Artificial Intelligence

The way the media cover AI, you’d swear they had invented being hopelessly naïve: Chances are, you’ve already seen this headline or one of many like it: “Robot that thinks for itself from scratch brings forward rise the self-aware machines” It’s from a story first published inThe Telegraph (UK), then by Yahoo News and MSN, and then (of course) linked on Drudge. Henry Bodkin, “health and science correspondent” for The Telegraph, tells us, with no hint of caution, that “the rise of “self-aware” robots has come a major step closer following the invention of a machine capable of thinking for itself from scratch, scientists have said.” The first problem with both the headline and the story is confusion. They claim Read More ›

Many Singulatarians hold that their soon-to-be-realized technology will be indistinguishable by the rest of us from magic.   Are they serious? Well, in 2005, Kurzweil said that the magical Harry Potter stories “are not unreasonable visions of our world as it will exist only a few decades from now.” when, due to AI, “the entire universe will become saturated with our intelligence.”  Keas warns that this type of thing encourages people “to expect the experiential equivalent of occult phenomena.” More. Mike Keas’s new book Unbelievable: 7 Myths About the History and Future of Science and Religion discusses how AI and ET are merging, to create a religion of futurist magic: See also: Historian: Darwinists Kept The “Flat Earth” Myth Going, To Attack Read More ›

He argues that we may need new institutions, such as insurance against job obsolescence: I believe that humans are creative enough to come with the new institutions necessary to adapt to a changing world. What I fear is that we will not be allowed to do so. We do not live in an ideal free market, where we can choose whether or not to belong to any particular institution. Instead, we live in a mixed society where we are free to choose whether to belong to some institutions but other institutions are either mandated or forbidden. We are not always free to experiment with new institutions to identify the best ways to organize society. If humans are free to experiment Read More ›

The release of the Top Ten over hyped AI stories of 2019 has led the way for further promising ones, including this one, says engineer and philosopher Jonathan Bartlett: Was the machine cleverand sneaky or was it just programmed wrong? You decide. First, just to be clear, at Mind Matters we have nothing against AI. Quite the opposite, our writers include professors at the forefront of AI research. But we do have something against AI hype. Media seemingly can’t help portraying today’s high-tech world as a remake of I, Robot (2004), starring you and me. One result is that some members of the public may completely misunderstand what AI is and does.… TechCrunch published an article on December 31, 2018, Read More ›

Mistaking a teapot shape for a golf ball, due to surface features, is one striking example from a recent open-access paper: The networks did “a poor job of identifying such items as a butterfly, an airplane and a banana,” according to the researchers. The explanation they propose is that “Humans see the entire object, while the artificial intelligence networks identify fragments of the object.” News, “Researchers: Deep Learning vision is very different from human vision” at Mind Matters “To see life steadily and see it whole”* doesn’t seem to be popular among machines. *(Zen via Matthew Arnold) See also: Can an algorithm be racist?

AI help, not hype, with Robert J. Marks: Software can automatically generate word sequences based on material fed in from existing scripts: In 2016, Ars Technica was proud to be sponsoring “the first AI-written sci-fi script:” As explained in The Guardian, a recurrent neural network “was fed the scripts of dozens of science fiction movies including such classics as Highlander Endgame, Ghostbusters, Interstellar and The Fifth Element.” Sunspring, the title of the AI written play, was computed after the trained neural network was given a “set of prompts.” A Guardian writer terms the resulting script “gibberish.” Here’s a description from sponsor Ars Technica: Ars is excited to be hosting this online debut of Sunspring, a short science fiction film that’s Read More ›

Fred Brooks says that human intelligence augmented by artificial intelligence will always beat artificial intelligence alone. Is he right? Jed Macosko, an assistant prof at Wake Forest University, explains: Before we envision scary scenes from The Matrix, we need to remember that Zor, Deep Blue, and any future AI systems are inevitably designed by humans. Developing an algorithm to beat humans or humans-plus-computers in chess requires a lot of other humans doing careful engineering. Not only that but their program designed to play chess won’t suddenly become a champion at Monopoly—or even very good at checkers. The bottom line is that Brooks’ Bet and his IA>AI inequality principle is a good reality check in the face of fears and hype Read More ›