Artificial Intelligence

[Dogmaphobe]

Artificial intelligence, meh.

Finding any of the stuff produced organically is quite difficult enough.

 

[Dajjal]

My experience is that we are incarnate spiritual beings, and therefore intelligence is a discarnate entity using a body, therefore intelligence in not produced by the brain. I also have qualifications in computer engineering and that tells me that all a computer does is add zeros and ones. The appearance of intelligence comes from the programming not from the computer. I am sure that will always be the case, no matter how powerful computers become. If I am wrong and electronic brains can be created that can think for themselves,s then we should immediately smash them because an inhuman consciousness would have little use for us.

 

[percysunshine]

.

Asimov, a long time ago...

I Robot - Wikipedia the free encyclopedia

 

[Delta4Embassy]

Is true 'artificial intelligence' possible? Intelligence in the sense that we understand it as a human trait? If so, what does this mean about our view of ourselves and our place in the world? It raises questions of a spiritual and theological nature as well, but I suppose that's for another thread.

Dunno if it's technologically possible, but 'intelligence mimicry' has already been done fooling humans interacting with it. Whether that's actual clinical intelligence or not I don't know. Projected fowards though I'd say very possible or at least indistinguishable from organic intelligence in every way that matters.

Very worrisome indeed.

 

[midcan5]

Interesting piece, 'The Myth Of AI' A Conversation with Jaron Lanier.

The Myth Of AI Edge.org

And this from a piece on books I posted earlier today. What Book Changed Your Mind - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education

 

[Treeshepherd]

As a bonus question, how if at all does this relate to transhumanism?

Add the word "smart" to any conventional product and you can guess what the hottest consumer items will be over the course of the next decade. Smart toasters, smart clothing, smart garage doors, etc.. How about a cash-for-clunkers smart toilet connected wirelessly to your mobile device that chemically analyses your waste? I wouldn't categorize these features as 'intelligent'. They'll just be ubiquitous tools that quantify every aspect of human life. Like, your clothes and accessories will constantly inform you about your body temp, heart rate, blood chemistry, dietary needs. Personally, that sounds incredibly annoying. But you could look at these features as yet another tool that empowers individuals to manage their own health, rather than being helplessly dependent on the doctor in the white coat.

Transhumanism; how does that relate to AI? The passion of the transhumanist is achieve salvation/immortality through technology. Upload your own memories, experience, and 'intelligence' to an artificial storage device, and house that in a disposable body. Maybe one's personality could be transferred to disposable brains which are mostly organic. How does that relate to AI?
I don't know, except that the people who live in that possible future are going to be extremely boring and wretched, and completely unaware of their own wretchedness.

 

[dblack]

Interesting piece, 'The Myth Of AI' A Conversation with Jaron Lanier.

The Myth Of AI Edge.org

And this from a piece on books I posted earlier today. What Book Changed Your Mind - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education

I read that one, right on the heels of Dennett's "Consciousness Explained", and I found Dennett's view far more compelling. Ultimately, Chalmer's argument is that it just feels like there ought to be something substantial to consciousness that our current science doesn't yet comprehend (google 'qualia').

I think its more likely that all the pieces are there, that the fundamental building blocks of consciousness are within our current understanding of the physical world. There's a strong analogy to be drawn between our struggles to understand consciousness, and the long struggle of science to come to terms with the chemical processes that animate living creatures.

Philosopher's long ago proposed that living entities are composed of the same basic stuff (atoms) as their non-living counterparts. But even as we came to accept this on a superficial level, we continued to cling to the belief that life simply couldn't spring from non-living matter, that there must be some special "lifeforce" (anima) that imbued the physical body with life. Eventually, we conceded that it wasn't so, that biological life was a by-product of organizing ordinary chemical structures in special ways.

I think we're struggling with the same kind of realization now. Chalmers is still pining away for qualia, but on examination, it's just not there. I think, in the end, we'll find that consciousness isn't magic - it's just a by-product of, ultimately, mundane representational systems, organized in special ways.

 

[theDoctorisIn]

Can a computer analyze data semantically, or just syntacticly?

That's the root problem of artificial intelligence, to me.

 

[dblack]

Can a computer analyze data semantically, or just syntacticly?

That's the root problem of artificial intelligence, to me.

Can a brain?

 

[theDoctorisIn]

Can a computer analyze data semantically, or just syntacticly?

That's the root problem of artificial intelligence, to me.

Can a brain?

Yes.

I was thinking about how to answer your question, and the fact that I was thinking about it was proof enough for me.

 

[dblack]

Can a computer analyze data semantically, or just syntacticly?

That's the root problem of artificial intelligence, to me.

Can a brain?

Yes.

I was thinking about how to answer your question, and the fact that I was thinking about it was proof enough for me.

What about other brains, beyond yours? Do you have any proof that they're not just syntactically responding in a way that "seems" semantic? Are you familiar with the concept of 'p-zombies'?

 

[theDoctorisIn]

Can a computer analyze data semantically, or just syntacticly?

That's the root problem of artificial intelligence, to me.

Can a brain?

Yes.

I was thinking about how to answer your question, and the fact that I was thinking about it was proof enough for me.

What about other brains, beyond yours? Do you have any proof that they're not just syntactically responding in a way that "seems" semantic? Are you familiar with the concept of 'p-zombies'?

Since I'm unable to experience firsthand any brain but my own, no I have no "proof".

Nor do I have any reason to think that my brain is fundamentally different from any other brains.

 

[Vikrant]

Can a computer analyze data semantically, or just syntacticly?

That's the root problem of artificial intelligence, to me.

This is a very good question. It leads us to a realization that the way human brain processes data differs fundamentally from that of a computer. The things a human brain finds difficult are piece of cake for a computer and vice versa. If you have any doubt in your mind about this, it can be laid to rest by looking at successes of languages that follow context based grammars over the languages that follow generative grammar.

 

[Vikrant]

Each brain is a product of disorder (or random events) that have taken place for billions of years. So naturally, it has an entropy which theoretically can be measured and perhaps reproduced. This is where you could theoretically say that an artificial brain can be constructed. But practically speaking, how easy is it going to be to understand that complex entropy? The lack of appreciation for this complexity is what results in trivialization of human brain to a point where people start to think that brain is just like computers and since we can build computers, we can just as easily build brains too.

 

[SmedlyButler]

Is true 'artificial intelligence' possible? Intelligence in the sense that we understand it as a human trait? If so, what does this mean about our view of ourselves and our place in the world? It raises questions of a spiritual and theological nature as well, but I suppose that's for another thread.

Your question is probably the most important question human beings will be dealing with for at least the next 50 yrs. True AI has the potential to change the paradigm we have been in since the arrival of homo sapiens on the scene. Right now I'm reading "The Singularity is Near" by Ray Kurzwell. There are some who dismiss him as a "nut" or "crackpot" since his latest projections in the field. In my opinion a quick overview of his Bio makes him not so easy to ignore though;

"Kurzweil was the principal inventor of the first CCD flatbed scanner,[2]the first omni-font optical character recognition,[2] the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind,[3] the first commercial text-to-speech synthesizer,[4] the Kurzweil K250 music synthesizer capable of simulating the sound of the grand piano and other orchestral instruments, and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition.[5]

Kurzweil received the 1999 National Medal of Technology and Innovation, America's highest honor in technology, from President Clinton in a White House ceremony. He was the recipient of the $500,000 Lemelson-MIT Prize for 2001,[6] the world's largest for innovation. And in 2002 he was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame, established by the U.S. Patent Office. He has received twenty honorary doctorates, and honors from three U.S. presidents. Kurzweil has been described as a "restless genius"[7] by The Wall Street Journaland "the ultimate thinking machine"[8] by Forbes. PBS included Kurzweil as one of 16 "revolutionaries who made America"[9] along with other inventors of the past two centuries. Inc. magazine ranked him #8 among the "most fascinating" entrepreneurs in the United States and called him "Edison's rightful heir".[10]"

His predictions about the marriage of machine intelligence and the Human mind may instill hope in many of us, in many of us it instills a deep level of fear and loathing. This short video encapsulates his ideas.



This longer one digs deeper and reveals more of the man himself;

If your curiosity on this topic is insatiable like mine his book "The Singularity is Near" is available on most of the download sites (Paid and un-Paid versions)

 

[Abishai100]

Cyclonus (A.I. Avatar): Brain Sentiment


The colorful animated film "The Transformers: The Movie" (1986) is a movie adaptation of the popular children's animated series about A.I. robots engaged in special missions for governance on Earth.

This franchise is now a big-budget Hollywood (USA) film series begun by Michael Bay.

In "The Transformers: The Movie" (1986), a special terrorist warrior-robot named Cyclonus is formed from the decaying body of a dying terrorist giant insect-robot named Bombshell.

Cyclonus symbolizes an imaginative perception of malice and how it can be "programmed" in computing networks designed to create profit (i.e., eTrade) and envisioned in super-intelligent robots that not only make their own decisions but also exhibit traits of deception, arrogance, and fury.






Cyclonus G1 - Transformers Wiki

 

[Treeshepherd]

Is true 'artificial intelligence' possible? Intelligence in the sense that we understand it as a human trait? If so, what does this mean about our view of ourselves and our place in the world? It raises questions of a spiritual and theological nature as well, but I suppose that's for another thread.

Your question is probably the most important question human beings will be dealing with for at least the next 50 yrs. True AI has the potential to change the paradigm we have been in since the arrival of homo sapiens on the scene. Right now I'm reading "The Singularity is Near" by Ray Kurzwell. There are some who dismiss him as a "nut" or "crackpot" since his latest projections in the field. In my opinion a quick overview of his Bio makes him not so easy to ignore though;

"Kurzweil was the principal inventor of the first CCD flatbed scanner,[2]the first omni-font optical character recognition,[2] the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind,[3] the first commercial text-to-speech synthesizer,[4] the Kurzweil K250 music synthesizer capable of simulating the sound of the grand piano and other orchestral instruments, and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition.[5]

Kurzweil received the 1999 National Medal of Technology and Innovation, America's highest honor in technology, from President Clinton in a White House ceremony. He was the recipient of the $500,000 Lemelson-MIT Prize for 2001,[6] the world's largest for innovation. And in 2002 he was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame, established by the U.S. Patent Office. He has received twenty honorary doctorates, and honors from three U.S. presidents. Kurzweil has been described as a "restless genius"[7] by The Wall Street Journaland "the ultimate thinking machine"[8] by Forbes. PBS included Kurzweil as one of 16 "revolutionaries who made America"[9] along with other inventors of the past two centuries. Inc. magazine ranked him #8 among the "most fascinating" entrepreneurs in the United States and called him "Edison's rightful heir".[10]"

His predictions about the marriage of machine intelligence and the Human mind may instill hope in many of us, in many of us it instills a deep level of fear and loathing. This short video encapsulates his ideas.



This longer one digs deeper and reveals more of the man himself;

If your curiosity on this topic is insatiable like mine his book "The Singularity is Near" is available on most of the download sites (Paid and un-Paid versions)

Perhaps mistakenly, but I've always thought "The Singularity" was that point in the future when all data stored in a human brain may be copied and uploaded to a new brain (either synthetic or bio-engineered or some combo thereof). That is the entire crux of the matter to the Transhumanist. That's the Grail he seeks. Other technologies are integral to his achievement of that goal, but his goal is to achieve immortality. He would become a techno-Lich.

The Ecology of a Lich (AD&D) : "A mage becomes a lich by means of necromancy, using a magical receptacle called a Phylactery to store the lich's soul. In some sources the method of becoming a lich is referred to as the Ritual of Becoming or Ceremony of Endless Night... Unlike most other forms of undead creatures, the Lich retains all of the memories, personality, and abilities that it possessed in life — but it has a virtual eternity to hone its skills and inevitably becomes very powerful. Like other powerful forms of undead (such as a vampire or mummy), a Lich has unnatural powers owing to its state...
a lich's most valuable resources are its vast intellect, its supreme mastery of sorcery and limitless time to research, plot and scheme."

 

[Quentin111]

Emotions are one of the many aspects of the brain that makes it extremely complex. It is the emotions which will distinguish artificial intelligence from a human intelligence. A true intelligence is not possible without its ability to undertake unpredictable actions which we call emotions. When a not so good student pushes himself to do well academically, he is basically charting in a territory which is unpredictable and is driven by an emotion called pride.

Human brain is a product of random events. You cannot design a human brain because design by its nature is limited to its stated specifications and therefore cannot truly produce an intelligent entity like human brain.

Excuse me, but cats and dogs have primitive emotions, but they don't have high intelligence. True intelligence belong to humans. I think that most imortant problem of simulaton of human brain is its complexity. Human brain consist of about 87 billions neyrons, no one modern supercomputer hasn't operating speed enough to emulate it.

 

[dblack]

Emotions are one of the many aspects of the brain that makes it extremely complex. It is the emotions which will distinguish artificial intelligence from a human intelligence. A true intelligence is not possible without its ability to undertake unpredictable actions which we call emotions. When a not so good student pushes himself to do well academically, he is basically charting in a territory which is unpredictable and is driven by an emotion called pride.

Human brain is a product of random events. You cannot design a human brain because design by its nature is limited to its stated specifications and therefore cannot truly produce an intelligent entity like human brain.

Excuse me, but cats and dogs have primitive emotions, but they don't have high intelligence. True intelligence belong to humans. I think that most imortant problem of simulaton of human brain is its complexity. Human brain consist of about 87 billions neyrons, no one supercomputer hasn't operating speed enough to emulate it.

And I think (guessing of course, but ...) that that will prove to be the easy part. The design and programming required to support real intelligence or consciousness is something we haven't even begun to work out.

 

[Quentin111]

Can a computer analyze data semantically, or just syntacticly?

That's the root problem of artificial intelligence, to me.

This problem may belong to problems that now are solving by Computational Linguistics and NLP (Natural Language Processing). For example in Russia there is a company that hardly working at machine translating - ABBYY ( omprehensive language support for corporate clients and cutting-edge language technologies and services ABBYY Language Services Scientific investigations are discussed in "Dialog conference": Dialogue - A Major Conference On Computational Linguistics In Russia