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Artificial Consciousness - Possible or Not?
I was randomly surfing links from one page to another and I stumbled upon this site - http://www.longbets.org/bets - where people are encouraged to make long-term predictions about the future, and then back those predictions with money. Of all the predictions on the site, the very first one was most intriguing to me; Mitch Kapor bet Ray Kurzweil that by 2029, no machine will have passed the famous Turing Test and proved itself to be conscious.
For those who don't know, Kapor was one of the founders of Lotus (the software maker not the car manufacturer), and an important figure in the world of open source software with his co-founding of the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation). Kurzweil is a polymath who has worked in the fields of OCR, speech recognition, musical synthesizers, and artificial intelligence, as well as authoring several futurist books. Both men are therefore well versed in the possibilities of computer technology, which makes their disagreement on the AI question so interesting.
What do you think? Will we one day be matched and then inevitably surpassed by our robotic overlords? Or is there something special about human intelligence that can never be copied by a computer?
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Gotta find this one book called Conversations on consciousness its a book with interviews on the top people on the mind/brain debate, and it touches on the idea of artificial intelligence.
If nothing this particular debate has to come from a point of understanding the long time debate.
I'm a reductionist and I feel that eventually we'll understand the brain, consciousness like we do anything else, that might take a long time mind you as we are going deep into inner space so to speak.
Some suggest its impossible for there to be AI because of the implications of sparks of divinity, or that it can be only done by natural biological means.
I think technology can mimic and reproduce any biological, chemical function, so its a matter of time before we realize AI and that humans become hybrids and eventually more technology than flesh.
Also we're maybe 50 - 100yrs max from living forever.
I am a fan of Kurzweil, but I think his predictions are a little too optimistic. However, he has been proven more or less right over the last 25 years or so.
In his book The Singularity is Near, he said that we will have built a computer that has the processing speed of a human brain by 2013, and it will be available for personal computers by 2020.
Kurzweil thinks that by the 2040s we will be able to completely download our consciousness into machines.
He also says that it is possible for him to live indefinitely... by taking supplements and staying healthy until nanotechnology and medical research gets to the point where we can start to reverse the aging process.
It is pretty cool to see how he breaks down mankind's technological advancement and determine the direction its going.
I expect to see cyborgs and artificial life before I kick the bucket. Cyborgs don't seem that far off, and with the pace of advancements in our knowledge and abilities, unless we kill ourselves first we'll be seeing amazing things before too long. There are already many amazing things going on.
Personally, I think the whole notion of 'mind' and 'consciousness' are a little silly.
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For as long as people have been trying to create a real AI, it has always been a decade or 2 away. However, they continue to further understand exactly what is entailed in the brain itself, so they keep pushing the requirements higher.
I would not be suprised if we never obtained anything close to 'true AI', however simply passing the Turing test is another story. 2029 seems a bit soon though.
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What do you think? Will we one day be matched and then inevitably surpassed by our robotic overlords? Or is there something special about human intelligence that can never be copied by a computer?
What do I think?
I think all of this has happened before and all of this will happen again.
Cowperson
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Everything is about money and cost cutting these days anyways, so what is the incentive to create a fake brain. Who wants a brain that is just as quirky as the real thing, just as prone to mental breakdowns and neurosis, AND NEEDS BATTERIES
2029 7:30am est Machine gains sentience for the first time
2029 7:30:01 est Machine evaluates mankind, sighs loudly and blows its brains out
2039 7:30am est Machine II gains sentience for the first time
2039 7:30:01 est Machine II evaluates mankind deems it as threat with access to weapons of mass destruction. Machine II renames itself George W.
2039 7:30:02 Machine II decides to destroy mankind, checks database, see's that a rerun of GunSmoke is on decides to think about it while spending an afternoon on the couch.
2039 7:50 am est To counter effects of Machine II, origninal machine is activated, tells machine II to get off of the couch and get a damn job then sighs and blows its brains out. Machine II fills out job application for local 7-11, down loads specs on 1978 firebird, downloads 72 terrabytes of porn . . .
The war with the machines has begun.
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Not a chance that it happens in the next 20 years, unless Ray Kurzweil creates a machine who's only function is to pass the Turing test, like in that Numb3rs episode. But a real sentient machine is centuries away.
I was randomly surfing links from one page to another and I stumbled upon this site - http://www.longbets.org/bets - where people are encouraged to make long-term predictions about the future, and then back those predictions with money. Of all the predictions on the site, the very first one was most intriguing to me; Mitch Kapor bet Ray Kurzweil that by 2029, no machine will have passed the famous Turing Test and proved itself to be conscious.
For those who don't know, Kapor was one of the founders of Lotus (the software maker not the car manufacturer), and an important figure in the world of open source software with his co-founding of the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation). Kurzweil is a polymath who has worked in the fields of OCR, speech recognition, musical synthesizers, and artificial intelligence, as well as authoring several futurist books. Both men are therefore well versed in the possibilities of computer technology, which makes their disagreement on the AI question so interesting.
What do you think? Will we one day be matched and then inevitably surpassed by our robotic overlords? Or is there something special about human intelligence that can never be copied by a computer?
I've had conversations with people who think that computers (particularly chatbots) can already pass the Turing test. Which, to me, suggests a poor understanding at what the Turing test is. Yeah, there are chat bots that can pass for human for brief periods of time on a chatroom (especially if the chatbot is saying sexy things and all the humans in the room are horny teenage boys), but none can survive any sort of interrogation, which is what the Turing test really is. Simple logic or syntax questions like "Can you repeat the third word you just said?" fool just about any chat bot, which is why existing contests like the Loebner prize force the interrogator to stick to questions about a topic.
That said, there's a huge difference between being able to process language and logic problems and having a conscience. More impressive (and important) would be a computer that can handle problems of mind: be aware of others, what they're likely thinking, and how to act in order to influence them. A computer that chooses to take the Turing test, understands the nature of the test, and then sets out to deceive the interrogator, is far more impressive an act than something that can simply mimic a human and parse language really well. Heck, a computer that had crow-level intelligence (a social understanding that allows for problems of mind, multi-step problem solving, tool construction and usage) would be pretty impressive.
It's like the chess problem: computers are able to play at a grand-master level, but only because their processing power has increased exponentially. They aren't truly thinking, they're just running through formulas at an incredibly fast speed. Programmers have been working on computers that can play Go for just as long, but have not produced machines that can play the game at anywhere close to a master level, because the game has far too many possible combinations to be solved with raw CPU speed.
I don't really think that the current direction of AI research is going to produce a conscious entity on its own. It needs to wait for our understanding of neuro-science to catch up.
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Well, based on the consciousness level of certain mono-headed humanoids I've encountered recently, it shouldn't take much to develop artificial consciousness based on similar standards.
But can they develop a drum machine with soul? Now that would be an accomplishment.
Last edited by Ford Prefect; 10-14-2009 at 11:12 AM.
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Originally Posted by J pold
I think it's bedtime for jammies.
That was actually good advice!
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Originally Posted by JohnnyB
Personally, I think the whole notion of 'mind' and 'consciousness' are a little silly.
How so? I can see how consciousness might be an illusion (there is considerable evidence that our consciousness is nothing more than a post-facto observer of workings of the real and hidden "mind"), but how is mind a silly notion?
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Originally Posted by octothorp
They aren't truly thinking, they're just running through formulas at an incredibly fast speed.
Yet it's not clear that our minds do anything different; unlike digital computers, which are general-purpose machines theoretically capable of adapting and running any algorithm, our minds have many special-purpose modules that are tuned to interpret specific classes of algorithms, but so far no one has found any evidence to prove there is a difference in kind between brains and computers, as well as in what specializations are available. To make an analogy, most personal computers use a specialized module - the video card - to process graphics for on-screen display because such a module is far better at its specialized task than the computer's main CPU, but that doesn't mean the CPU couldn't do the same job through emulation, it just can't do it nearly as fast. So IF the mind is merely a conglomeration of specialized meat machines, then you can either try to mimic it with a sufficiently powerful digital computer that can model all the functions of these specialized machines internally, or build specialized computers that mimic each function of the brain and then network them in the same way the brain is networked.
For the mind to be impossible to model digitally, it seems there must be one of two things true about it: it processes on the quantum level, or there is a non-material component to it. I think it's Roger Penrose that argues the former, but from what I remember of his book about it, he was singularly unconvincing (although that doesn't mean he's wrong, he just might have the details wrong while the central idea is correct). The latter is of course the province of the religious, and might be summed up as "machines cannot have a soul."
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Better educated sadness than oblivious joy.
Location: In a land without pants, or war, or want. But mostly we care about the pants.
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Originally Posted by Ford Prefect
But can they develop a drum machine with soul? Now that would an accomplishment.
They are already working on it by analyzing the styles of particular drummers and mapping that into quantizing formulae that convert a basic drum track into a track that carries the "groove" of a specified drummer (or even an imaginary drummer with certain qualities). So far the results are mediocre, but I'd guess it'll be 3-5 years at most before you won't be able to tell the difference between a studio drum track done by a real drummer and one done by a sufficiently talented programmer.
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Better educated sadness than oblivious joy.
It's possible but there is nothing in the current economic or scientific worldsphere to make this possible so soon. I would give it another 100 years or longer.
Science advances by great leaps and bounds where pushed and the money and people are there. Look at how fast the atom bomb was developed. Unfortunately, artificial life and intelligence, and consciousness is just something dabbled in by few and there is nothing pushing it to happen so quickly. I don't see any reason for it either. I wouldn't want to deal with the ethical implications.
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Artificial Consciousness - Possible or Not?
