When Descartes said “I think, therefore I am”, I wonder if he could extend it to AI saying “it thinks, therefore it is” 😉
Ultimately as a computer programmer, what we do is to tell a computer what to do. AI goes one step further, where it also figures out how to do it. Learning AI helps us to learn about how we think. It may sound pretty cool, but (imo and what I recall from studying it in my engineering) what it really comes down to is given one or more inputs, it goes through various permutations and combinations, considering the current circumstances, and then comes up with one outcome. One thing it keeps feeding back the outcomes back into its database using it as part of the processing for more and more variations in outcomes. Even then, an outcome is always one out of several pre-defined possibile outcomes. It may appear to be intelligent, but the larger the superset of outcomes, the more it appears to be intelligent, but its always a pre-defined set. Afaik, they haven’t come up with any form of AI that has imagination.
Btw how is the real intelligence of us humans different?
What is a thought? Neurlogy tells us, incredibly enough, that at its most ultimate level, its merely an electrical signal. And then it gets interpreted into words and concepts and so on in a way that makes sense to us.
Given any stimulus in any situation, something within us does a complex computation based on all our past conditioning, and we come up with a reaction. Most of the time it is blind & pre-defined, as if we were already wired just like a computer! And indeed we are – and in our case, we are our own programmers! I’ve seen a surprisingly small percentage who actually manage to recognize this and start coming out of such pre-defined patterns into doing something more spontaneous.
Had been discussing about robotics and AI off late, and as a result of the discussion, suddenly recalled several links that I’d seen at different points in time, that now seemed to be somewhat related…
20 questions – an online implementation of the common game that gives you a practical hand-on experience with AI, the results could be more surprising than you’d expect.
Think of an object and the A.I. will try to figure-out what you are thinking by asking simple questions. The object you think of should be something that most people would know about, but, never a specific person, place or thing.
Manna –
A story describing different possible futures with advancement in robotics/AI by Marshall Brain.
Kevin Warwick, who claims to be the world’s first cyborg man, an Englishman who wired his nervous system to a computer through an implant in his arm has gone from Cyborg 1.0 to Cyborg 2.0.
One very interesting point Prof. Warwick makes in his FAQ is this:
Q: In your article for “Wired”, you said “I was born human, but it was an accident of fate”. Do you think humanity must change itself because it has the power to?
A: Humanity can change itself but hopefully it will be an individual choice. Those who want to stay human can and those who want to evolve into something much more powerful with greater capabilities can. There is no way I want to stay a mere human.
Interestingly enough, Mother of Auroville has said in 1966:
Humanity is not the last rung of the terrestrial creation. Evolution continues and man will be surpassed. It is for each individual to know whether he wants to participate in the advent of this new species.
A friend and me had tried making a simple robot to lift something and place it somewhere else, way back during our school days, using a simple electric motor and pulleys and some household stuff – a fascinating project but not an easy one. I’d made a point about an exhibhition in Germany on human anatomy modelling I’d visited in the year 2000…
They showed parts of the body with operations in it, they explained how the muscles and bones worked together to make the body move… all this was something I had studied in school and always wanted to know more about, and it was simply great to actually see the muscles, tendons, ligaments, bones all making the most beautiful complex design. We struggle so hard to make a simple robot which lifts something up and its like a joke when compared to the beautiful design and intricate mechanics of the human body.
Well, inspite of Prof. Warwick’s noble intentions of this whole excercise where he says…
I’ve always wanted to help others if it was at all possible. All of the work here in the Cybernetics Department, the research, had been able to help people less fortunate than ourselves, those with disabilities. This always needs a large amount of innovation.
…I can’t help being skeptical about some various digressions that we’ve seen inevitable with any technology, which might well culminate in this chilling joke from the movie I, Robot
Lt. John Bergin: We’re going to miss the good old days.
Detective Del Spooner: What good old days?
Lt. John Bergin: When people were killed by other people.
See also: H2G2 , a trilogy that kind of incorporates a great many of these ideas.
Leave a Reply