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[Tidewater]

Who can afford these technologies?

I win.

[Bubba#$%Kron]

Maybe it will bring back the recording studio business like the days when a person had to rent a studio because there is no way they could afford a tape machine/console!!!

cheers

Tidewater wrote on Sun, 09 January 2011 16:33

Who can afford these technologies? I win.

[bruno putzeys]

Jay Kadis wrote on Sat, 08 January 2011 17:22

It is the difference between conscious action and sub- or unconscious action.  We don't really know for sure where phylogenetically consciousness begins, but it seems to be associated with prefrontal lobe activity that arises in primates and brings with it a sense of possible future consequences.  The question is how much of preservation behavior is pre-programmed and how much is due to conscious reasoning.  The behaviors of entities without consciousness must be attributed to something else. If a machine develops enough intelligence to become conscious, does it automatically realize it needs to preserve its "life?"  Is self-preservation automatic when one realizes consciously that there is a self and that it will not necessarily exist forever?  That is different from what we observe in biological systems that do not recognize the self.

Consciousness is a sliding scale. The na

[bruno putzeys]

Tidewater wrote on Sun, 09 January 2011 00:27

Is anyone here a member of a skeptical society?

Can you spot one?

[Jay Kadis]

You might be right about consciousness as I wasn't aware I had taken a firm position on the matter.  I just want to be careful giving mechanical devices more and more autonomy and intelligence because we do not understand its ramifications.  I am only at the stage of considering the possibilities.  Evolution is a much more complicated process than Darwin thought.  The evolution of consciousness is even more complicated.  I do not pretend to understand it and that's why I would be cautious in implementing ever more intelligent machines.

Just substitute "group" for species if you don't like the idea of clear delineation of species.

Do you think there is no chance of mechanical intelligence developing an urge for self-preservation?

[bruno putzeys]

My view isn't that extreme. So I presume yours as well isn't as extreme as I seem to think. In fact, upon further inspection we might be closer to agreement than it seems

I'm firstly saying that it's perfectly possible for artificial intelligence not to have any urge for self-preservation. In addition I expect that an artificial intelligence engineered from the ground up will certainly be free from any of the emotional traits or shortcomings that science-fiction writers seem to expect as a matter of fact.

The reason why I think this is that the human brain only has those emotions because they are driven by specialised nerve centres. That this is so is gleaned from observing people who've unfortunately had them knocked out. Emotions are not emergent properties of intelligence. Like naturally occurring intelligence they are only emergent properties of an evolved biological system. So if we don't put emotional processing into intelligent programs, they won't have them.

If artificial intelligence is produced simply by letting it evolve freely all bets are off though. There's no longer a guarantee that the evolved solution won't include some unexpected extras. Designed AI will be free from pesky emotions but evolved AI might well not be.

Personally though I don't give a purely genetic approach to creating AI much chance. The amount of interaction each iteration needs to have would be prohibitively costly if something approaching the degree of specialisation of the various human nerve centres is to be reached without guidance from the results of the billions of years we've had.

Because I expect any reasonably intelligent computer programs to be designed instead of evolved, I don't see any danger. The only danger I see is that we might rely so much on thinking machines that we forget to develop our own intelligence, or more precisely that of our children and grandchildren. An altogether different matter.

Jay Kadis wrote on Mon, 10 January 2011 16:30

Just substitute "group" for species if you don't like the idea of clear delineation of species.

Indeed, "group selection" is the correct term for the now well discredited interpretation that genes evolve to instigate behaviour benefiting collections of individuals other than kin. Social behaviours extending beyond kin are all analysed -successfully- in terms of game theory (look up "evolutionarily stable strategy").
The concept of "group selection" has mainly found entry in our collective consciousness because of the infamous lemming film that people thought showed lemmings trying to save the species from collapse. This is clearly impossible because lemmings that did not have such a gene would not jump, therefore upping the prevalence of non-jumping alleles. In fact, evolution regularly drives organisms to extinction. A gene that makes individuals more capable of using a limited resource compared to others carrying alleles will become more and more prevalent in an ever shrinking population.
One scenario of group selection that isn't fully ruled out occurs when in some way a population manages to remain extremely homogenous. This is the de facto situation in species like bees where an entire colony share all of their genes but then of course that's just an extreme case of kin selection and not group selection as it's normally understood. Other than that, sufficient homogeneity for group selection to work has never been seen. Group selection is very much part of "folk-evolution-theory" as seen in popular discourse.

[Tidewater]

We aren't smart enough to make something smart enough.

We will invent a clapping thing to help us find where we parked the robot.

[bruno putzeys]

Tidewater wrote on Mon, 10 January 2011 23:18

We aren't smart enough to make something smart enough.

Yes, people say that, don't they? It sounds so self-evident that nobody wonders how plausible it actually is.

Exhibit 1: So far EVERY machine constructed by humans was more capable than its designer in the particular aspect that it was designed for. We started with the easiest tasks first (levers, spears, bludgeons) and worked our way up to more complicated ones (calculation, memory, computation). We have no data to go by that suggests that the trend should level out.

Exhibit 2: Apart from crude tools and amenities there are no objects anyone can manufacture alone. I may know quite well how my amps work, but I couldn't make the FETs myself. I don't understand the chemistry of electrolytic capacitors in sufficient detail to make them. We all stand on the shoulder of giants. So if the limit on any designed product is the ability of designers to understand it in full, it's handaxes and mud huts. Nobody works alone.

Exhibit 3: Modern neuroscience finds that the brain is put together of little blocks that do just one specialised thing. Each of those turns out to be constructed of even more specialised bits. Why should there, as some people think, suddenly be one large blob whose function can only be understood as a whole? All data points toward the modular view for conscious thought as well. Suppose we wanted to model intelligence on the operation of the human brain. We assemble a team of a few hundred people, each with their expert understanding of their cubic millimetre of brain, each of whom will write a software model of that bit. Not even the project leader needs to understand all of it.

The same already goes for any complicated computer program, intelligent or not: there's no need for a single person to understand all of it. It's not the intelligence of a single human that determines the most intelligent thing we can make. It's the aggregate intelligence of the whole team that does it.

The belief that humans cannot make machines as smart as humans is fallacious because it assumes that it'll be done by only one human.

[Tomas Danko]

I've got a good example of this.

A friend of mine designs radio antennae and the DSP code used to improve s/n ratio and boost performance in general.

The best the staff could do was something like above 70% efficiency and it took some 100-200 instructions of code.

My friend tried out genetic programming, and had the computer to create endless amounts of permutations and iterated for quite some time (by only saving the most promising ones and use them as seeds for the next iteration etc).

They ended up with above 90% efficiency and the code used less than 20 instructions IIRC. Some kind of weird feedback loop.

Nobody figured out what it did.
Nobody could figure out WHY it worked at ALL.
Nothing made sense, because the code didn't do anything resembling the traditional methods.

But it just did work, and for that specific application only.

And it did so much better than they ever managed to code by themselves. Still, it WAS created by a human being.

[Tidewater]

People used to come up with great ideas, until they started spending all their time creating fake brains to do the other thinking.

I predict a brain bubble. Thought market crash.

[bruno putzeys]

Tidewater wrote on Tue, 11 January 2011 14:24

I predict a brain bubble. Thought market crash.

How long has it been since you last spoke to a student? We're right in the middle of that crash. Students are prepared to be cogs in a consumer society, not to be independent thinkers. The reason why the ideas are no longer great is because they need to fit in a short term investment cycle. You really need something like a state sponsored space race if you want to develop in a certain direction. The whole idea of letting the market drive technological advances is bonkers. Markets are like evolution: things change but there is no direction. And in retrospect people will think that the direction is wherever they ended up. I don't want to think about it it makes me too sad.

[Tidewater]

I don't like state driven programs. If we are waiting on funding, I think we're done. However, individuals are rich enough to carry out their own programs, if they choose. Some do choose.

The paradigm of the individual inventor/discoverer is coming back when this fake brain helps us reserach technologies... although the brain will get all the credit.. it, or Obama.

L M A O

All the World is a stage, and I just crapped on this one.

[Jon Hodgson]

bruno putzeys wrote on Tue, 11 January 2011 14:02

Tidewater wrote on Tue, 11 January 2011 14:24 I predict a brain bubble. Thought market crash. How long has it been since you last spoke to a student? We're right in the middle of that crash. Students are prepared to be cogs in a consumer society, not to be independent thinkers. The reason why the ideas are no longer great is because they need to fit in a short term investment cycle. You really need something like a state sponsored space race if you want to develop in a certain direction. The whole idea of letting the market drive technological advances is bonkers. Markets are like evolution: things change but there is no direction. And in retrospect people will think that the direction is wherever they ended up. I don't want to think about it it makes me too sad.

Many great things have come from companies doing prooactive development, where people have been encouraged to just try stuff because it seems interesting with no immediate thought of profit. EMI's Central Research Laboratories, Xerox PARC.

Unfortunately it seems most companies are scared to do that today, probably because it can seem like a black hole for money, the main exception I can think of is Google, who give their employees 20% of their time to work on their own projects.

Someone who'd worked at the Central Research Laboratories back in the EMI dayw described it as a truck arriving once a month and dumping cash in the car park, and the engineers and scientists would wheelbarrow the money into the building and just do research, on whatever, and the next month there would be another truck.

Sounds crazy, but apparantly just ONE thing that came out of that lab, the CAT scanner, eventually made enough money to pay for the whole history of the lab (it was also ironically one of the things that greatly contributed to the fall of EMI, but that's another story).

But to do this kind of thing requires a good store of cash and a long term view, both of which are in short supply these days.

[Tomas Danko]

Tidewater wrote on Tue, 11 January 2011 13:24

People used to come up with great ideas, until they started spending all their time creating fake brains to do the other thinking. I predict a brain bubble. Thought market crash.

People used to come up with great ideas, until they started spending all their time on Facebook.

...People used to come up with great ideas, until they started spending all their time in front of the TV...

...People used to come up with great ideas, until they started spending all their time in car factories...

...People used to come up with great ideas, until they started spending all their time in caves...

...came down from the trees...
...started eating meat...
...recording into Pro Tools.

[Jay Kadis]

bruno putzeys wrote on Tue, 11 January 2011 06:02

Tidewater wrote on Tue, 11 January 2011 14:24 I predict a brain bubble. Thought market crash. How long has it been since you last spoke to a student? We're right in the middle of that crash. Students are prepared to be cogs in a consumer society, not to be independent thinkers. The reason why the ideas are no longer great is because they need to fit in a short term investment cycle. You really need something like a state sponsored space race if you want to develop in a certain direction. The whole idea of letting the market drive technological advances is bonkers. Markets are like evolution: things change but there is no direction. And in retrospect people will think that the direction is wherever they ended up. I don't want to think about it it makes me too sad.

I see students every day.  Admittedly I enjoy working with an elite group but they are not all driven by money - they're into music after all.  Universities like Stanford still invest in long-term non-goal-oriented research even though money drives the system in the long run.  John Chowning's FM synthesis patent has endowed our research, a perfect example of what can happen when new ideas are allowed to flourish.  The university has not forgotten this.