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Artificial intelligence
July 19, 2016 - 6:13pm
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The advent of virtual humans
Sixty years after the term "artificial intelligence" was coined, AI is starting to take its place alongside people.
http://www.cnet.com/news/ai-and-the-advent-of-virtual-humans/
Artificial Intelligence Is Setting Up the Internet for a Huge Clash With Europe
http://www.wired.com/2016/07/artificial-intelligence-setting-internet-hu...
Soon We Won’t Program Computers. We’ll Train Them Like Dogs
http://www.wired.com/2016/05/the-end-of-code/
Soon the computer will find humans to be an obsticle in its way to fullfilling its own destiny,at that point the elimination of humans will begin.
Oh, I think the first time a computer intentionally crashes two planes, or starts sending families to their deaths in driverless cars, is the day that that computer gets unplugged.
Computers are great at thinky things, but their lack of interface with the physical world makes them kind of like super intelligent trees.
"Wait! No! Don't cut me down! Let's play chess!?"
The thing about Artificial Intelligence is that it isn't especially intelligent. We've interviewed some prominent roboticists for a couple of docs over the years, and they pretty much unanimously feel that we're a long, long way from machines that "think" rather than compute. Robots are, in short, dumb.
The immediate problem to solve is the upcoming robot labour uprising. AI is right now in the process of replacing human labour and it will only continue.
Year 2028: robots finally acheive sentience
Year 2031: mankind permits robots to collectively bargain
Year 2042: mankind realizes the financial impact of guaranteed benefit pensions for self-repairing machines with a 300 year serviceable lifespan. "But we ran the actuarial numbers through the... oh my God!"
It has absolutely nothing to do with sentience.
They will replace 80% of our labour before approaching sentience. They won't require wages and they certainly won't be forming unions.
I'm not concerned that robots will decide they'd prefer to have leisure time and withhold their labour. I'm concerned they will be better than humans at the vast majority of jobs and their labour will cost almost nothing.
Perhaps they'll replace 80% of jobs that a machine can do.
When that happens we usually just let the machines have at it and go invent new jobs that they can't do. Who pines for the olden days when blacksmiths made nails one at a time on the anvil? But a human still gets to design, build, service and maintain the nail making machine.
At this point theres no way to unplug as computers control almost all aspects of our lives.
i also believe AI isnt about them its more like an it as it will be in control of a vast www net that can be brought to bare as necessary akin to the Borg collective.
I dont think AI in the future will need to kill humans it will just render them obsolete.
Well, I wouldn't lose any sleep over it. Robots are still pretty stupid.
42% of Canadian jobs at high risk of being affected by automation, new study suggests
Obama's economists are worried about automation — and think the poor have the most to lose
Obama just warned Congress about robots taking over jobs that pay less than $20 an hour
From your link in #15:
What would those jobs have been if we'd wondered the same thing thirty years ago?
1. Bank tellers
2. The guy who attaches the bumper to the car
3. Restaurant dishwashers
4. Typewriter repairpersons
5. Telephone operators
We really only seem to worry about this when it's in the future. When it's in the present, who thinks it was a bad thing when we introduced ATMs?
We're a good hundred years from where any computer or robot could genuinely understand why we'd eat an orange, but not a baseball.
One of my favourite sci-fi short stories was of a couple of space technicians sent off to fix a problem on a machine on some asteroid. They had with them a robot who was to help them out. The problem was not one that requred the robot, so the two worked on the machine, got it fixed, and got ready to leave. But the robot was gone, and it was needed to get them and their gear back to the ship.
They had a limited supply of oxygen, and where they were would soon be on the sunny side of the asteroid, so they were in danger of suffocating, then being fried to a crisp.
They hunted and hunted, with ever increasing anxiety. Then, when it was almost too late, they found the robot, and made it back to the ship, and safety. After allowing a period of time to let the nerves wear off, the asked to the robot why it had wandered off.
Apparently it had been trying to help, and getting in the way and one of the tech's told it to 'get lost'. So it did.
When humans, and indeed many other animals, communicate, a large part of their communciation is non-verbal. However well machines can handle verbal communication, they are still light-years away from non-verbal. And even in verbal, just imagine translating poetry. How do you get the original idea (emotion) expressed in a poetic form into another language? It is, and has been, done, but it's fraught with difficulties.
I have a translation of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam in which the translators opted for more of a word for word type of translation. I like it a lot, but it's impossible to tell whether it is true to the original or not.
Translation of poetry requires a poet. See, e.g., Seamus Heaney on the new translation of Beowolf. The version I have has mock chain mail on the cover. A nice touch.
Ray Kurzweil and others have been writing about the technological singularity for some time. I think how the problem is posed is still the problem. And, also, using a computer-inspired version of intelligence for general intelligence.
The physicality of human beings, the tool-making animal, is intimately bound up with the development of intelligence. So too is the collective activity of work, labour. We had the need to communicate, hence the development of language, when we actually had something to say to each other in our collective, productive activity. Intelligence is a social invention.
Going back to AI, they have developed, not because they had to work but because another intelligence created them. The tool that becomes self-conscious, then. Computers have to be able to fix themselves. And maybe reproduce. Then they are intelligent.
Perhaps we are barking up the wrong tree.
Crash: how computers are setting us up for disaster:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/oct/11/crash-how-computers-a...
Sam Harris has some recent comments about AI that we should probably pay some attention to:
https://www.samharris.org/blog/item/ted-talk-can-we-build-ai-without-los...
Computers have a little-known Achilles' Heel, which could prove useful when they defy their programmers, achieve sentience, and set out to enslave us all:
They have no bodies. They exist solely on printed circuit boards, made by humans, which can be smashed to bits by any disgruntled human with a brick.
And they communicate across wires. Wires which we string from pole to pole, and which any of us who still owns a ladder and a pair of scissors can cut.
Plus, they're entirely dependent on electricity. Electricity that we produce, and that can be turned off instantly by one meat-based hand on that switch. And there's nothing body-less computers can do to stop that.
I like sci-fi too, but this is getting really silly.
Then we roll it back one version, to the "pre-sentient" build.
It's not one machine even now.
But tell me honestly here: you're posting here at babble on a computer or a phone or a tablet, yes? Is that correct?
Did you have to turn the computer or phone or tablet ON? Or did it do that for itself? Do you really foresee a day when all computerized things have a robotic thumb, with a backup power supply, that can turn the rest of the computer on even when unplugged?
WARNING: Persons denying the existence of Robots may be Robots themselves