort of "Higgs boson of awareness" that we don't nothing about.
As for CS not having a theory for how intelligence appears, that is be true, but neuropsychology does have a good basis for one; as I mentioned, our conscious process -when scanned through magnetic resonance- looks a lot like creating post-hoc rationalizations of the reflex analysis performed by the lower brain functions. That model could be reasonably expected to provide a basis for true artificial intelligence in the future.
This conversation is quite interesting:-) You're certainly a rare bird, as a non-spiritual dualist. I can empathize with that kind of dualism - being conscious certainly feels different (on a purely emotional level) to the way we see machines operate. I think I'm a physicalist mostly because of practical reasons. (And you're dead-on, my definition makes any kind of dualism a logical impossibility).
I don't rule out that there may be (i.e. exist) some phenomenon or essence that is different from the matter and energy of our current universe, which is the thing that creates conscience. But what good does it make if there's no way that we can observe it or know anything about it? That's why I said that the problem is undecidable - even if it happens to be that way, we'll never know it. Call me physical-agnostic if you will.
I try to avoid thinking too hard about such possibility because of the Occam's Razor, just as a heuristic to make reasoning about the world easier. When the only qualia ("subjective experiences") that I will ever perceive are those that I feel personally, what good does it make to think that other people also share them because of some undetectable substance? I just take it for granted that they also have them, and study the physical signs connected to those experiences - there's nothing else I can do.
Maybe you can enlighten my of why you take a different approach? I'm genuinely interested on how dualistic people reason (and feel) about conscience.
My intuition is we will see only failure and at some time the whole AI community will (again, they have done so before) do try a paradigm-shift, because that break-through will not manifest itself.
Yeah, I fully agree with that. Augmented intellect (with a human in the middle of the "intelligent" processes, guiding them to do useful work) seems a much more viable paradigm in the mid term - and it's how any kind of AI is working now in practice.
You are completely missing that any kind of perception is only something an "observer" can do.
I'm not missing it (I've seen you commenting about it at another thread), it's just that I don't see how it's relevant, nor why "being an observer" is something that can't happen exclusively within the confines of the physical world as currently understood.
I find it rather funny that you think a very prominently physical phenomenon ("collapsing the wave-function") requires something from outside the realm of the modern physics paradigm.
(Physical matter cannot supply an "observer", as observers can and will collapse the wave-function.)
You keep repeating that impossibility as your core argument, but I don't take it as a given ("an axiom") as you do, and it doesn't follow from the laws that explain the collapse of the wave-function. Basically you're saying "an observer cannot be physical matter because the collapse of the wave-function requires something that is not physical", but don't explain why it requires something non-physical.
It is true that current physics doesn't understand the interaction between micro and macro levels (i.e. what happens when you add what you call an "observer" to the mix), but I can't agree with your jumping to the conclusion that this interaction requires something that can't be explained with configurations of matter and energy. Under that point that you highlight as essential, an "observer" is "whatever causes a wave-function to collapse in a physical system". There is nothing requiring this "whatever" to be a form of consciousness, just that it's something external to the system studied at a quantum level.
Nothing regarding quantum physics makes me think that my consciousness requires something other than an emergent phenomenon of my physical body. If that makes me a p-zombie, I'm a p-zombie with a very rich inner life.;-)
Perception requires awareness (not necessary self-awareness), and that is, again, not something physical matter is known to be able to do.
When I turn on the room's light, my cellphone's light sensor detects it and instructs the screen to dim the bright. You can say that my phone is aware of the environment's light.
How is that different in essence to what my brain does in my body, other than being able of much more complex processes? How do you know that what I sense as self-awareness is impossible to be the collection of those physical processes, and that I sense all of it because of - well, because I'm inside this body that is doing them?
Thanks, I wanted to understand your position about "non-physical", and we have no disagreement there.
Although if you are not aiming for "non-physical" as "spiritual", I don't get why you'd describe it as non-physical. Under my model, if something belongs in the world, it is physical by definition - i.e. because both words mean the same thing - whether the phenomena can be described by the current status of the physics science or not.
None of the AI research we have are for strong/true AI that might be a danger. We still do not know whether creating that type is even possible at all in this physical universe.
Quite true. I happen to have the (irrational?) belief that creating true AI it is possible (or better, I have no reason to believe that it's not), hence my user name. Yet I think such possibility can't be achieved with our current knowledge and technology. Major breakthroughs should happen both in hardware capabilities and software approaches to create any kind of strong AI.
And it probably would require some kind of evolved training of a self-preserving system able to adapt to increasingly harsh environments thanks to its highers brains, just like we emerged from the common animals, rather than being engineered from first principles.
Dualism just says that a part of what we perceive as ourselves is non-physical.
Define "non-physical". If you can't find a set of properties that can tell apart the "physical" from the "non-physical", you're just trolling (I don't know whether other slashdotters or just yourself). If your properties depend on assuming that reality is dualistic, you're doing circular reasoning.
I admit that I'm no expert with respect to dualistic theories, but I've never come across with a convincing set of such properties.
And hence it is a pure belief without rational basis.
All rational require a pure unproven belief at the beginning, it's what we call an "axiom". You can't avoid those in any rational way. The best you can do is to adopt a collection of axioms that don't create too bad contradictions, and tweak your axioms when you find out that they do contradict themselves.
This is basic theory of meaning; you just can't write off other belief systems as "irrational" if they happen to be self-consistent, merely because you disagree with their adopted axioms. Doing that is not rational either.
The best thing rationality can do is assert "these are the facts we known about the world, and here we have the collection of logical models that might explain them; there's no rational way to prefer one over the others in principle when all them are consistent with the facts".
Self-awareness is not something physical matter can do
Why would you assume that? Taking that assertion as an axiom is in fact admitting dualism as a first principle, but there's no rational reason to accept it as a given either - I certainly don't see anything obvious about it.
The whole idea that self-awareness is something magically ("emergent property") stemming from matter is completely absurd.
Quite the contrary, it seems perfectly consistent with what we know about consciousness thanks to recent brain scanning technology.
Self-awareness is a perception that is derived from distributed brain activity, in fact it's a post-hoc rationalization of the unconscious processes that the brain performs fast and in parallel.
I don't see why that perception, like any other perceptions can't just be a result of the combined activation of our grain matter. Mind you, I don't believe that it has to come just from matter and that no other kind of "conscious substance" or "soul" can't exist; in fact I think that monism/dualism is an undecidable problem, and thus badly defined metaphysics.
The problem with those fears is that they come from a completely unrealistic understanding of how Artificial Intelligence works. The myths that permeate western public understanding and popular depictions of robotics and AI are Frankenstein and Pinocchio. However, the Mechanical Turk and Disney's The Old Mill are much more accurate descriptions of what's going on in the workings of any current, apparently intelligent machine.
In the Mechanical Turk, all appearance of independent behavior is put there by a human trying to trick the audience into thinking the robot is intelligent. Think chatbots and how they apparently pass the Turing Test.
In the Old Mill, it is the watcher who humanizes the behavior of a purely automatic mechanism, blindly driven by the laws of physics. The Old Mill didn't care about the animals living inside it, not suffered its destruction in the middle of the storm. It merely was pushed by the force of the wind; but we perceive it as a sad story.
The problem with those fears is that they come from a completely unrealistic understanding of how Artificial Intelligence works. The myths that permeate western public understanding and popular depictions of robotics and AI are Frankenstein and Pinocchio. However, the Mechanical Turk and Disney's The Old Mill are much more accurate descriptions of what's going on in the workings of any current, apparently intelligent machine.
The "bottom-up" approach you talk about does exist, but as of today it only has the intelligence capabilities of amoeba and earthworms.
It is possible that in the future, huge technological advances make bottom-up a viable approach for artificial intelligence. But it would require a scientific breakthrough from what we know now and, above all, thousands of years of simulated evolution for fine-tuning. At which point, it would likely contain huge built-in bias induced by the training process, that would render it too dependent on human caring, and would lack true self-preservation traits that we get from hour biological heritage.
All respect to women, programmers, engineers, and human-beings in general notwithstanding, don't you need to have undertaken something dangerous to qualify for the term "hero"? Especially "great hero"?
I think having a more formal approach would certainly help with the current status of development. C.T. provides a declarative way of studying side effects, which can allow developers better ways to split the problem into manageable chunks, avoiding the traps of hidden state changes that plague current systems.
As I explain in my previous comment, the most recent changes in structure are being driven by theoretical advances in Category Theory (the "abstract nonsense" that brought us monads and LINQ).
This means that they are particularly well adapted, as Category Theory is the science of composing small parts to build a large structure without scaling problems. In theory, programs using these techniques should be easier to understand and maintain, at least once that you get a preliminary grasp of the underpinnings of Category Theory.
There's a wealth of new research going on in Programming Language Theory, with several breakthroughs in the last years bridging the gap between functional and imperative programming.
The other trend in declarative programming is reactive languages like React.js and Flux being applied to user interfaces. This allows for tools like React Native which can abstract away all the spaghetti code to handle events, providing a higher abstraction, including the "debug & rewind" and "live programming" capabilities seen in online "web embedded" environments like Github Gist or JSFiddle.
I expect that, as these techniques mature, they will settle down and allow for development techniques that allow for easy discoverability of APIs without having to learn a particular complex syntax, and better programming by connecting components without the drawbacks and limitations of classic Visual tools.
All these new techniques based in Category Theory are driving advances in mainstream languages - starting with libraries like Linq and jQuery but also Python, Javascript and even C++ adopting lambdas, advanced type systems with auto-inference of types, and libraries with constructs for declarative race-free parallelism such as promises and agent models.
The majority of those techniques are being tested first in experimental languages by researchers eating their own dog food, with Haskell often having its most pure form (see what I did there?). Anyone interested in enhancing the expressivity of PLs may lurk Lambda the ultimage, where guys much more clever than you and me hang around and can give pointers to all the relevant theoretical results.
No, all those weird animals you see in stuff like Google's deep dream are not put there, they are a consequence of training.
Did the training of the network emerge in a spontaneous way from raw components and evolved into a useful feature by natural selection, or was it assembled, guided and carefully tweaked by an engineer at Google for a specific purpose?
That neural network IS a functional representation of a brain and while you might think we are special.... BUT WE ARE NOT SPECIAL. Our brains work the same way.
So, where does the Google image algorithm hold the amigdala, neocortex, cerebellum...? Does it dream with electric sheeps?
That the lowest layer works in the same way does not mean that we know how to replicate the function of the whole working structure. See the 3D folding of proteins, a much (much!) simpler system that we don't fully understand and can only simulate through brute force. A whole brain is out of our league.
These things are NOT PROGRAMMED, and no human is in the loop.
Are you sure? When Google publishes the results of an image search in their web page, there are humans selecting which results are relevant; I've even heard Google feeds that information back in the system to learn which results are the best and refine the algorithm. Again you're confounding the lowest layer (image recognition/generation) with the application of those techniques in a larger environment for practical results, which is the thing I'm talking about.
Of course you can create small automated routines that solve very specific problems without direct human intervention- that was my starting point. But we don't know how to compose lots of those small automated routines to create a system with intelligence "in the large", which can navigate the real world unaided. No, Google cars don't qualify either.
Slashdot Mirror
In that respect, the Force is much less energy-efficient than spaceship engines or droid batteries.
You need two telephones in a phone call. Leia wouldn't have heard it without being force-sensitive herself.
From the very first moment that Google decided that Firefox was no longer their flagship way for users to access their ads and decided to throw all their weight in their own branded browser, the prospect of Firefox being the dominant browser received a death blow.
Once a mega-corp puts resources into figuring out how users handle the product and tweaking it, and then advertise it as their preferred platform as they did with Chrome, there's no way for a non-profit to compete - in particular when the said mega-corp retired their funding and considered them a competitor.
Tech experts might had kept using the same old versions if the product didn't evolve; but there's no money in that, and Firefox would have eventually stalled anyway. They desperately need to find a new market to attract an interested corporate backer that will support them in the long term, if they want a chance to stay relevant.
Proves my point.
That you can't disrupt an established consumer market with a clone product?
There is no established consumer market for embedded smart devices, so don't you that "lesson" might not be relevant in this new space?
Oh, and I forgot - emergent behaviors of complex systems are not subject to the limitations of Turing-machines completeness; such behaviors are not described as symbols within the system, so they cannot be "diagonalized" (which is the basis for the limitations of formal systems such as Turing machines halting problem and the GÃdel's theorem in mathematics).
We don't know whether the "emergent computation" of distributed automata systems is more powerful* than Turing's computable functions, but we have no reason to believe that they are equivalent. A systems that performs computation through emergent adaptations rather than manipulation of symbols might be strictly more powerful.
*(We know it's not less powerful thank's to Rule 110 being Turing-complete; anything a symbolic computer can do, a cellular automaton can do as well).
It seems that our only core disagreement is regarding whether awareness can emerge from a combination of the physical that we already know about, or whether it requires a yet undiscovered phenomenon (what you call "extra-physical") that would influence them.
There's nothing "magical" in emergent properties of complex systems being able to adapt to their environment in intelligent ways, or producing elaborate results; the only thing that seems magical is how such complex behaviors can appear out of very simple, unrelated rules - but it can be seen happening everywhere, if you know where to look. See for example how Conway's Game of Life produces persistent, moving structures out of single-cell activation rules, or how the parable of the polygons gives raise to segregation from individual decisions that are not particularly racist.
Such emergent behaviors may indeed be influenced an react to an external environment, in special when the survival of the whole system depends on it (have you seen ant colonies fighting an aggressor?) - survival of the fittest means that only systems able to adapt will be around for long; so the well-tuned systems are self-selected, and those without the "magic" property will disappear. So this model too works without unfounded ideas, just like yours; and it doesn't require any "undiscovered particle", while your model requires postulating a sort of "Higgs boson of awareness" that we don't nothing about.
As for CS not having a theory for how intelligence appears, that is be true, but neuropsychology does have a good basis for one; as I mentioned, our conscious process -when scanned through magnetic resonance- looks a lot like creating post-hoc rationalizations of the reflex analysis performed by the lower brain functions. That model could be reasonably expected to provide a basis for true artificial intelligence in the future.
This conversation is quite interesting :-) You're certainly a rare bird, as a non-spiritual dualist. I can empathize with that kind of dualism - being conscious certainly feels different (on a purely emotional level) to the way we see machines operate. I think I'm a physicalist mostly because of practical reasons. (And you're dead-on, my definition makes any kind of dualism a logical impossibility).
I don't rule out that there may be (i.e. exist) some phenomenon or essence that is different from the matter and energy of our current universe, which is the thing that creates conscience. But what good does it make if there's no way that we can observe it or know anything about it? That's why I said that the problem is undecidable - even if it happens to be that way, we'll never know it. Call me physical-agnostic if you will.
I try to avoid thinking too hard about such possibility because of the Occam's Razor, just as a heuristic to make reasoning about the world easier. When the only qualia ("subjective experiences") that I will ever perceive are those that I feel personally, what good does it make to think that other people also share them because of some undetectable substance? I just take it for granted that they also have them, and study the physical signs connected to those experiences - there's nothing else I can do.
Maybe you can enlighten my of why you take a different approach? I'm genuinely interested on how dualistic people reason (and feel) about conscience.
Yeah, I fully agree with that. Augmented intellect (with a human in the middle of the "intelligent" processes, guiding them to do useful work) seems a much more viable paradigm in the mid term - and it's how any kind of AI is working now in practice.
I'm not missing it (I've seen you commenting about it at another thread), it's just that I don't see how it's relevant, nor why "being an observer" is something that can't happen exclusively within the confines of the physical world as currently understood.
I find it rather funny that you think a very prominently physical phenomenon ("collapsing the wave-function") requires something from outside the realm of the modern physics paradigm.
You keep repeating that impossibility as your core argument, but I don't take it as a given ("an axiom") as you do, and it doesn't follow from the laws that explain the collapse of the wave-function. Basically you're saying "an observer cannot be physical matter because the collapse of the wave-function requires something that is not physical", but don't explain why it requires something non-physical.
It is true that current physics doesn't understand the interaction between micro and macro levels (i.e. what happens when you add what you call an "observer" to the mix), but I can't agree with your jumping to the conclusion that this interaction requires something that can't be explained with configurations of matter and energy. Under that point that you highlight as essential, an "observer" is "whatever causes a wave-function to collapse in a physical system". There is nothing requiring this "whatever" to be a form of consciousness, just that it's something external to the system studied at a quantum level.
Nothing regarding quantum physics makes me think that my consciousness requires something other than an emergent phenomenon of my physical body. If that makes me a p-zombie, I'm a p-zombie with a very rich inner life. ;-)
When I turn on the room's light, my cellphone's light sensor detects it and instructs the screen to dim the bright. You can say that my phone is aware of the environment's light.
How is that different in essence to what my brain does in my body, other than being able of much more complex processes? How do you know that what I sense as self-awareness is impossible to be the collection of those physical processes, and that I sense all of it because of - well, because I'm inside this body that is doing them?
Thanks, I wanted to understand your position about "non-physical", and we have no disagreement there.
Although if you are not aiming for "non-physical" as "spiritual", I don't get why you'd describe it as non-physical. Under my model, if something belongs in the world, it is physical by definition - i.e. because both words mean the same thing - whether the phenomena can be described by the current status of the physics science or not.
Quite true. I happen to have the (irrational?) belief that creating true AI it is possible (or better, I have no reason to believe that it's not), hence my user name. Yet I think such possibility can't be achieved with our current knowledge and technology. Major breakthroughs should happen both in hardware capabilities and software approaches to create any kind of strong AI.
And it probably would require some kind of evolved training of a self-preserving system able to adapt to increasingly harsh environments thanks to its highers brains, just like we emerged from the common animals, rather than being engineered from first principles.
Define "non-physical". If you can't find a set of properties that can tell apart the "physical" from the "non-physical", you're just trolling (I don't know whether other slashdotters or just yourself). If your properties depend on assuming that reality is dualistic, you're doing circular reasoning.
I admit that I'm no expert with respect to dualistic theories, but I've never come across with a convincing set of such properties.
All rational require a pure unproven belief at the beginning, it's what we call an "axiom". You can't avoid those in any rational way. The best you can do is to adopt a collection of axioms that don't create too bad contradictions, and tweak your axioms when you find out that they do contradict themselves.
This is basic theory of meaning; you just can't write off other belief systems as "irrational" if they happen to be self-consistent, merely because you disagree with their adopted axioms. Doing that is not rational either.
The best thing rationality can do is assert "these are the facts we known about the world, and here we have the collection of logical models that might explain them; there's no rational way to prefer one over the others in principle when all them are consistent with the facts".
Why would you assume that? Taking that assertion as an axiom is in fact admitting dualism as a first principle, but there's no rational reason to accept it as a given either - I certainly don't see anything obvious about it.
Quite the contrary, it seems perfectly consistent with what we know about consciousness thanks to recent brain scanning technology.
Self-awareness is a perception that is derived from distributed brain activity, in fact it's a post-hoc rationalization of the unconscious processes that the brain performs fast and in parallel.
I don't see why that perception, like any other perceptions can't just be a result of the combined activation of our grain matter. Mind you, I don't believe that it has to come just from matter and that no other kind of "conscious substance" or "soul" can't exist; in fact I think that monism/dualism is an undecidable problem, and thus badly defined metaphysics.
The problem with those fears is that they come from a completely unrealistic understanding of how Artificial Intelligence works. The myths that permeate western public understanding and popular depictions of robotics and AI are Frankenstein and Pinocchio. However, the Mechanical Turk and Disney's The Old Mill are much more accurate descriptions of what's going on in the workings of any current, apparently intelligent machine.
In the Mechanical Turk, all appearance of independent behavior is put there by a human trying to trick the audience into thinking the robot is intelligent. Think chatbots and how they apparently pass the Turing Test.
In the Old Mill, it is the watcher who humanizes the behavior of a purely automatic mechanism, blindly driven by the laws of physics. The Old Mill didn't care about the animals living inside it, not suffered its destruction in the middle of the storm. It merely was pushed by the force of the wind; but we perceive it as a sad story.
The problem with those fears is that they come from a completely unrealistic understanding of how Artificial Intelligence works. The myths that permeate western public understanding and popular depictions of robotics and AI are Frankenstein and Pinocchio. However, the Mechanical Turk and Disney's The Old Mill are much more accurate descriptions of what's going on in the workings of any current, apparently intelligent machine.
The "bottom-up" approach you talk about does exist, but as of today it only has the intelligence capabilities of amoeba and earthworms.
It is possible that in the future, huge technological advances make bottom-up a viable approach for artificial intelligence. But it would require a scientific breakthrough from what we know now and, above all, thousands of years of simulated evolution for fine-tuning. At which point, it would likely contain huge built-in bias induced by the training process, that would render it too dependent on human caring, and would lack true self-preservation traits that we get from hour biological heritage.
Wait, you haven't seen how Ada and Babbage fight crime and have adventures?
Anyone interested in Ada Lovelace and/or the story of computing will enjoy that utterly respectful comic.
I think having a more formal approach would certainly help with the current status of development. C.T. provides a declarative way of studying side effects, which can allow developers better ways to split the problem into manageable chunks, avoiding the traps of hidden state changes that plague current systems.
Thanks, that simple description has explained it better than any ambiguous Wikipedia article or newsreel I've seen.
If I have had some mod points left I would have upvoted you instead of replying; this post deserves to be seen.
As I explain in my previous comment, the most recent changes in structure are being driven by theoretical advances in Category Theory (the "abstract nonsense" that brought us monads and LINQ).
This means that they are particularly well adapted, as Category Theory is the science of composing small parts to build a large structure without scaling problems. In theory, programs using these techniques should be easier to understand and maintain, at least once that you get a preliminary grasp of the underpinnings of Category Theory.
There's a wealth of new research going on in Programming Language Theory, with several breakthroughs in the last years bridging the gap between functional and imperative programming.
The other trend in declarative programming is reactive languages like React.js and Flux being applied to user interfaces. This allows for tools like React Native which can abstract away all the spaghetti code to handle events, providing a higher abstraction, including the "debug & rewind" and "live programming" capabilities seen in online "web embedded" environments like Github Gist or JSFiddle.
I expect that, as these techniques mature, they will settle down and allow for development techniques that allow for easy discoverability of APIs without having to learn a particular complex syntax, and better programming by connecting components without the drawbacks and limitations of classic Visual tools.
All these new techniques based in Category Theory are driving advances in mainstream languages - starting with libraries like Linq and jQuery but also Python, Javascript and even C++ adopting lambdas, advanced type systems with auto-inference of types, and libraries with constructs for declarative race-free parallelism such as promises and agent models.
The majority of those techniques are being tested first in experimental languages by researchers eating their own dog food, with Haskell often having its most pure form (see what I did there?). Anyone interested in enhancing the expressivity of PLs may lurk Lambda the ultimage, where guys much more clever than you and me hang around and can give pointers to all the relevant theoretical results.
There's scientific evidence now, too.
Does it please you to believe you guess I will prattle on meaninglessly?
It seems that you didn't notice my username. I win.
Did the training of the network emerge in a spontaneous way from raw components and evolved into a useful feature by natural selection, or was it assembled, guided and carefully tweaked by an engineer at Google for a specific purpose?
So, where does the Google image algorithm hold the amigdala, neocortex, cerebellum...? Does it dream with electric sheeps?
That the lowest layer works in the same way does not mean that we know how to replicate the function of the whole working structure. See the 3D folding of proteins, a much (much!) simpler system that we don't fully understand and can only simulate through brute force. A whole brain is out of our league.
Are you sure? When Google publishes the results of an image search in their web page, there are humans selecting which results are relevant; I've even heard Google feeds that information back in the system to learn which results are the best and refine the algorithm. Again you're confounding the lowest layer (image recognition/generation) with the application of those techniques in a larger environment for practical results, which is the thing I'm talking about.
Of course you can create small automated routines that solve very specific problems without direct human intervention- that was my starting point. But we don't know how to compose lots of those small automated routines to create a system with intelligence "in the large", which can navigate the real world unaided. No, Google cars don't qualify either.
In Slashdot, that's quite true.
Also, whooosh.