[Scarabin]

kenberg, on 2013-March-03, 10:44, said:

I'll explain, as I often take this view on issues.

Can computers play a good game of chess? No doubt.
A good game of bridge? Not as good, for the moment, as chess but yes, quite good.
Can computers do a good job of assessing the value of a stock? Probably, but there are issues.
Should President Obama nominate a computer as ambassador to France? No, not a good idea I think.

We need all of the intelligence we can get in international relations. But I doubt we should turn to computers except as very useful adjuncts. The type of judgment required for a good ambassador certainly involves intelligence but I think it is the kind of intelligence that computers are not so good at. Of course you might say that the human track record here is not so great either, true enough. But with sense and experience, a person comes to feel "This person I can trust, that person I cannot". Or "This would be a good idea, but the time is not ripe for presenting it". Or etc.

So what I meant is that we could discuss, and maybe agree, maybe not, on what sort of things computers would be good at doing and what they would not be good at doing without ever using the word "intelligent". If, later, we could also agree on which tasks represent intelligence and which do not, that could be nice, but it is comparatively unimportant. Any disagreement would, perhaps, center on what is the correct usage of the word "intelligent". If we agree on what tasks computers can be trusted with and what tasks should be left to humans, then I call questions about the applicability of the word 'intelligent" a semantic issue.

Sounds a good approach to me. Let's start with your four points.
1) Agree computers can play a good game of chess, although they cannot explain in human terms why they made a particular move. Something I would expect of a human player. Similar considerations apply to scrabble, and jeopardy(Barmar).
2) I would not agree that computers play a quite good game of bridge. Have you watched Wbridge5 "think".
3) My impression is that anyone can assess the present fundamental value of a stock. Both humans & computers have difficulty in assessing a stock's potential value.
4) Agreed computers perform poorly on social & literary endeavours.

OK we're agreed, how do we proceed?

[kenberg]

A good question. This thread started life as a side topic on guns, wandered into drones, then into AI in general. So it is a little hard to say what is on topic, what is off topic.

Drones are one expression of a large problem. Our cyber attack on Iran's nuclear program is another aspect of the same thing. I recognize there are nations and groups who wish to harm us and I believe in prevailing over our enemies. However, one does not have to be either a right or left wingnut to be concerned about government making a list of people who can be droned on sight, ot launching what amounts to an attack on another country not only without approval but even without acknowledgement. And it is not just government. My wife graduated college in the 1960s, Since then she has married, divorced, remarried and moved several times. She still gets letters from her former college asking for donations. If the CIA needs any help in tracking people they should talk to that college.
I joke about my car discussing with other cars how stupid a driver I am, but it monitors my driving very carefully. I pulled around a car blocking the lane, not signalling before doing so (there were no other cars in sight). Beep Beep Beep. Oh shut up.

With both the serious and the trivial there are issues about who will manage technology and what will be done with it. I have several reminders on my e-mail that various folks are waiting for my response to their invitation to LinkedIn. I don't know them. A response should be provided that says "Who the hell are you?". Somehow I have become a Facebook friend of my ex-wife's husband's daughter. Actually I like her, to the extent that I know her, but it's a bit crazy. She and my daughter are friends, so that's how it came about I guess, but still...

Added: I liked this morning's comment from Richard Cohen at http://www.washingto...c586_story.html

Quote

What will happen to cafe culture when everyone is staring into a laptop instead of carrying on about Kierkegaard is something to worry about.

[PassedOut]

kenberg, on 2013-March-05, 06:13, said:

My wife graduated college in the 1960s, Since then she has married, divorced, remarried and moved several times. She still gets letters from her former college asking for donations. If the CIA needs any help in tracking people they should talk to that college.

Don't know where your wife went to college, but I've observed that wherever we move, Constance's and my colleges are always the first to locate us. Things might be better these days, but I've often thought that if colleges had put the same amount of effort into organizing course registrations as they did into tracking down alumni, they'd have improved students' opinions of their administrations considerably.

kenberg, on 2013-March-05, 06:13, said:

With both the serious and the trivial there are issues about who will manage technology and what will be done with it. I have several reminders on my e-mail that various folks are waiting for my response to their invitation to LinkedIn. I don't know them. A response should be provided that says "Who the hell are you?"

Amen.

[PassedOut]

Duplicate

[barmar]

Scarabin, on 2013-March-04, 20:52, said:

My understanding is that the Turing Test got whittled down to the point where it could be met by "Liza" clones. If we return to a more general test where the computer demonstrates human performance on several fronts then I think it mjght be more convincing.

You're right, the basic Turing Test is limited because it just relies on conversation. Human intelligence also involves planning, creativity, dealing with unanticipated situations, etc. I was thinking of a generalization of Turing's criteria that involves things like this, but it's hard to set such a thing up as a "test". But the general idea is that intelligence is like pornography: it's hard to define, but you know it when you see it.

[blackshoe]

barmar, on 2013-March-05, 09:28, said:

But the general idea is that intelligence is like pornography: it's hard to define, but you know it when you see it.

My problem is that as I look at the people around here, and those I see on the internet, I don't see much intelligence. Present company excepted, of course.

[kenberg]

With the hints given I looked a little at Turing's Test. It appears that the first thing he did in his paper was to give up on the question of machine intelligence, dismissing it as too ambiguous a question to scientifically address. Instead, he suggested that we ask if machines can imitate intelligence. Now I am not Alan Turing, but this view is along the lines of what I was suggesting. We ask what machines can do, describe our answers without using the word intelligence, and then at the end, if we still wish to, decide if we want to label these abilities as intelligence, or as machine intelligence, or, my own preference, some entirely new label.

We were able, at least Scar and I, to quickly agree that machines are good at chess and not so good at social interaction. I am no expert at all on robotics, but those who are could probably quickly find other areas of agreement about what machines can and, at least at present, cannot do.

But, now to argue against myself, if we are going to look at what constitutes intelligence I see the intuitive ability to size up a situation as a very significant component of intelligence. Proving mathematical theorems is very important, or so I like to claim, but in everyday living that's not what counts. Much more often, you listen to a person and you say "Yeah, sounds right" or "That's crap, he is fooling himself or trying to fool me, or both". If pushed, perhaps you can say why. Perhaps not. But I think that 95% of my decisions in life are of this sort.

Turing was brilliant, but he died when computers were still running on vacuum tubes. We will have to face the future without him. In my view, drones are not intelligent just as they are not moral. Intelligence and morality is up to their masters, and, so far, that's us. And if that leads us to say "And so may God help us", I am inclined, atheist thought I am, to agree.

[onoway]

I seem to be watching far too many TED Talks lately but this one seems pertinent to this discussion.. http://www.ted.com/t...nal_robots.html

[kenberg]

An interesting talk.

[mike777]

Just to be clear of course flying robots can kill Americans on American soil without a trial.


Here are 3 types of examples from our own history where we kill or might kill Americans without a trial, off the top:

1) Whiskey rebellion
2) American Civil War
3) 9-11


Now add situations going after some crooks by law enforcement.


The only question is will we or Homeland Security have say a central eye or net in the sky, call it Skynet for example to oversee? Will Homeland security at some point in the future have a digital security network?

Not sure if it will ever be possible to connect computers into some type of network for Homeland security purposes.

[blackshoe]

It is not always illegal to kill someone. It is not always morally wrong to do so. The law (including Mosaic law) distinguishes between killing and murder. Killing someone in defense of oneself, one's loved ones, other people, or even one's property is not usually murder. This is true whether one is a cop or not. Killing someone, as a cop, "in the line of duty" is not murder. Killing an enemy in war is not murder. The Patriot Act, among its many flaws, redefines "not murder" to include the killing of people, Americans or not, without a trial, without giving them Constitutional protections (the argument here, in part, is that non-Americans are not entitled to Constitutional protections, but leave that aside), indeed without much vetting of their guilt at all. Not to mention the "collateral damage". This is just plain wrong, morally and Constitutionally.

For over two hundred years we prided ourselves on being a country that follows the rule of law, even though in some instances we arguably did not. Now the Patriot Act throws that principle right out the window. Many people, including me, see this as the top of a slippery slope, at the bottom of which lies the failure of our noble experiment in government "of the people, by the people, and for the people". I'd like to think I have a few years left in me, but if riding the toboggan down that slope is part of the deal, I'm not so sure I want to buy in.

[mike777]

To be fair on 9/11 we were willing to kill innocent Americans by flying robots without a trial.
This was before the Patriot Act. America long before 9/11 was willing to kill our fellow Americans without a trial, this goes back to the days of George Washington.


btw if we kill someone with flying robots under the Patriot Act that follows the "rule of law."


I fully grant that today it is far more likely that should we do this we will be sued by a lawyer. I expect the next time an American is killed by a flying robot there will be a lawsuit.

[barmar]

This thread was created to separate the discussion of robot and AI technology from the discussion of violence in the gun thread. Let's not take it back in that direction. Please take the political discussion elsewhere.

[dwar0123]

An interesting read that I ran across that relates to this thread.

http://en.wikipedia....sophical_zombie

Personally, I feel that the problem it presents should be resolved something along the lines of Gödel's Incompleteness theorem. If a P-Zombie can be created, we will completely understand it. I am pretty sure we will never completely understand consciousness for the same reasons that Gödel's theorem exist. Which isn't to suggest we won't ever be able to create human like AI, it just means we won't be able to fully describe what we created.

http://en.wikipedia....teness_theorems

[onoway]

dwar0123, on 2013-March-07, 14:45, said:

we won't be able to fully describe what we created.

seems to me we are doing that already with GMO experiments.

I ran across another TED talk which in spite of a perhaps unfortunate beginning, has some very interesting thoughts to put forward. This guy doesn't think people should be designing robots as such, but letting them evolve. He has had some startling results working with this premise.

It would be interesting to see the stage he is at now as this talk was posted in 2007.

http://www.ted.com/t...are_robots.html

[mike777]

fLYING Robots are now connected to the cloud network and they now have a federation.
SKYNET?



"More intelligent robots

The developed Platform as a Service (PaaS) for robots allows them to perform complex functions like mapping, navigation, or processing of human voice commands in the cloud, at a fraction of the time required by robots’ on-board computers. By making enterprise-scale computing infrastructure available to any robot with a wireless connection, the researchers believe that the new computing platform will help pave the way towards lighter, cheaper, more intelligent robots.

“The RoboEarth Cloud Engine is particularly useful for mobile robots, such as drones or autonomous cars, which require lots of computation for navigation. It also offers significant benefits for robot co-workers, such as factory robots working alongside humans, which require large knowledge databases, and for the deployment of robot teams.” says Mohanarajah Gajamohan, researcher at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zurich) and Technical Lead of the project.

“On-board computation reduces mobility and increases cost.”, says Dr. Heico Sandee, RoboEarth’s Program Manager at Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands, “With the rapid increase in wireless data rates caused by the booming demand of mobile communications devices, more and more of a robot’s computational tasks can be moved into the cloud.”

Impact on jobs

While high-tech companies that heavily rely on data centers have been criticized for creating fewer jobs than traditional companies (e.g., Google or Facebook employ less than half the number of workers of General Electric or Hewlett-Packard per dollar in revenue), the researchers don’t believe that this new robotics platform should be cause for alarm.

According to a recent study by the International Federation of Robotics and Metra Martech entitled “Positive Impact of Industrial Robots on Employment,” robots don’t kill jobs but rather tend to lead to an overall growth in jobs.

OK, so robots have their own federation now? Skynet detected. — Editor


http://www.kurzweila...tm_medium=email

[mike777]

Is the universe being created by a computer program?

[+]
Konrad Zuse

Many scientists are now taking seriously the possibility that the entire universe is being computed by a computer program, as first suggested in 1967 by the legendary Konrad Zuse, who also built the world’s first working general computer between 1935 and 1941. [1]
http://www.kurzweila...tm_medium=email




My paper on all computable universes called ‘A computer scientist’s view of life, the universe, and everything’ got submitted/published in 1996/1997


FAST Algorithm
for i := 1, 2, . . . do
Run each program p with l(p) ≤ i for at most 2i−l(p) steps and reset storage modified by p
end for

[here l(p) denotes the length of program p, a bitstring]

Schmidhuber explains: “This is essentially a variant of Leonid Levin’s universal search (1973), but without the search aspect. The code systematically lists and runs all possible programs in interleaving fashion. It can be shown that it computes each particular universe as quickly as this universe’s (typically unknown) fastest program, save for a constant factor that does not depend on the universe size.

From this asymptotically optimal method, we can derive an a priori probability distribution on possible universes called the Speed Prior. It reflects the fastest way of describing objects, not necessarily the shortest. (BTW, note that any general search in program space for the solution to a sufficiently complex problem will create many inhabited universes as byproducts.)”

[mike777]

We want to do for machine learning what the advent of high-level program languages 50 years ago did for the software development community as a whole,” said Kathleen Fisher, DARPA program manager.

“Our goal is that future machine learning projects won’t require people to know everything about both the domain of interest and machine learning to build useful machine learning applications. Through new probabilistic programming languages specifically tailored to probabilistic inference, we hope to decisively reduce the current barriers to machine learning and foster a boom in innovation, productivity and effectiveness.”

The PPAML program is scheduled to run 46 months, with three phases of activity from 2013 to 2017. Fisher believes a successful solution will involve contributions from many areas, including statistics and probabilistic modeling, approximation algorithms, machine learning, programming languages, program analysis, compilers, high-performance software, and parallel and distributed computing.

http://www.kurzweila...tm_medium=email

[y66]

Essay-Grading Software Offers Professors a Break

What next? Software that rates and filters bridge forum posts?

[y66]

From Why Home Prices Change (or Don’t) by Robert Shiller:

Quote

In a 1956 study of home prices by the National Bureau of Economic Research, Leo Grebler, David M. Blank and Louis Winnick documented a substantial decline in inflation-corrected construction costs per housing unit in the first few decades of the 20th century. They traced this decline to multiple causes, including a decline in the number of rooms per home, the use of gypsum wallboard in place of plaster and of asphalt shingles in place of slate, a shift in construction to lower-cost Southern climates and a relative increase in the number of multifamily housing units and apartment buildings. The authors concluded that the long-run movements in construction costs and home prices are “remarkably similar.”

This was the prevailing theory of home prices at the time: construction costs drove the entire housing market. That view — which implies that increasing productivity has restrained prices and could do so in the future — is very different from the focus on financial pressures and speculative bubbles that drives much of our thinking now.

Steady progress in developing new construction equipment, materials and techniques can be seen in something as simple as the history of power drills. A big step forward came in 1889, with the invention of the electric drill. Then came a series of other inventions: the portable electric drill in 1895, the pistol-grip-and-trigger-switch portable electric drill in 1917 (by S. Duncan Black and Alonzo G. Decker), the Phillips head screw in 1935 (by Henry F. Phillips), the first cordless electric drill in 1961 and the first lithium ion battery, which improved cordless drills, in the 1970s. Each set in motion a string of other improvements that, over decades, penetrated the construction industry and vastly improved its productivity. We can expect more such inventions in the future.

It is hard to imagine the next advances in home construction technology, but there are some clues. For example, Behrokh Khoshnevis of the University of Southern California is developing “contour crafting” robotics that he says will be able to accept computer instructions and, like gigantic 3-D printers, build houses. We cannot tell how well this will work, but computer technology has produced some amazing results. Why is it that we worry about the effect of information technology on our jobs but usually don’t link such uncertainty to the outlook for home prices?

The contour crafting robotics stuff sounds like it might be a ways off. It seems like there's a huge potential to cut costs now by using technology to improve the quality and timeliness of decision making from start to finish on construction projects.