http://www.businessinsider.com/google-tests-new-artificial-intelligence-chatbot-2015-6
Chattiest are not alive, they are not conscious. If you think they are ... then you are projecting/anthropomorphizing, just like when you think Bugs Bunny is a real person. But Google once again, has taken a wrong turn at Albuquerque ;-)
When I went to the IJCAI at UCLA back in 85 ... (International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence) ... I learned that AI was a scam, designed to sell Shinola to the military ... now branching out to scam the commercial sector. I listened respectfully when we visited the AI lab at UCLA, where a grad student speaking in serious tones, explained that his research was to understand dreaming better, by writing a software model to simulate it. I am still waiting for his big breakthru.
Here is my question ... if you believe that AI is real, then tell me how I can distinguish between a person writing a post at Atheist Forums ... and a chat bot? Also ... apply at Google while you still can ... they need to hire better scammers ... so they can continue to get money from the CIA.
While I won't comment on Googles bot without interacting with it, I'll say none of the previous ones I have 'talked' to have left me particularly impressed. Having said that, a general purpose AI is inevitable, and our own brains are the proof of it. Once we learn to reverse engineer the human brain, building a true AI becomes much easier. It will probably take centuries, but it will happen.
It's one of the first examples, if not the first, of functional artificial neural networks, more than actual A.I.
I love (almost) everything! From Computers and People and everything in between! Who gives a shit if it's alive? As Pragmatic as I may be, I think we should all just do whatever the fuck makes us happy! :grin:
Quote from: Baruch on July 03, 2015, 07:17:55 AM
Here is my question ... if you believe that AI is real
Well, I would hope that people believe that AI is real, it's pretty indisputable that machines can display some sort of rudimentary intelligence. Everything from your Roomba to a computer chess opponent to that robot who went on Jeopardy display some intelligence.
Quotethen tell me how I can distinguish between a person writing a post at Atheist Forums ... and a chat bot? Also ... apply at Google while you still can ... they need to hire better scammers ... so they can continue to get money from the CIA.
You're talking about a Turing test - a machine communicating in such a way that it's practically indistinguishable from human communication. I suppose it's possible, though I have yet to see it in person. I've tried a lot of chat bots and they generally fail in a few ways: not enough spelling/grammar errors, incorrect emotional reactions (immune to insults, no sense of ego, angry at something that innocuous, not angry at something really horrific) and replies that clearly didn't understand the input (oblivious to puns, innuendo, memes)
I see y'all were easily impressed by ELIZA the original bot that simulated a psychologist. The code may change, but the reality is, no matter how you arrange 1s and 0s ... it is the same thing fundamentally ... and it still isn't alive or conscious.
Quote from: Baruch on July 03, 2015, 02:23:31 PM
I see y'all were easily impressed by ELIZA the original bot that simulated a psychologist. The code may change, but the reality is, no matter how you arrange 1s and 0s ... it is the same thing fundamentally ... and it still isn't alive or conscious.
A question I would like to propose is this; Does being alive or conscious automatically allows them to be deserving of love? And Vice Versa?
So. ..google foisted Ted Cruz on the world via artificial stupidity? Sounds about right. . Now artificial intelligence sounds a bit fishy, but the GOP is proof positive artificial stupidity is alive and well in the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA!
More properly part of the political section ... but humans can't create utopia (it means no-place) ... because it is self contradictory to be able to do so. Now what people can do, is create dystopia ... and the harder they try to achieve their wacky vision, the more dystopia it gets ;-( Similarly both good cop/bad cop branches of wacky idealism ... "you should have an automatic weapon with you in the port-a-potty just in case" ... if followed to their logical conclusions, will kill all of us.
dtq123 .. a unique question by a unique person, thanks. What does "deserving" mean? What does being "alive" mean? What does being "conscious" mean? What does "automatically allows" mean? I or anyone else, can only tell you what they mean by that. And some of us are just plain mean ;-) This is why people have to spend years getting even a BA in philosophy. Thus we face word salad. But for me, this is less complicated than Euclidean geometry ...
Love what you will. Hate what you will. Just be honest with yourself and with everyone else. Expect this will be interative, that you won't get it right at first, but you can always learn more. Of course this means defeating delusion and deceit ... but if you can do that, then you are well on your way to showing the highest "agape" possible. Not philos, not eros. Now notice I didn't say do what you will. Certainly be very careful acting on your honest hate. And don't be complacent about acting on your honest love, that is a worse blind spot than what you hate. Now I am not supposed to evangelize, but I would recommend The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran. Poems. Poems by William Blake and the sonnets of Shakespeare. And the love paean by Paul ... and the Song of Songs. Basically, if you want to know things, you have to get fully involved. And if you want to understand, then you have to embody. If you embody a single poem of love, either your own or borrowed ... then you will know the answer to your question.
Enough on methodology. I am in love with all things and all people, but not in the same way, uniquely with each and changing in time. Besides, even fictional characters are real in some universe somewhere. So of course I love Naruto, but in a non-homoerotic way in my case. Because in the least, I love that part of the author of Naruto, out of which the character of Naruto comes. We are fictional also ... but we are living cartoons, like in Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Set your worries aside, and get yourself tooned. ThThThat's all folks!
Quote from: Baruch on July 03, 2015, 07:17:55 AM
Here is my question ... if you believe that AI is real, then tell me how I can distinguish between a person writing a post at Atheist Forums ... and a chat bot? Also ... apply at Google while you still can ... they need to hire better scammers ... so they can continue to get money from the CIA.
I wouldn't call AI a scam. AI is basically to computer programming what fusion power is to physics: always 20 years down the line, no matter what year you're making your prediction. So I would say it's possible, but not yet. I think it's more likely that sentience is an emergent property of a sufficiently complex system (say, for example, a brain) rather than something that can be set down by rules, however flexible.
We're also learning that the Turing Test may not be the right test to apply. I wouldn't be surprised if a machine passes the Turing Test in the next few years, but I think all will agree that it's due to very cunning programming rather than to innate intelligence.
And now we veer into philosophy, which I have previously stated impatience with, but it's impossible to progress further into an exploration of AI without it, so I'll just have to suffer through it.
The main problem is that we don't have a solid definition of what consciousness
is. We're all kind of reduced to the late Justice Potter Stewart's test for what pornography is: "I know it when I see it." That's all well and good, but it's not very rigorous or repeatable, and it's not a basis upon which to start coding.
If I can make a few recommendations here, and they're all by Douglas Hofstadter, I can do no better than to suggest
Gödel, Escher, Bach,
The Mind's I, and
I Am A Strange Loop, which I can't honestly say I understand well enough to summarize, but I have a feeling are groping in the right direction.
Quote from: Baruch on July 03, 2015, 02:23:31 PM
I see y'all were easily impressed by ELIZA the original bot that simulated a psychologist. The code may change, but the reality is, no matter how you arrange 1s and 0s ... it is the same thing fundamentally ... and it still isn't alive or conscious.
Hm.....sounds like some of the christians that drop in here every now and again. :)
The only reason I'm rooting for AI is that better AI produces better games--and what could be more valuable than that????
trdsf ... "I know it when I see it." ... that is when you know you are dealing with an axiom, not a deduction. Life, consciousness etc ... are axioms ... are not analyzable by more primitive concepts by deduction and computation. Though some axioms are tricky, like the Parallel Axiom.
Really to me, AI is about guys ... jealous of women, who want to bring forth life, without having to get a date first ;-) That is what is funny to me about Dr Frankenstein ... he couldn't get a date himself (this might not be canonical), but he though he could create a bride for his monster ;-)) What is his pickup line down at the pub ... I spend my spare time reanimating corpses?
Quote from: Baruch on July 03, 2015, 02:23:31 PM
I see y'all were easily impressed by ELIZA the original bot that simulated a psychologist. The code may change, but the reality is, no matter how you arrange 1s and 0s ... it is the same thing fundamentally ... and it still isn't alive or conscious.
Whew, thanks for clearing that up. I was sort of on the fence on whether or not PCs qualify as life. :|
Just fyi, what's the base code of humans? Because it looks an awful lot like a bunch of As, Ts, Cs, and Gs to me.
Granted, it's actually way more complex than just that, but that's sort of the point. You can boil it down to the building blocks and it looks rather unimpressive, but how that stuff is arranged and functions is where all the magic happens. Humans are just cells. Planets and galaxies are just atoms.* And machine code is just zeroes and ones.
(* before someone corrects me - yes, I know that galaxies contain non-baryonic matter, too)
Quote from: Baruch on July 03, 2015, 11:52:04 PMReally to me, AI is about guys ... jealous of women, who want to bring forth life, without having to get a date first ;-)
Is that a joke? Please tell me that's a joke.
Quote from: Baruch on July 03, 2015, 11:52:04 PM
trdsf ... "I know it when I see it." ... that is when you know you are dealing with an axiom, not a deduction. Life, consciousness etc ... are axioms ... are not analyzable by more primitive concepts by deduction and computation. Though some axioms are tricky, like the Parallel Axiom.
I'm inclined to think we can understand cognition someday. I'm philosophically (there's that word again) disinclined to think that the basis of consciousness is unknowable. But it's an extremely difficult question, and I think we're a long way off from it. I consider it axiomatic that one should proceed from as few axioms as necessary, and there's no reason to write off consciousness as unknowable, certainly not yet.
With regard to AI itself again, certainly we're talking about artificial
human-like intelligence. A natively-evolved machine intelligence falls prey to Wittgenstein's observation that "If a lion could speak, we could not understand him." We would lack the common frame of reference that makes communication possible. Even with another human with whom you do not share a language, it is possible to work out a means of communication between you.
Now, I'm not sure that I agree with Wittgenstein
if the lion were to have a human
level intellect (as opposed to a human
like intellect) -- at that level, yes, we could work out some sort of mutually intelligible communication. With a lion-level intellect, I think we could learn how to understand it, but I don't know if we could make ourselves understood to it. That's hard to call communication -- it's only one way.
As someone who grew up watching Star Trek, the idea of AI has always fascinated me. Data was such a beloved character because his ultimate goal was to be human and his efforts taught a lot of the humans he served about their own humanity.
I think the saddest part of AI in modern science fiction is that it proves that humans really are shitty. Data never really was treated equally, and was often sent out on dangerous missions instead of his human counterparts. In Star Wars, the droids are practically slaves. Even if we were to create sentient artificial life, I think it's human nature to want to exploit it.
Hydra009 - reductionism is not as successful as its advocates promote. Also male geek culture produces most of technology ... because men are mutant women, and geeks are mutant men. And yes, I was joking ... sort of. Marie Curie is the exception that proves the rule.
trdsf - there is no self-licking ice cream cone
TomFoolery - all of economics is based on slave labor ... starting with the family unit ... you know what the ladies are for, right? And in most societies the children are used as unpaid labor whenever possible. For the really shitty work we use war prisoners (as recently in the Soviet Union following WW II .. and all thru Nazi occupied Europe) or foreigners sufficiently different from us (see export of US jobs to every 3rd World shit-hole on the planet). Robots or humanly modified life forms (human-animal hybrids like the human-sheep cross the Brits developed (10% human, 90% sheep)) are ideal ... because robots aren't sentient, and the human-animal hybrids aren't going to get any "human rights". Modern society invented wage and debt slavery, because the oppression is less obvious to those being oppressed ... because they are coopted into voting/working for their own demise. The Elite are simply the most successful predators of their species, the most sociopathic.
http://www.bioethics.ac.uk/topics/human-animal-hybrids---chimera.php
http://listverse.com/2013/03/08/10-insane-cases-of-genetic-engineering/
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2017818/Embryos-involving-genes-animals-mixed-humans-produced-secretively-past-years.html
Ape-human hybrids as super-soldiers are inevitable, and probably technically possible now.
Quote from: Baruch on July 04, 2015, 09:03:59 AM
TomFoolery - all of economics is based on slave labor ... starting with the family unit ... you know what the ladies are for, right? And in most societies the children are used as unpaid labor whenever possible...
...Robots or humanly modified life forms (human-animal hybrids like the human-sheep cross the Brits developed (10% human, 90% sheep)) are ideal ... because robots aren't sentient, and the human-animal hybrids aren't going to get any "human rights".
I can't disagree with many of these points (though I find them very bleak when taken alone and perhaps not fully capturing the point of society, if there is a point at all), but when it comes to sentient artificial intelligence, does it make us better or worse that we would deliberately create something just to openly enslave it? Computers, smart phones, and really all tools already serve as non-sentient slaves, but at what point should be begin feeling bad about it? When we put faces on them and give them personalities?
Quote from: Baruch on July 04, 2015, 09:03:59 AMFor the really shitty work we use war prisoners (as recently in the Soviet Union following WW II .. and all thru Nazi occupied Europe) or foreigners sufficiently different from us (see export of US jobs to every 3rd World shit-hole on the planet).
Are you from the U.S., or at least familiar with the U.S. prison system? All prisons are federally operated, but many are now contracted out to private companies which subcontract out prison labor to private industry. For a slightly higher wage than other prison jobs (usually still less than $1 an hour) prisoners can produce goods for commerce, and it's a system whereby companies have a labor pool they barely pay, a labor pool they can ensure will show up on time every day and never take sick or family leave, and if they complain they can be put in solitary confinement or have time added to their sentence. I don't know if you could have a more perfect description of slavery, but it seems like no one complains because they get "paid" and they're prisoners anyway. It's like no one realizes (or cares) that it encourages us to jail more people and keep them there because private companies don't want to pay fair wages to free citizens. It's insane.
Quote from: TomFoolery on July 04, 2015, 09:27:44 AM
All prisons are federally operated, but many are now contracted out to private companies which subcontract out prison labor to private industry. For a slightly higher wage than other prison jobs (usually still less than $1 an hour) prisoners can produce goods for commerce, and it's a system whereby companies have a labor pool they barely pay, a labor pool they can ensure will show up on time every day and never take sick or family leave, and if they complain they can be put in solitary confinement or have time added to their sentence. I don't know if you could have a more perfect description of slavery, but it seems like no one complains because they get "paid" and they're prisoners anyway. It's like no one realizes (or cares) that it encourages us to jail more people and keep them there because private companies don't want to pay fair wages to free citizens. It's insane.
Seems to be another guise of the 'company store' or 'share croppers' and the Jim Crow laws that allowed blacks to be arrested for next to nothing and made to 'work' off their fines.
Mike CL ... correct ... there are 250 million laws in the US ... every person on average violated 3 felonies per day (as reported elsewhere) ... so yes, the police can pick you up at any time and throw away the key. The police, like the rest of the middle class, are quisling enablers of the upper class psychos. In America today, we aren't racist, because everyone not wealthy is a B&%^k. Anyone who is wealthy, like Tiger Woods, is at least an honorary W#6$e. Except that women, colored folks, and Jews are still forbidden from many private country clubs. That is where the KKK lives today.
TomFoolery - privatized prisons? Of course! Just a coincidence that most prisoners are B$&^k men. Most are there on drug violations ... for violating the right of the Pharmaceutical Oligarchs to control distribution and pricing (and doctors are the enablers, not the controllers). But the greatest drug of all is money, and it is perfectly legal. Yes, thanks to technology, the average middle class family has an average equivalent of 11 house slaves. Without technology we would need to import more Irish maids and English butlers. PS - the Japanese love to put faces and personalities on their robots. We must eliminate all jobs for people working minimum wage or sub-miniumum plus tips wages. So when all human work is replaced, we will all be retired .. just not equally wealthy. Mansions for some, viaduct cardboard boxes for the rest. I don't think we will have to worry about Seri getting the vote ... that was never part of the Master's plans (bad guy from Dr Who).
Quote from: TomFoolery on July 04, 2015, 09:27:44 AM
When we put faces on them and give them personalities?
Are you testifying that machines can have personalities? Wasn't there consensus that they cannot? I'm lost after about 5 long posts, pardon my idiot self.
No need to apologize ... nobody thinks that Anime people are more than two dimensional anyway ;-)
Well not real personalities, but in the same way that an advertising icon like Tony the Tiger has a personality ...
http://www.theweathernetwork.com/us/news/articles/new-japanese-hotel-will-be-staffed-by-robots-androids/45009/
I find the Japanese preoccupation with humanoid robots to be creepy ... as compared to robot arms for car assembly etc, which are clearly not anthropomorphic. In an old Dr Who, there is an episode that mentions that humanity will develop robe-phobia eventually.
Quote from: dtq123 on July 04, 2015, 11:49:13 AM
Are you testifying that machines can have personalities? Wasn't there consensus that they cannot? I'm lost after about 5 long posts, pardon my idiot self.
All a personality is a characteristic and adaptive pattern of thinking, feeling and behaving.
It would be an interesting experiment to program 10 androids with a baseline algorithm for how to perceive and respond to all manner of social interactions. More frequently used traits would become more dominant over other traits and as time went on those dominant traits would become more fixed, so an android that was constantly exposed to dry humor and sarcasm would use those characteristics more often than tenderness and sensitivity for example. If you exposed each android to very different conditions (some to frequent humor, some to frequent tragedy, some to frequent violence, etc.), what would the androids be like after a year? After ten years? Would you consider that the development of personality?
Quote from: Baruch on July 04, 2015, 11:55:59 AM
No need to apologize ... nobody thinks that Anime people are more than two dimensional anyway ;-)
Hey! Spinoza would not like such insults with his name! Spinoza would love anime (I hope :3)
Quote from: Baruch on July 04, 2015, 11:55:59 AM
In an old Dr Who, there is an episode that mentions that humanity will develop robe-phobia eventually.
How much of that do you believe? Sure with movies like terminator that might seem true, but with JAPAN leading the anime industry and Anime lovers eating that up it might seem that we have a faction of Robot lovers. Do you agree? Or does the episode sound more accurate XD
Quote from: TomFoolery on July 04, 2015, 11:57:57 AM
Would you consider that the development of personality?
Ask Spinoza, I can't answer that X3
I haven't taken my psych class yet to think critically of it
TomFoolery - that is a good description of artificial neural net theory. And at least as a simplified model, it does match part of what neurons do for a living. But I wouldn't characterize something like a robot following a program ... as having behavior ... it has a program (which with fuzzy logic or neural nets is adaptive).
dtq123 - those folks are Japanese ... who can figure them out? I see Americans as more European, and thus more likely to engage in "sabot"eurism. Sabot were wooden shoes that early French workers tossed into the machinery, to break them down. This is why England progressed industrially faster ... they were more Tory.
Quote from: Baruch on July 04, 2015, 09:03:59 AMHydra009 - reductionism is not as successful as its advocates promote. Also male geek culture produces most of technology ... because men are mutant women, and geeks are mutant men. And yes, I was joking ... sort of. Marie Curie is the exception that proves the rule.
(http://i.imgur.com/LIqaBa3.gif)
Serious question: are you on illicit drugs when you post?
Quote from: TomFoolery on July 04, 2015, 07:09:56 AM
As someone who grew up watching Star Trek, the idea of AI has always fascinated me. Data was such a beloved character because his ultimate goal was to be human and his efforts taught a lot of the humans he served about their own humanity.
Heh. Shows my age, when you said Star Trek and AI, I thought about the talking computer on the original series.
Quote from: TomFoolery on July 04, 2015, 07:09:56 AM
I think the saddest part of AI in modern science fiction is that it proves that humans really are shitty. Data never really was treated equally, and was often sent out on dangerous missions instead of his human counterparts. In Star Wars, the droids are practically slaves. Even if we were to create sentient artificial life, I think it's human nature to want to exploit it.
The flip side is robots as presented by Isaac Asimov, in which they are explicitly manufactured products with built-in safeguards -- whence the Three Laws of Robotics. I think he was more correct in that if commercial robots -- as independent, ambulatory, artificially intelligent entities -- ever come to pass, that's exactly how they will be built, with hard-wired limits on their behavior.
Quote from: Baruch on July 04, 2015, 09:03:59 AM
trdsf - there is no self-licking ice cream cone
What does that have to do with anything? Logically and/or physically impossible things are logically and/or physically impossible, but there's no reason to file understanding of consciousness as either.
Quote from: trdsf on July 04, 2015, 03:56:52 PM
Heh. Shows my age, when you said Star Trek and AI, I thought about the talking computer on the original series.
I like the original series quite a bit, but I will say I feel like TNG posed social and philosophical questions that related more to my generation. The original had space hippies. I mean, come on! :)
But in TNG there are two episodes that deal with definitions of "life" in regards to AI. The more obvious one was "Measure of a Man" which explored Data's position within Starfleet, whether he was equipment that could be ordered to submit to experimentation or a life form. The definition of life, what it is, when it begins and when it ends will always be up for debate. A point in the episode that really resonated with me (perhaps due to my biochemistry background) was when they pointed out that if you can look at human life as being an intricately arranged mass of organic compounds made operational by chemical signaling, is it really that crazy to imagine we could achieve the same thing with non-organic compounds and electrical signaling?
There was a second episode however called "Quality of Life" which I think hit further home in regards to AI and being "alive" in a way we have a difficult time comprehending. A scientist built these little robots to perform repairs in a mine and eventually they began showing signs that they were self-aware when they avoided going into a situation that would have been certainly "fatal" to them. These robots looked very much like robots. They didn't have Data's face or anything that a human would relate to in real way as a life form.
I think self-awareness for us is a problem in a lot of ways that we don't want to confront. It forces us to consider there are things out that that might rival us in ways that we consider exclusive to humanity. If sentience is a requirement, there are animals that have demonstrated a profound level of intelligence and self-awareness, yet we don't extend the same rights to those species. *cough* Sea World *cough*
In regards to artificial life, yes, I could see that as a possibility, if we ever so slightly modify using the biological definition:
All of or most of these qualities:
Homeostasis: Regulation of the internal environment to maintain a constant state
Organization: Being structurally composed of one or more cells - not necessarily organic cells.
Metabolism: Transformation of energy by converting chemicals and energy into cellular components (anabolism) and decomposing matter (catabolism). Living things require energy to maintain internal organization (homeostasis) and to produce the other phenomena associated with life.
Growth: Maintenance of a higher rate of anabolism than catabolism. A growing organism increases in size in all of its parts, rather than simply accumulating matter.
Adaptation: The ability to change over time in response to the environment. This ability is fundamental to the process of evolution and is determined by the organism's heredity, diet, and external factors.
Response to stimuli: A response can take many forms, from the contraction of a unicellular organism to external chemicals, to complex reactions involving all the senses of multicellular organisms. A response is often expressed by motion.
Reproduction: The ability to produce new individual organisms, either asexually from a single parent organism, or sexually from two parent organisms.
These complex processes, called physiological functions, have underlying physical and chemical bases, as well as signaling and control mechanisms that are essential to maintaining life
Cells fashioned with or by nanotechnology would qualify as artificial cells and once they form a multicellular artificial organism that exhibits most or all of these traits, then it would be considered alive. Perhaps not recognizable to us as living, but it would technically be alive.
Then we can take a look at human intelligence. Tons of definitions and various debates, but let's, for simplicity's sake, settle on one.
Perception - the organization, identification, and interpretation of sensory information in order to represent and understand the environment
Consciousness - the quality or state of awareness, or, of being aware of an external object or something within oneself
Self-Awareness - the capacity for introspection and the ability to recognize oneself as an individual separate from the environment and other individuals
Volition - will is the cognitive process by which an individual decides on and commits to a particular course of action. Volitional processes can be applied consciously or they can be automatized as habits over time
And...
Learn - the act of acquiring new, or modifying and reinforcing, existing knowledge, behaviors, skills, values, or preferences and may involve synthesizing different types of information.
Form concepts - concepts are the mental categories that help us classify objects, events, or ideas, building on the understanding that each object, event, or idea has a set of common relevant features. Thus, concept learning is a strategy which requires a learner to compare and contrast groups or categories that contain concept-relevant features with groups or categories that do not contain concept-relevant features.
Understand - a psychological process related to an abstract or physical object, such as a person, situation, or message whereby one is able to think about it and use concepts to deal adequately with that object.
Reason -
---- Recognize patterns
---- Comprehend ideas
---- Plan
---- Problem Solve
---- Use language to communicate
It think we all become sidetracked by the manner in which a supposed artificial intelligence goes about accomplishing these traits. We use a complex array of interdependent neural networks which in turn rely on neurons communicating with each other by the use of neurotransmitters between the synapses. These signals are highly choreographed and susceptible to error. An artificial neural network would be expected to use a similar method, albeit perhaps "digital" or quantum in nature. If the artificial "lifeform" is able to demonstrate most, if not all of these traits, then it reasonably on par with human intelligence. If it lacks a few features, then it is on par with human beings who are mentally impaired and yet still considered to have intelligence.
It's my speculation that we'd have to create artificial life before artificial intelligence becomes a real possibility, given that intelligence as we know it (our own) requires a system to create it as an emergent property and to sustain it.
At the moment, I believe we have computers that demonstrate a handful or less of the qualities needed for intelligence, but they do not make for an intelligent machine. When we do create artificial intelligence, it will be both a cause for celebration and the beginning of a tragic era for the new life form.
Aletheia - reductionism is useful, until it is not. Just like a hammer. Also reasoning from analogy isn't scientific, it is poetic.
TomFoolery - yes, I think the Data character was used to explore lots of interesting questions ... but now people are tired of thinking ;-(
trdsf - how does one recognize what is impossible or not? Quoting Aristotle? Curves space-time was impossible, until it wasn't. Also kudos for mentioning Asimov.
Hydra009 - you know that drug/addiction is a result of stimulating certain brain chemicals. Suppose one could stimulate these same brain chemicals without having to use external molecular stimulation ... hmm?
Quote from: Baruch on July 04, 2015, 11:22:15 PM
trdsf - how does one recognize what is impossible or not? Quoting Aristotle? Curves space-time was impossible, until it wasn't. Also kudos for mentioning Asimov.
Curved space-time wasn't impossible before Einstein, it just wasn't recognized as being curved. Neither was the current phase of accelerated expansion of the universe -- more to the point, it just wasn't considered as a possibility, until evidence unexpectedly came in demonstrating the accelerated expansion (Asimov, to mention him again, once speculated that most scientific discoveries are not the result of "Eureka!" but of "Hm, that's odd..."). But that's entirely not the same as being impossible.
The point is, you can't pre-judge the impossibility of something. And 'not known' is not the same as 'not knowable'. The nature of consciousness is currently not known, and all that means is that as of now, we don't know how it works. It says nothing about whether it's knowable.
I can very nearly give you chapter and verse on Asimov like a fundie can give you the King James Version... been an avid fan since I was ten. :D
trdsf ... philosophical, but not scientific. Channel Plato much? There is no abstract world of absolute mathematic nor physical truth, that special men with special organs are able to declaim oracles about the realm of Forms. Pythagoras ran a cult, and Plato followed him, not Socrates. This is why the academy aka university is also a cult. Though I do give credit Euclid for giving it a good try ... and Archimedes. But scepticism and Thomas Kuhn says otherwise. But Euclid wasn't correct about flat space being the same as physical space ... and even his axioms had to be both corrected by David Hilbert and transcended by the non-Euclidean geometry guys.
This is where we get to ... Newton and Einstein are both correct, even though they say very different things (we ignore that, we follow Feyman in ... "just shut up and calculate", and each theory is approximately more correct than the last until Spock of Vulcan is born, and then we will know the Theory of Everything and be like gods. Or at least have warp drive and completely violate classical physics even under conditions where classical physics is valid. That is a mythology of science, not science itself aka big scientism. Even Feynman propagated this mythology, because it served him quite well ... since he was one of the anointed of Pythagoras ... had that special organ.
And if we can't prejudge impossibility, then G-d is possible ;-)
Apparently Google hired the demented PhD student I mentioned in the first post:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/google/11712495/Google-unleashes-machine-dreaming-software-on-the-public-nightmarish-images-flood-the-internet.html
Bwahaha ... not only do we own your day-dreams, we own your nightmares too!
Recognizing patterns is so easy, even a machine can do it by itself?
It's kind of neat how code can create more code... wait... :ugeek:
Quote from: Baruch on July 05, 2015, 10:56:39 PM
trdsf ... philosophical, but not scientific. Channel Plato much? There is no abstract world of absolute mathematic nor physical truth, that special men with special organs are able to declaim oracles about the realm of Forms. Pythagoras ran a cult, and Plato followed him, not Socrates. This is why the academy aka university is also a cult. Though I do give credit Euclid for giving it a good try ... and Archimedes. But scepticism and Thomas Kuhn says otherwise. But Euclid wasn't correct about flat space being the same as physical space ... and even his axioms had to be both corrected by David Hilbert and transcended by the non-Euclidean geometry guys.
This is where we get to ... Newton and Einstein are both correct, even though they say very different things (we ignore that, we follow Feyman in ... "just shut up and calculate", and each theory is approximately more correct than the last until Spock of Vulcan is born, and then we will know the Theory of Everything and be like gods. Or at least have warp drive and completely violate classical physics even under conditions where classical physics is valid. That is a mythology of science, not science itself aka big scientism. Even Feynman propagated this mythology, because it served him quite well ... since he was one of the anointed of Pythagoras ... had that special organ.
And if we can't prejudge impossibility, then G-d is possible ;-)
See, this is why I don't have much patience with philosophy. You haven't actually said anything here; all I see is the kind of word salad that made the one philosophy course I did take in college also the last -- and I had a good teacher.
If I can bring a more relevant Feynman quote into this, "Philosophers, incidentally, say a great deal about what is absolutely necessary for science, and it is always, so far as one can see, rather naive, and probably wrong." As far as getting actual research done, "shut up and calculate" seems to work pretty well.
You make one particular statement that is profoundly wrong, and for all the wrong reasons: "Newton and Einstein are both correct, even though they say very different things".
Simply put (and, of course, based upon our most current knowledge), Einstein is correct and Newton is not. However, the differences in everyday life are so miniscule they can in most circumstances be safely ignored. Newton's close enough to get you to the Moon, Mars, Jupiter, Pluto, and Newton's maths are a lot easier to calculate, so we still study Newton.
But Newton can't provide you a functioning GPS satellite system, or a working Large Hadron Collider. You need Einstein there, because Einstein provides the correct answer.
Also, at 'normal' gravitational fields and velocities, Einstein emphatically does
not say very different things from Newton. That's the whole point: Einstein's theory replaced Newton, because Einstein's theory
included Newton. They say
exactly the same thing under normal circumstances, unless you happen to care what's going on in the 20th, 30th or 40th decimal place, and there are precious few applications that require that kind of precision.
And this goes back to Feynman: it suggests a fundamental philosophical misunderstanding of what science
is, what it
does and how it does it.
Thinking about AI..My daughters bf is artificial and about as phony as a 7 dollar bill, but has 'some' intelligence. .just enough to manipulate her and my grandkids except my 11 year old grandson can see right through him and actually has a chart he made of how to avoid having to deal with the asshole. To bad my daughter can't see through the bullshit. . Damned, if an 11 year old child can see through it surely a 31 year old woman can. . Well maybe not. .
QuoteIn regards to artificial life, yes, I could see that as a possibility, if we ever so slightly modify using the biological definition:
All of or most of these qualities:
Homeostasis: Regulation of the internal environment to maintain a constant state
Organization: Being structurally composed of one or more cells - not necessarily organic cells.
Metabolism: Transformation of energy by converting chemicals and energy into cellular components (anabolism) and decomposing matter (catabolism). Living things require energy to maintain internal organization (homeostasis) and to produce the other phenomena associated with life.
Growth: Maintenance of a higher rate of anabolism than catabolism. A growing organism increases in size in all of its parts, rather than simply accumulating matter.
Adaptation: The ability to change over time in response to the environment. This ability is fundamental to the process of evolution and is determined by the organism's heredity, diet, and external factors.
Response to stimuli: A response can take many forms, from the contraction of a unicellular organism to external chemicals, to complex reactions involving all the senses of multicellular organisms. A response is often expressed by motion.
Reproduction: The ability to produce new individual organisms, either asexually from a single parent organism, or sexually from two parent organisms.
This sounds like the definition of fire to me. :eek: :cool:
So much good stuff ... from so many ... thinking people ;-)
Solitary ... well part of living for most animals is respiration, where you take oxygen and burn sugar. But the seraphim were imagined as living fire ... fire angels. Cherubim were wind angels. In angelology ... Elijah is made into a seraphim called Sandalphon. Elisha his disciple similarly elevated and called Metatron. Sandalphon is a mythic precursor of John the Baptist, and Metatron is a mythic precursor to Jesus. Both were worshipped as pagan deities who lived in the Jordan River.
The origin of seraphim are probably fire tornadoes ...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SyX2NUEkKk ... which to a traditional mind, seems to move with a will of its own aka alive.
Dust devils are probably the origin on cherubim. Cherubs however are baby associates of Cupid, the adult and Adonis-like son of Venus.
AllPurposeAtheist ... if your daughter is dating the equivalent of a male Seri, maybe you can have her upload the regular female Seri ;-) Anyway, as a father myself, you have my condolences. My daughter has yet to encounter anyone she has fallen for.
trdsf ... well quoting Feynman are we? He is pretty good, for a whiz kid who could do math in his head. His view was "shut up and just calculate" ... but that wasn't the view of many other Nobel Prize winners. Newton said ... spooky action at a distance (propagating at infinite velocity), but Einstein said spooky local action (propagating at "c" or less). These are not the same, though it is a rhetorical fallacy to do a slight of hand to obscure that ... the calculations converge, but the reasons for doing the calculation, do not. Quantum mechanics doesn't work with gravity, it only deals with flat space-time. Here is an actual recent lecture at Stanford:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-NBeVEAzPU ... Dr Miller isn't the Physics Pope ... but then I ain't Catholic ;-) At least in relativity/gravitation, we know what a measurement is, aka gravimetry and GPS. Quantum mechanics are nihilist obscurantists? But if we want to deal with current grad school quantum mechanics etc, we will have to start a string in another place. This is the problem with lay understanding of physics ... the problems are papered over in favor of pedagogy, even in some graduate classes. But it isn't science to idolize Einstein, Bohr or Feynman ... otherwise we might as follow St Aquinas.
dtq123 ... a self-booting code, is called a boot sector ... aka Bios plus basic formatting of the HD. But you can't literally start with nothing ... there is some minimum of non-random bits required. Experiments with self-developing software have always been problematical ... though one could describe artificial neural networks as adaptive statistics ... unfortunately these become more rigid over time, because of entropy. Living things, locally reverse the growth of entropy however.
Quote from: Solitary on July 06, 2015, 11:47:17 PM
This sounds like the definition of fire to me. :eek: :cool:
And therein lies the problem with most of the definitions of life I've read.
I don't know if you play games but this is a very interesting exploration into "A.I." with fun puzzle solving kinda like portal 2.
(http://nsae02.casimages.net/img/2015/07/28/150728071704844230.jpg)
Quote from: Nihil-ist on August 25, 2015, 01:59:23 AM
I don't know if you play games but this is a very interesting exploration into "A.I." with fun puzzle solving kinda like portal 2.
(http://nsae02.casimages.net/img/2015/07/28/150728071704844230.jpg)
Have you played it? I have not played Portal 2, so I can't compare that way. Is it like Myst? If so, that drove me nuts and I simply quit the game. I don't do that often.
I'm good up to the point where it starts building weapons to use against me.
I was going to refer to the Turing test on AI, but Hydra beat me to it - you may want to Google this.
I tend to doubt that Google's latest gadget is truly sentient, but I don't doubt that they will produce such a thing soon enough. This is computer technology, the most rapidly changing field in the history of science, and you made your judgment call on a doctrine from 1985! Back then the saw was oft-repeated, "Garbage in = garbage out", which basically asserted that computers do exactly as they are programmed to do, and no more. This is still true, as I have made the case for with a certain hairy-eyed freak with purple scales on his face (avatar) who dumps tons of garbage here in his attempts to waste our time, but computer scientists and psychology professionals now have far greater insight on animal neurological programming, even if they aren't anywhere close to nailing down exactly how that works. I don't see why they would need to, so long as they manage to produce coding which is complex enough that it gives its lucky recipient machine enough options which would enable it to achieve sentience. There are already machines with at least the intelligence of an ant, and then I think the question of whether an ant has sentience is moot - what matters is that it acts according to natural neurological programming at its own complexity level. Therefore, the path to human-equal sentience in non-carbon-based life forms (said Ilia in Star Trek) is complexity. On that, boy have they ever got it now, and they expect to open up whole new technological dimensions in making much more of this possible. Quantum particle computers were hardly even a dream in 1985, if anybody thought of that idea at all! Now I need to go look up that book series Future Shock mentioned by somebody here (was that Mike CI?), as I watch its prophecies become reality around me while reading it.
Quote from: Baruch on July 03, 2015, 02:23:31 PM
I see y'all were easily impressed by ELIZA the original bot that simulated a psychologist. The code may change, but the reality is, no matter how you arrange 1s and 0s ... it is the same thing fundamentally ... and it still isn't alive or conscious.
Oh come now, give it just a little more thought than that - how can you really think such an argument isn't too much like saying no matter how they arrange C,G,A, and T to form genetic codons, they will never produce that clone of Baruch, complete with all of his natural, chemically-driven predispositions? How can anything composed essentially of four bases be alive and conscious? Perhaps the reality of life is that it's essentially a lot simpler than you may think it is when you still don't understand it. I think this is where we should polish out the rust and hone up that Ockam's Razor.
Unfortunately a little knowledge of science is a bad thing ... a human cell is a lot more than just the DNA ... in fact the nuclear machinery is a lot more than just the DNA. Now we know that both Lamark and Darwin were both correct ... you both inherit from cellular DNA (nuclear and mitochondrial) but you also inherit from the early life experience of your parents, because the proteins that control DNA expression, actually are modified by experience, and are carried by the egg and sperm along with the DNA. Gregor Mendel was obsolete around 1960. You gotta catch up!
Well it is OK to be a techno-booster ... just don't put too much money in tech stocks, particularly in early 2000. If you want to believe your Roomba is alive and sentient in naturalist terms ... I won't mind ... just let me turn my head and not snicker to your face ;-)
Quote from: Baruch on August 25, 2015, 06:47:47 PM
Unfortunately a little knowledge of science is a bad thing ... a human cell is a lot more than just the DNA ... in fact the nuclear machinery is a lot more than just the DNA. Now we know that both Lamark and Darwin were both correct ... you both inherit from cellular DNA (nuclear and mitochondrial) but you also inherit from the early life experience of your parents, because the proteins that control DNA expression, actually are modified by experience, and are carried by the egg and sperm along with the DNA. Gregor Mendel was obsolete around 1960. You gotta catch up!
Waddya think mediates epigenetics, which is what you're clearly referring to? Those methyl groups don't attach themselves.
Lamark was still wrong. Mere use does not determine what traits are inherited. Epigenetics provide an additional channel for how organisms can adapt to their environment, but a lot of poor bastards still had to die along the way until a creature that could encode epigenetic hints for their offspring, and even more bastards had to die before those epigenetic signals were sorted out. This is pure Darwinian natural selection, not Lamarkism.
Quote from: Baruch on August 25, 2015, 06:47:47 PM
If you want to believe your Roomba is alive and sentient in naturalist terms ... I won't mind ..
HEY! Don't pick on my Roomba's, I love em.
^ Indeed, Roombas are cool. Especially with other pets:
DNA doesn't just drive its machinery, it builds it from available resources. Not that this should matter with life forms based on silicon chips or quantum particles, why do you really think that? Only the DNA in carbon life contains the instructions by which everything else can be obtained through available resources - in the primordial ooze, those resources were available, thereby the first self-replicating proteins began the big chain reaction which gave rise to us. But we aren't talking about DNA life, are we? Instructions are instructions, and resources are resources. Put them together in a way that the one can utilize the other, and anything can happen!
Baruch, there is no magic behind the making of life - we are really just thinking, feeling, and reacting machines which happen to be complex enough that we have the illusion of making our own decisions, when in fact that effect comes from hierarchical loops in our coding which gives us the options to reason, and based on that reasoning we rewrite lower-order routines. We can even rewrite our reasoning code too. While I could hardly imagine writing software of such complexity as this, it in the presence of the resources which would enable it is the key to all forms of life. You aren't your outer mitochondria, nor are you 100% your DNA instructions, you are your software which is stored in your brain! Anyway, carbon life is only form we know of it now, but this paradigm is likely to shift. 0s and 1s make software today, and even that paradigm may shift tomorrow. We have already seen the shift from simple silicon wafers to the use of quantum physics to drive our software, allowing greater complexity in time which allow our machines to interact with us.
I believe it is the fact that we make our machines interactive where you have your cognitive dissonance. Siri is made to interact and no more, and I won't weigh in on whatever Google is promoting now. Siri has no true self-awareness - it doesn't truly appreciate itself, doesn't mind if you shut it down, has none of its own desires or aspirations, and it certainly has no emotional depth. But why can't a machine have software which enables all of the above? Give it the right options, and it, just like you, will be able to reprogram itself! Whatever the nuts and bolts are behind any software, all of it makes intelligence. Intelligence, including human intelligence is nothing more than software in action! No, we can't view the actual code, and we don't even understand yet how it works, but the evidence for it is as sure as natural selection.
Quote from: Baruch on August 25, 2015, 06:47:47 PM
Unfortunately a little knowledge of science is a bad thing ... a human cell is a lot more than just the DNA ... in fact the nuclear machinery is a lot more than just the DNA. Now we know that both Lamark and Darwin were both correct ... you both inherit from cellular DNA (nuclear and mitochondrial) but you also inherit from the early life experience of your parents, because the proteins that control DNA expression, actually are modified by experience, and are carried by the egg and sperm along with the DNA. Gregor Mendel was obsolete around 1960. You gotta catch up!
Well it is OK to be a techno-booster ... just don't put too much money in tech stocks, particularly in early 2000. If you want to believe your Roomba is alive and sentient in naturalist terms ... I won't mind ... just let me turn my head and not snicker to your face ;-)
Faith in mysterious carbon vitalism ... is secular woo woo. Unless you want to believe that some kinds of quantum electron orbitals are alive and others are not ;-))
Who is being a carbon vitalist here?
Sorry ... if I post right after another, it usually is implied that is who I am referring to. So in this case, Peacewithoutgod.
The description of molecules that occur in living things ... is description, not explanation. Unless one is part of the cult of partial quantum vitalism ;-)
Quote from: Baruch on August 25, 2015, 06:47:47 PM
Unfortunately a little knowledge of science is a bad thing ... a human cell is a lot more than just the DNA ... in fact the nuclear machinery is a lot more than just the DNA. Now we know that both Lamark and Darwin were both correct ... you both inherit from cellular DNA (nuclear and mitochondrial) but you also inherit from the early life experience of your parents, because the proteins that control DNA expression, actually are modified by experience, and are carried by the egg and sperm along with the DNA. Gregor Mendel was obsolete around 1960. You gotta catch up!
Well it is OK to be a techno-booster ... just don't put too much money in tech stocks, particularly in early 2000. If you want to believe your Roomba is alive and sentient in naturalist terms ... I won't mind ... just let me turn my head and not snicker to your face ;-)
Here's something you may want to google: "human appendix".
Quote from: aitm on August 25, 2015, 09:07:06 PM
HEY! Don't pick on my Roomba's, I love em.
Can they make the 1/8" bump from bare floor to non-shag area rugs?
Quote from: Baruch on August 26, 2015, 07:42:07 PM
Faith in mysterious carbon vitalism ... is secular woo woo. Unless you want to believe that some kinds of quantum electron orbitals are alive and others are not ;-))
Like any doctrine, can't argue with that!
Quote from: Baruch on August 26, 2015, 08:10:08 PM
Sorry ... if I post right after another, it usually is implied that is who I am referring to. So in this case, Peacewithoutgod.
The description of molecules that occur in living things ... is description, not explanation. Unless one is part of the cult of partial quantum vitalism ;-)
Hmmm... I'm arguing that thinking, self-aware intelligence is
not necessarily dependent on carbon-based, molecular action in cells which life as we know it, and
you are accusing
me of
carbon vitalism? I essentially said that true intelligence is possible with any materials, and the method doesn't matter so long as it works, therefore I have a good case against the accusation of
partial quantum vitalism as well.
To all of the above, I plead NOT GUILTY! :police:
Go build a Horta. Then come show us what you made. BTW - I did a study on potential silicon based virus back when I was still in HS. Like in most rhetoric, if you keep redefining what a living thing is ... then yes, your Roomba is alive. But then Crazy Al's car sales is real, where you can buy a good used car for only $1000 ;-)
Redefining terms is sometimes necessary, and most terms have multiple definitions and connotations. A classic SciFi AI wouldn't be alive in a strictly technical sense, but it would be sentient and, in some circumstances, a person â€" which is close enough to the real thing that people would shrug their shoulders and let the term "alive" pass. As to silicon life, it probably won't be a horta. Silicon doesn't have nearly the rich chemistry as carbon. However, if a Roomba were to give birth to another via raw materials scavenged from other machinery, I'd think I'd seriously consider it to be alive.
Strong AI or Weak AI? Weak AI ... if we drop the conceit of intelligence, which most people don't deserve .. is possible. Programs can be self modifying on the basis of data input, which can be environmental not formal. Though you have to be careful not to get into a loop. Society is a machine that takes in raw inputs and produces varying outputs for self perpetuation ... but there is "man in the loop". Strong AI implies independent sentience (not sentience borrowed from a sentient programmer, assuming those exist) ... and I am unconvinced that is even possible. There is a difference between simulation and emulation. The usual way to emulate neural circuits is to make a baby the traditional way ;-) I was a member of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence back in the 80s, but it had turned into a scam by that time (as related at the start of the thread). I am still interested in a "sand box" for self modifying code ... but will have to play with that after retirement if at all ... today programs like that are called computer viruses ... hence the need for a "sand box". The original worm program of 1988, was supposed to be a safe self propagating code experiment, that ended badly.
Given your skepticism of cognitive neuroscience, I really shouldn't find your skepticism of strong AI that surprising. The development of strong AI is probably going to closely parallel that of cognitive neuroscience because in a way they're after the same thing: building a model of intelligence. The development of both strong AI and understanding of our own intelligence will be slow and incremental.
I doubt that ELIZA really ever fooled anybody into thinking it's a real person/intelligence. People attached to it because sometimes they just need something responsive to vent at, even if that something won't remember what they'd said just seconds before, even if what they're holding conversation with is a simulacrum of a deity â€" there's a reason why it's called "the talking cure." Hell, it doesn't even have to have even the pretense of a responsive individual to help. I can personally attest to the therepeutic value of bitching out my car when it breaks down.
The progress is slow, but progressive. Deep Blue beat us at chess. Watson beat us at Jeopardy. Bastions of human superiority will fall one by one until, someday, we unite all these together into a something that beats us in every way. It will either be an exhilarating time, or a nightmarish one.
Quote from: Baruch on August 27, 2015, 11:59:46 PM
Strong AI or Weak AI? Weak AI ... if we drop the conceit of intelligence, which most people don't deserve .. is possible. Programs can be self modifying on the basis of data input, which can be environmental not formal. Though you have to be careful not to get into a loop. Society is a machine that takes in raw inputs and produces varying outputs for self perpetuation ... but there is "man in the loop". Strong AI implies independent sentience (not sentience borrowed from a sentient programmer, assuming those exist) ... and I am unconvinced that is even possible. There is a difference between simulation and emulation. The usual way to emulate neural circuits is to make a baby the traditional way ;-) I was a member of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence back in the 80s, but it had turned into a scam by that time (as related at the start of the thread). I am still interested in a "sand box" for self modifying code ... but will have to play with that after retirement if at all ... today programs like that are called computer viruses ... hence the need for a "sand box". The original worm program of 1988, was supposed to be a safe self propagating code experiment, that ended badly.
Are Strong AI / Weak AI in any way analagous to Macroevolution / Microevolution? I recall you didn't seem to understand what is wrong with the latter terms.
Peacewithoutgod ... well at least you are thinking analogically (comparing one kind of thing to different kind of thing, and deriving the similarities and differences). No, Strong AI means ... that any kind of machine, electronic or mechanical (Babbage) that can play checkers, is intelligent as in conscious and alive. Biology is just one kind of machine, like any other ... not implied vitalism. Weak AI means ... that some kinds of machines can simulate intelligence ... but are not conscious and not alive. It is not necessary to emulate a human, to play chess ... it is enough to simulate a human. Of course it is possible, using a biological system (a chimp) to emulate a human, because a biological system is the superclass a human belongs to. But a steam powered calculator is not ... it is in a different superclass ... as is an electronic device (a third superclass).