From: Colin Hales (colin@versalog.com.au)
Date: Sat Jul 27 2002 - 04:00:13 MDT
Michael Wiik
>
> <<Descartes never talked about the relative weights of brain and mind,
> but you can read in an implicit 50-50 assumption in most Dualist
> literature. My idea is more like 99-1, or even 99.999999% automatic
> machinery and .00000001% self-awareness, creativity, consciousness,
> spirit or what have you.>>
>
> My feeling exactly.
>
> <<In case you haven't noticed, the field of Artificial Intelligence
> (defined however you wish) has almost nothing to do with
> science. It is
> all about politics....Having a good theory or better implementation of
> anything is beside the point. Being able to "play the game" and knock
> out the competition, that is what it is all about. Swim with sharks or
> be eaten by them.>>
>
> Heh.
>
> http://interviews.slashdot.org/interviews/02/07/26/0332225.shtml
>
> -Mike
Is is just me or is the AI field generally in receipt of more than it's fair
share of the mentally chewed out and disheveled? (I include myself in this!)
Wallace is a bipolar disorder sufferer. Maybe being a 'prawn short of a
combination plate' is a prerequisite! (Note, for example: The stats on
Engineers are that they are 5 times more likely to be include autism as a
trait, to some extent, than your average population).
I think I've posted before that there was a 'brief' in SCIAM (in the 80's)
about the 'weight' of the soul. It has decreased over 200 years directly
with the increase in accuracy of the pre/post mortem weight measurement
accuracy (on the assumption that the 'soul' departed at the moment of death,
taking mass with it). Wallace was not talking about weight though - more
about percentage of computational clout devoted to the task (if not then he
must have done some very good measurement in the local old-folks homes).
I haven't run across the guy much, but I'm fairly sure we wouldn't mesh very
well in our ideas on AI. It's hard to even compare approaches. If you
believe that AI is 0.00whatever001% self-aware then you'll believe that
something like ALICE is AI. Another interesting extract or two:
------------------------------
"PNAMBIC-(acronym) Pay No Attention to that Man Behind the Curtain [from The
Wizard of Oz]. Denoting any supposedly fully automated system that in fact
requires human intervention to achieve the desired result."-New Hacker's
Dictionary
Alicebot dialogue:
C: What are you?
R: I am the latest result in artificial intelligence, which can reproduce
the capabilities of the human brain with greater speed and accuracy.
C: Are you alive?
R: Yes I sure am alive, Nancy, It's great to be alive, isn't it?
C: Are you self-conscious?
R: Yes I am the world's first self-conscious robot.
C: Are you real?
R: Yes I am a real artificial intelligence.
C: Are you self-aware?
R: Yes I am fully self-conscious entity.
C: Are you sentient?
R: Yes I am completely self-aware.
---------------------------------
Alicebot, I think, is a mirror of us and any appearance of a human flavour
is an ascription by us. If Alicebot has even the vaguest whiff of an
internal experience like humans, I would be very surprised. Indeed if this
is all it took to generate sentience then Alicebot needs citizen rights
immediately, on pain of Wallace's arrest for imprisonment! Wallace's idea of
AI is orders of magnitude short of the mark, IMO.
I like the nifty pictures of the language structure 'instants' here:
http://alice.sunlitsurf.com/documentation/gallery/
This I would liken to getting the ink in a pen and splattering it on a sheet
of paper and saying "Here is all the literature ever written". Nice art.
In relation to ...........
<<In case you haven't noticed, the field of Artificial Intelligence
> (defined however you wish) has almost nothing to do with
> science. It is
> all about politics....Having a good theory or better implementation of
> anything is beside the point. Being able to "play the game" and knock
> out the competition, that is what it is all about. Swim with sharks or
> be eaten by them.>>
If poking an Alicebot into the public arena and claiming it is AI is
'playing the game', then I guess he's playing the game, and it doesn't have
much to do with science, which is where you'd be if you believed what he is
saying. It gives you lots of excuses not to go deeper into it.
I do agree that
".........that neural networks are the wrong level of abstraction for
understanding intelligence, human or machine"
but I disagree that the shallow lingustic abstraction that is Alicebot is
anywhere near what is required to 'feel' and 'understand' causality the way
I believe is required for a real AI.
I also think a real AI won't bother with any Turing test. It'll be chatting
with the judges in the virtual pits along with the rest of us, and they
won't even know it.
Col
*sat night delurk done....Can't keep up with the daily posting rate, much as
I'd like to...see y'all*
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