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RE: Organic brain - 5/23/2011 12:23:37 PM   
Moonhead


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Status: offline 		Assuming that events at that level have any effect on the purely chemical reactions taking place inside your skull, of course.

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RE: Organic brain - 5/23/2011 1:02:24 PM   
Kirata


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quote:

ORIGINAL: Moonhead

Assuming that events at that level have any effect on the purely chemical reactions taking place inside your skull, of course.

How could they not? Chemical reactions take place at the level of atomic bonds. Quantum mechanics renders the universe explainable at this level (if "explainable" is the word I want) only in statistical terms.

FYI:

Abstract: In contrast to the usual continuous time description, a discrete version of stochastic chemical kinetics is suggested. Within its framework the total number of reaction events plays the role of a discrete time variable. The continuous and discrete time descriptions are complementary: the dispersion of the reaction events increases as the time increases. Conversely, the dispersion of the time necessary for the occurrence of a given number of reaction events increases with the increase of the number of reaction events. A chemical uncertainty principle is formulated which is similar to the uncertainty principle of quantum mechanics.

K.

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RE: Organic brain - 5/23/2011 1:21:27 PM   
Moonhead


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Status: offline 		Isn't that just shifting the notion of control over your behaviour even further out of your hands than naysaying the deterministic model, though?

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I like to think he was eaten by rats, in the dark, during a fog. It's what he would have wanted...
(Simon R Green on the late James Herbert)

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RE: Organic brain - 5/23/2011 2:04:43 PM   
Kirata


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quote:

ORIGINAL: Moonhead

Isn't that just shifting the notion of control over your behaviour even further out of your hands than naysaying the deterministic model, though?

I'm sorry, maybe I don't understand where you're coming from, but it seems as if you are either ignoring uncertainty or else think it to be somehow not incompatible with determinism. As for "control," which I take it you intend as a stand-in for "free will," I don't think we have free will, at least not strictly speaking. What we have is choices within the limits allowed by the system.

Otherwise, I would be cheerfully floating out over the bay on my way to Marina Jack's for a drink right now.

K.

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RE: Organic brain - 5/23/2011 2:07:45 PM   
Moonhead


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Status: offline 		Right. Mea culpa: we've been talking at cross purposes.

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I like to think he was eaten by rats, in the dark, during a fog. It's what he would have wanted...
(Simon R Green on the late James Herbert)

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RE: Organic brain - 5/24/2011 6:54:36 AM   
tweakabelle


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Status: offline 		Indeedies.

A minimum requirement might be to be able to guarantee that you are going to be around in an hour to have the thought, or so it seems to me.

And who amongst us can guarantee that?

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RE: Organic brain - 5/24/2011 8:10:40 AM   
xssve


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quote:

ORIGINAL: bighappygoth39

I think that's a Brian Aldiss short story from the '50s, not an issue.

Actually, it another issue raised by Hawking.

In some sense, this has already occurred - derivatives are market trades of relatively small value, but are done by supercomputers on a massive scale, i.e., millions of small trades instead a few larger ones - sort of the same principle as the old fraction of a penny thing, only it takes advantage of very small increases and decreases in individual issues, like a stock going up a Quarter of a point.

In any case, these programs have a fairly large effect on market dynamics due to the sheer volume of trading they manage, and who gets rich and who gets laid off are often the results of decisions made by these programs.

A couple of times, they have brought he global economy to the brink of collapse, Greenspan had to fix Gold prices back in the Nineties, because the US banking system was so over leveraged in Gold derivatives, a rise in Gold prices of even a penny or Two would have wiped half of them out and crashed the global economy.

A derivatives program is an AI, and the chances are good the first truely sentient AI is going to be in the basement of a Bank somewhere.



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RE: Organic brain - 5/24/2011 12:14:03 PM   
Moonhead


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Status: offline 		Not wishing to sound like I'm bigging up my Queen, but I think Aldiss was there before Hawking on that one. Aldiss had been publishing for quite a while back when Hawking was still an undergraduate, after all.

(The derivatives programmes are expert systems, not AIs, and not even the SF writers are in the habit of crediting fictional versions of those with sentience. If an AI was to emerge, the only way a bank would have a hand in it was if they were donating a grant or two to a university with a cybernetics research programme as a tax write off.)

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I like to think he was eaten by rats, in the dark, during a fog. It's what he would have wanted...
(Simon R Green on the late James Herbert)

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RE: Organic brain - 5/25/2011 5:28:20 AM   
xssve


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Status: offline 		Sure they're AI's, they independently process and act on data without guidance other than it's basic programming - the gaming engine in your average FPS is an AI, in fact game programming is pretty much the cutting edge of AI, flocking behaviors, etc., the fact that they don't have substantially more intelligence than a cockroach - or a herd of them - notwithstanding, they are AI's.

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RE: Organic brain - 5/25/2011 5:34:12 AM   
xssve


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Status: offline 		As far banks developing them, they already skim the top off the graduating classes at MIT, etc, to write those derivatives programs, encryption programs, etc. (including quantum encryption) they have the money, they have the motive, and they have the research data from every pure science lab in the country to work with.

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RE: Organic brain - 5/25/2011 5:42:15 AM   
Moonhead


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quote:

ORIGINAL: xssve

Sure they're AI's, they independently process and act on data without guidance other than it's basic programming - the gaming engine in your average FPS is an AI, in fact game programming is pretty much the cutting edge of AI, flocking behaviors, etc., the fact that they don't have substantially more intelligence than a cockroach - or a herd of them - notwithstanding, they are AI's.


Nope. They're programmed to fulfil a specific function, not to emulate human intelligence. In both cases it's sleight of hand, rather than a serious attempt at faking consciousness. It's the same argument as to whether there's any such thing as mimesis, and how "real" the characters in a piece of fiction can be said to be. Bad guys in a computer game are a long way from even the most two dimensional redshirt in a bad horror novel written by an author who was dropped on their head as a baby, as of yet.

_____________________________

I like to think he was eaten by rats, in the dark, during a fog. It's what he would have wanted...
(Simon R Green on the late James Herbert)

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RE: Organic brain - 5/25/2011 6:10:16 AM   
Kirata


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quote:

ORIGINAL: xssve

Sure they're AI's, they independently process and act on data without guidance other than it's basic programming...

I must admit, the difference between an "expert system" and "artificial intelligence" is at least linquistically difficult to discern. But in my understanding, one of the critical elements of AI is that it is capable of learning, whereas an expert system's "intelligence" is hard coded and does not increase.

K.



< Message edited by Kirata -- 5/25/2011 6:15:46 AM >

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RE: Organic brain - 5/25/2011 7:19:01 AM   
eihwaz


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quote:

ORIGINAL: Moonhead
quote:

ORIGINAL: xssve
Sure they're AI's, they independently process and act on data without guidance other than it's basic programming - the gaming engine in your average FPS is an AI, in fact game programming is pretty much the cutting edge of AI, flocking behaviors, etc., the fact that they don't have substantially more intelligence than a cockroach - or a herd of them - notwithstanding, they are AI's.

Nope. They're programmed to fulfil a specific function, not to emulate human intelligence. In both cases it's sleight of hand, rather than a serious attempt at faking consciousness. It's the same argument as to whether there's any such thing as mimesis, and how "real" the characters in a piece of fiction can be said to be. Bad guys in a computer game are a long way from even the most two dimensional redshirt in a bad horror novel written by an author who was dropped on their head as a baby, as of yet.

Artificial intelligence implies neither sentience nor learning.  The former might be more accurately termed artificial or simulated consciousness.  Many AI systems, including symbolic expert systems, are capable of learning,  even some symbol based expert systems.  For example, any natural language processing application must be able to learn.  Both neural net and evolutionary programming (genetic algorithm) techniques confer the ability to learn, among other things, and applications constructed using them are learning systems almost by definition.  As well as symbolic expert systems, program trading applications also incorporate neural nets and evolutionary programming.

quote:

"Artificial intelligence," Wikipedia

Artificial intelligence (AI) is the intelligence of machines and the branch of computer science that aims to create it.  AI textbooks define the field as the "study and design of intelligent agents" where an intelligent agent is a system that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its chances of success.

An underlying philosophical question is whether artificial intelligence is in any way equivalent to human intelligence.


< Message edited by eihwaz -- 5/25/2011 7:22:43 AM >

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RE: Organic brain - 5/25/2011 7:32:18 AM   
Kirata


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quote:

ORIGINAL: eihwaz

Artificial intelligence implies neither sentience nor learning.

Can you give me an example of an AI implementation that is incapable of learning?

K.

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RE: Organic brain - 5/25/2011 7:58:33 AM   
xssve


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quote:

ORIGINAL: Kirata


quote:

ORIGINAL: xssve

Sure they're AI's, they independently process and act on data without guidance other than it's basic programming...

I must admit, the difference between an "expert system" and "artificial intelligence" is at least linquistically difficult to discern. But in my understanding, one of the critical elements of AI is that it is capable of learning, whereas an expert system's "intelligence" is hard coded and does not increase.

K.

Any program can be programmed to "learn", albeit in a limited way - all it takes is an iterative if-then-else loop - the rest is a set of conditions and error trapping routines, we're just talking about orders of complexity after that.

Defining "learning" in terms of ability to create new subroutines to handle unfamiliar data is just raising the bar, i.e., current AI's have ability to process data types they have not been programmed to process, that's cutting edge stuff but it still entails a lot of programming in algorithms to recognize and categorize unfamiliar data and/or data types.

A minimalist definition is that it can act autonomously, albeit within a narrow range. But as eihwaz points out, creating an AI capable of abstract reasoning, and reality testing is largely an as yet unrealizable goal, limited by hardware capability as much as software - the current generation of AI's are as intelligent as we can make them, given the current technological limitations, of which Deep Blue is probably the premier specimen.

Guy in Santa Fe makes little robots powered by PV panels that can move themselves from one sunny spot to the next - that is an AI, albeit, a relatively primitive one, i.e., less versitile compared to organic - but even a Roomba is an AI  - you don't have to tell it what to do.

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RE: Organic brain - 5/25/2011 8:05:23 AM   
xssve


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Status: offline 		And even Deep Blue, although it can kick your ass at Chess, cannot tell if it's on fire if it smells smoke - because it isn't programmed to recognize olfactory data types.

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RE: Organic brain - 5/25/2011 8:16:07 AM   
Moonhead


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quote:

ORIGINAL: eihwaz
An underlying philosophical question is whether artificial intelligence is in any way equivalent to human intelligence.

Which is pretty much impossible to solve until we have a better idea about how human intelligence works, and whether we're sentient or just think that we are...

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I like to think he was eaten by rats, in the dark, during a fog. It's what he would have wanted...
(Simon R Green on the late James Herbert)

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RE: Organic brain - 5/25/2011 8:44:20 AM   
xssve


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quote:

ORIGINAL: eihwaz

An underlying philosophical question is whether artificial intelligence is in any way equivalent to human intelligence.

It's the "Chomsky dodge", w/regard to the linguistic abilities of Apes - Apes do use language, they just don't appear to be capable of processing or categorizing abstract data types, i.e., they are largely limited to describing only that which is right in front of them (they can say "this banana", not "all bananas are fruit", so Chomsky raises the bar on what constitutes "language", and everybody goes round again.

< Message edited by xssve -- 5/25/2011 8:46:54 AM >

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RE: Organic brain - 5/25/2011 9:03:50 AM   
xssve


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quote:

ORIGINAL: Moonhead


quote:

ORIGINAL: xssve

Sure they're AI's, they independently process and act on data without guidance other than it's basic programming - the gaming engine in your average FPS is an AI, in fact game programming is pretty much the cutting edge of AI, flocking behaviors, etc., the fact that they don't have substantially more intelligence than a cockroach - or a herd of them - notwithstanding, they are AI's.


Nope. They're programmed to fulfil a specific function, not to emulate human intelligence. In both cases it's sleight of hand, rather than a serious attempt at faking consciousness. It's the same argument as to whether there's any such thing as mimesis, and how "real" the characters in a piece of fiction can be said to be. Bad guys in a computer game are a long way from even the most two dimensional redshirt in a bad horror novel written by an author who was dropped on their head as a baby, as of yet.
And that would be Hawkings point: because they are inorganic, they basically have nothing in common with us - in human terms, yes, they can easily be described as expert systems, as an intelligence, they would be an alien intelligence, alien even to the predictable pattens of organic life, and therefore almost utterly unpredictable w/regard to possible motivations.

Upon saying that, I think the phrase we're looking for is "motive intelligence" - i.e., a Roomba's motives are pre-programmed, whereas a "sentient" AI would presumably be capable of independently formulating and acting upon it's own motives - whether or not those coincided with the motives of the intelligence that created it.

"Free will", in short.

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RE: Organic brain - 5/25/2011 9:46:48 AM   
eihwaz


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quote:

ORIGINAL: Kirata
quote:

ORIGINAL: eihwaz
Artificial intelligence implies neither sentience nor learning.

Can you give me an example of an AI implementation that is incapable of learning? K.

The vast majority of expert systems, which are, according to conventional usage, a subspecies of AI.

For example, some years ago I worked with an expert system which evaluated mortgage applications.  The system encoded both the rules and regulations governing mortgage qualification and the decision processes by which human evaluators applied those rules.  For a given mortgage application, the system could render acceptance, rejection, or undecidable, the last signifying that the input parameters were beyond the capabilities the system and that human judgement would be required.  That system was unable to optimize itself -- e.g., its decision processes --  much less accommodate changes in the rules.  It had permanently zero intrinsic reality testing, for which it was utterly dependent on its human programmers.

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