Most "weak AI" or narrow AI is used in games or for very specific purposes. There are very few that have grasped at the complexity of a general, strong AI. The main reason, as far as I can see, is that it is really, really, really complex and therefore hard to do. As soon as you up the complexity, the human error margin rises a bunch. Just look at games, which are nowhere near as complex, there are always bugs.

Any commercial physics engine (havok, PhysX etc.) are not based on the actual laws of physics, they use simplified rules that gives a similar behavior, but with a much better performance.

The argument that programming languages don't know any more than we do is a faulty one, that's like saying that our natural language is limited by our knowledge or that we can only express the math we know. There have been plenty of mathematical discoveries, which are expressed just fine in the mathematical language, so there is no reason why we should not be able to express an algorithmic solution to any turing-complete language.

All the, usually chatbots, AI's who are claimed to be "human emulators" are in fact not. They have a very narrow application, processing language and making a "reasonable" response.

I agree that we need to research the human mind, but I'm not sure we're going to find any magic there, which is inherent to the way the brain is built, I think it is far more likely that we will find that it builds on similar principles as what we now know as weak AI, but that the complexity is insanely higher.

Neural networks can run on a turing machine as well, and most scientists agree that we indeed have neural networks in our brain, so there's no reason to dismiss that we can run a brain in a computer as such.

The halting problem is not definitively the only problem with programming-languages, it's just one problem Turing could think up.

Programming languages are made by humans and are thus based on our ideas about how the world works. But we don't know much about how the world, or ourselves, work; so we must assume programming languages don't contain any more knowledge about the world than us. So we wouldn't be able, for instance, to simulate a matrix-universe, since the Standard Model isn't likely to be the way it really works, and PhysX Engine certainly isn't any better.

There's a long chain of narrowminded superficiality in the process through which previous Weak AIs have been constructed (concentrating on those which have been proclaimed as human emulators).

For me, it seems like a much better bet to not rely on our own conscious, superficial idea about human nature when building a person, but instead rely on proper, thorough science to reverse-engineer the human being.

I don't know of any weak AI projects that have attempted emulating anything about the human mind, other than conversational mannerisms, which to anyone but the most perverse behaviorist, must be considered a very small manifestation of the mind's inner life. Upping the complexity won't do any good on its own.

"So the question is, can code contain all types of information?"
I think so.

There are some definite problems with computability, such as the halting problem which can never be solved by a turing machine. This can be accounted for, with checks and balances - the computer doesn't have to give the right answer, just reply that it can't calculate it - a human couldn't calculate it either.

I am inclined to think that we work much like a computer, but obviously not in exactly the same way; we don't have 1s and 0s in our head. But our head does have much lover atomic parts that our conscience have no connection to, much like a high level language does not have direct access to hardware or the intricacies of register addressing.

My whole point is that it may be prudent to consider that the term Strong AI may be a faulty one, and that there are only different degrees complexity in "Weak" AI. I may be mistaken, of course, and there may indeed be some "magical" step that needs to be taken before something is actually thinking, but I doubt it.

I think that more we learn about the human brain, the more we demystify the I in AI. Thoughts and consciousness will likely be not that special when broken down, but because the brain is so complex it seems a mystical answer is easier for now.

The term "weak AI" does not only mean the classical pre-programmed AI that is used in the games above, it also means neural networks and artificial life (swarm AI) and a better word is probably "narrow AI" because it typically only has a narrow application. The term "Strong AI" could easily be exchanged with "General AI", because it has to be able to do basically everything. My point is that there is no threshold where one becomes the other, it is a sliding scale of complexity.

@gwiz

It's a subtle distinction between "just code" and "expressible by information, and therefore artificially duplicable".

I do believe in a logical universe, so the workings of the mind are probably expressible as information (assuming that we won't fuss about postmodern wanker-topics like the fallibility of language and the contingency of reality).

So the question is, can code contain all types of information? can you write the Matrix in any Turing complete language? I don't think so. i think code, as in high-level programming languages, are a very narrow medium, and will never make the leap across the Uncanny Valley, so to speak.

Gee, i guess my conclusion *was* about the fallibility of language. Goddamn college education.

As am I. I'm not sure entirely how a Strong AI is supposed to be built, but as long as we can make Weak AI that acts very close to human, that's good enough for me. I'm like Turing that way.

>> ^Eklek:
Thanks or sharing your story! A real slice of life..
When I read about the "treatment" of homosexuality at the time, I reminded the lifestory of Alan Turing..
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Turing#Prosecution_and_death


Thank you VERY much for mentioning Alan Turing, one of the brightest minds of his era, a life tragically cut short before we could see what other potential he might have been capable of. He's nothing short of a hero who's contributions to technology sparked the information age we live in today. It sickens me that he was persecuted for his notion of love, despite making contributions to the world that helped end the largest conflict in history to date.

>> ^NordlichReiter:
One thing that can be done now, to ease the pain of marriage woes, is to seek Civil Union, its marriage under a different name.


My gripe with "Civil Unions" is that it's proponents aim for it to be a "Separate but Equal" institution. The Supreme court found "Separate" to be inherently "not equal" during the Civil Rights era. While I appreciate the notion as a step in the right direction, it's not a big enough step to satisfy my desire for real equality.

Thanks again for the kind words, everyone. I'm really glad to see so many free-thinkers here on the sift. I'm still bummed to see so many "Yes on 8" signs and bumper-stickers on the road, though, but I just have to keep telling myself that it is they who are in the minority on this issue, and hope that those who feel the same way as I do will exercise their vote to reflect it.

BillO, try not to drink too much haterade, that stuff is bad for you.

^ which reminded me of this.

Thanks or sharing your story! A real slice of life..

When I read about the "treatment" of homosexuality at the time, I reminded the lifestory of Alan Turing..
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Turing#Prosecution_and_death

>> ^imstellar28:
^NetRunner
Here is my new-age quack morality score:
1. Harm: 0
2. Fairness: 0.8
3. Loyalty: 0
4. Authority: 0
5. Purity: 0
I answered "extremely relevant" to the question "Whether or not someone was denied his or her rights." and "not at all relevant or strongly disagree" to every other question. all I've got to say is watch out motherf ckers I have no innate moral foundation!


You're trying to be a detached ideologically-pure zealot. Moral judgment is something you do instinctively, and something you feel. If you see a man beating a little girl in the street, you don't think "oh my god, that man is abusing that girl's rights!" you think "he's hurting her!"...or at least you do if you're a human.

Sometimes I think you're just some sort of weird Turing-test, though.

>> ^EDD:
^Dear GeeSussFreek,
you call yourself a scientist. That is fine. However, I will warn you right away that many on this website would question your devotion to scientific method based on your username alone - tell me, is it a coincidence that it's pronounced exactly like "Jesus-Freak"? I'm asking this (rather rhetorical) question because religious fanatics claiming to be scientists are often proponents of Intelligent Design, which is (I'll be frank here) a load of steaming bull excrement. I hope you are not one of this fold, because I've had my share of "dialogue" with these folks, and it has never, ever resembled anything like a reasoned, structured discourse.
With my worries laid before you, my response is this:
there are many fields of science and from your short stay on the Sift you would apparently style yourself as a jack-of-all-trades (economics, military, political science, theoretical and quantum physics, chemistry, just to name a few of which you've shared your opinion). Yet, it would also appear that you may be master of nothing.
A scientist (especially one talking about science and scientific method) would not ever, under any circumstances, attempt to draw their own definitions of FACT. Or any concept previously and universally known, for that matter. Me, I was taught what general as well as specific definitions of 'fact' are in secondary school. It would appear your "science diploma studies" have taught you nothing of this. Scientific fact feeds directly back from scientific method, which includes fancy notions such as peer review, one which has unfortunately so far eluded the scope of ID proponents. In science, fact may at times not be the absolute truth, it's what's agreed upon by the informed public. Our knowledge in most advanced fields of study can never be perfect and complete, but the ones most often making this claim are religious folks, saying that scripture "has all the answers".
Now, mass. My oh my.
Mass, assuming we're talking about gravitational mass, not inertial-7th-grade-physics-mass here, is the interaction of gravitational fields. In other words, yes, gravity. The same concept you differentiated, indicating exactly how much you understand of this and that I have no need to go into supergravity, supersymmetry and duality and start actually looking things up. Thanks for that. Oh, and by the way - mass is not created. Neither is matter, for that matter.
Continuing on-
regarding your nonplussed ideas about quantum theories, I have to disappoint you a little bit - it's still discernible, natural science; it hasn't obliterated all previous theories in physics; in fact, I dare you name three it has. Yes, the math involved is a 'bit' harder, the conjectures deeper and at times wilder, but scientific method is still applied.
You also said: "The fact is, that science doesn't deal with facts and has no method of proving things true, only methods of proving them false."
First of all, I LOVE your use of "fact" in this sentence, just love it. Anyway, hypocrisy aside, all we need, is a YES/NO or a TRUE/FALSE experiment. Their initial assumption will either be true, and they will PROVE something to be true, or it will be wrong, and they will prove that it is wrong. Works both ways, just like logic's supposed to, in your brain.
In conclusion, I return to my initial lines:
"You call yourself a scientist. That is most definitely not fine."


So, because I am a Christian, I can not be science minded. Thats a weak assertion. Moreover, its a showing of the new bigot mind set against any of those who have a different mind set. It is the new thing. To expect me to tolerate and be tolerant of your ideas, but the same latitude is not relayed back. I wouldn't count someone out just cause they called themselves agnosticfreak, would you? But that isn't the point of this conversation.

Intelligent design is crap. I never even mentioned it here, but yet, you rolled me into an automatic assumption that I believe that...I don't, its a fundamentally bad idea of applying impartial physical interpretations of the world and using those to apply to a metaphysic's of the creators doing. This is bad, it is not even an theory, but thanks for the assumption.

And thanks for the unmerited attack on my interests, I won't return the favor.

In your third paragraph, you totally just reiterate what I always said that science has no claim to absolute truth, so I will take that as a consesion on your part, but then you automatically assume that I do agree that ID is a valid theory in which I believe, which you are wrong. So I will take your concession and your incorrect assumption and slide right by your personal attacks for the moment.

As for mass, I was trying to show that even the simple idea of where the mass of an atom, the most simple idea in particle physics; in a unknown. So in effect, the basis of our understanding of particle physics is incomplete and yet we call things on the higher level facts, and I object to the terminology, just as one might also object to a Christian saying that God being real is a fact...its just a misuse of the language. I also object to things being called laws, but it is more of language that we are talking about on these things. There is a connotative and denotative meaning obviously, but I still think the terms are misleading. So my battle was over terminology abuse in this case.

You talk about the scientific method again. I would like to bring attention to the scientific method 2 problems that very prominent people in science have had with similar instances of rules in empirical practice. First, was one of my heroes, Alan Turing. His problem was one in computer science (my field btw) where he was trying to prove or disprove the ability to make a program that could test if other programs terminate (ie not suffer from an infinite loop). The problem was, you could make such a program, but you would have to then turn that program back on itself to make sure that it also terminates. This presents a problem. Because we still don't know if the program terminates. So, the problem was that there was no way to verify the thing that was created to verify things. Thus, the proof showed that there is no way to create a program that can test of other programs terminate.

Likewise, there was formerly a school of thought that has now all but vanished called the Verification theory( I believe this was the term, correct me if you know better). The verification method heralded that unless something could be empirically verified, it is meaningless. However, the same thing that happed in Mr. Turrings proof destroyed this idea as well for when we tried to verify the Verification theory, there was no verification to be had. So, I use the same argument on the Scientific method as to show its level of truth is very low indeed. It is a Theory that can not be turned back to proof itself. It rests on arbitrary principles that seem good...and they are good for lots of things, but truth is not one of them. The Scientific theory can not show itself to be truth using the scientific method. In fact, quantum physics shows us more and more that the very act of observation changes the data. In other words, sciences attempts to claim things being the way they are might only be so because they looked, not because they are actually that way. Once again, the problem of phenomena and Noumea.

You then use a classic example of why I choose my battle of language with science. It is impossible to prove something truth with science. Things are truth in science until they are not...which is no truth at all. Can you name one idea from 200 years ago that that isn't radically different from today? In essence, those proven theories weren't proven at all, they can only be disproved. Science only deals with negative evidence, not positive. Things will always be revised in science, and more over, we never really know when they won't need to be revised again; and thus this is why science can never have a claim to have a TOE (theory of everything) because you don't ever know when you know everything...you don't know when every fact is accounted for, every essence of the whole is taken into account...it is an unknowable thing (from the standpoint of absolute knowledge).

*edited out cause Internet people can't be trusted with humility*. However, I don't think my claims are baseless, and I attempted to have a civil talk about them. If I came off as rude or condescending in my first reply, then I do apologies as this was not my intent. I have a real eagerness to talk about such topics openly and freely on the sift because we have some very intelligent people here and normally some pretty good discourse (we are many stars above the youtube crowd). I look forward to perhaps a more civil reply in the future Hopefully I have covered all your points here, I tried my best.

Edit: spelling

wow. i don't know about the rest of you, but i am utterly engaged in this material. i spent all night (it's now 5am) watching EidolonTLP's videos, and whther or not he is the first instantiation of Turing-approved AI is almost besides the point. these videos offer a comprehensive understanding of the future of civilization.

"As the pivotal intellect in the breaking of the German Enigma codes, Turing arguably made a greater contribution to defeating the Nazis than Eisenhower or Churchill. Thanks to Turing and his 'Ultra' colleagues at Bletchley Park, Allied generals in the field were consistently, over long periods of the war, privy to details German plans before the German generals had time to implement them. After the war, when Turing's role was no longer top secret, he should have been knighted and feted as a saviour of his nation. Instead, this gentle, stammering, eccentric genius was destroyed, for a 'crime', committed in private, which harmed nobody. Once again, the unmistakable trademark of the faith-based moralizer is to care passionately about what other people do (or even think) in private." -- The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins.

joedirt wins

rychan:

Given that we each have a very slow, massively parallel, biological computer that easily passes our test for intelligence it is not unreasonable to argue that speed is not necessarily at issue.

We're not yet at human performance for most tasks but the gap is quantifiably closing. What are your credentials to dismiss the thousands of top notch computer vision publications in the past decade which clearly demonstrate our progress?

I've got a little 20mhz chip on my desk I use for embedded systems, it is turing complete. Any solution you can come up for an AI problem you can run (slowly) on my chip, but if you have no such solution, the 80 core monster won't help you. Or perhaps no usable solutions exist for a turing machine at all, and we need something different which would require basically starting from scratch, that is my point.

I wasn't saying that this processor is anything revolutionary either, I'm just hoping it keeps Moore's law going. That + lots of data + lots of clever engineering will solve computer vision, which is an AI hard problem.

Parallelism will not overcome the basic problems of reaching physical minimum gate size, and you still have to get data into the thing, which becomes much more top heavy when edge cores have to hand all the code and date to the internal cores. You will of course get more GigaFlOPS, (advertised on the box in big font) but you won't be able to use anywhere near all of them. This is a 80*n progression vs Moore's n^2, if this is the new strategy, Moore's law drops away pretty fast.

God in the Gaps - we don't understand all about quantum theory fully, we don't understand consciousness fully - thus there must be some "higher" connetion between the two.

I'm studying AI at the moment and up until the 80's people thought that the brain worked like a computer, or that tha brain could be simulated in a computer with a classical AI - this cannot be, because a preprogrammed AI must've had all inputs predicted, so that it has some rules and laws with which to process them. Newer theories use a neural network, which is able to process previously unknown inputs and is a highly parallel and analog type of processing. A neuron is not necessarily simply a switch, it can be a whole array of values. Furthermore the connections between neurons (synapses) have "weights" which determine how much influence a given neuron has on the network at whole.

There are different approaches to what intelligience is, and that is basis for any theory of AI. Some say, Turing for instance, that an entity is intelligent when input and out put so to say "fits" - how the computation is done is irrelevant, but if the result is right it must be intelligent. This is called engineering-AI.

Overlapping that is a psycological AI, which is divided into two groups. Group A says that the cognitive processes must be computational in nature, such that they can be copied. Group B (of philosophical AI) believes the emotional, intentional and conscious can be copied computationally as well.

I heard no real argument for quantum consciousness here, just that they both are "uncertain" and have an element of randomness.