Artificial Intelligence

Here: Artificial Intelligence has leapt to the forefront of global discourse, garnering increased attention from practitioners, industry leaders, policymakers, and the general public. The diversity of opinions and debates gathered from news articles this year illustrates just how broadly AI is being investigated, studied, and applied. However, the field of AI is still evolving rapidly and even experts have a hard time understanding and tracking progress across the field. More. But they are keeping track and it is free. See also: How are those AI spiritual machines coming?

Reader Edward Sisson writes to say, Denyse says in her 2006 article that “Then there was artificial intelligence (AI). Remember, this is supposed to be the “age of spiritual machines,” when computers are becoming indistinguishable from humans. In reality, the human mind works quite differently from a computer, and simply increasing computing power does not produce characteristic human qualities. AI enthusiast Kenneth Silber complains, “This is a disappointing state of affairs.” It sure is, if you are HAL or Deeper Blue.” [No computer has become inherently smarter than its programmers, for the same reasons as characters in a novel do not have more insight than the author. ]” He adds, The current issue of MIT’s Technology Review (Nov/Dec 2017) is Read More ›

From Tyler O’Neil at PJ Media: A former executive at Google has filed paperwork with the IRS to establish an official religion of technology. This religion doesn’t just worship scientific progress, but artificial intelligence itself, with the goal of creating a godhead. The new church of AI will aim “to develop and promote the realization of a Godhead based on artificial intelligence and through understanding and worship of the Godhead [to] contribute to the betterment of society,” according to IRS documents. The non-profit religious organization would be called “Way of the Future” (WOTF). More. Making a god is actually not a new idea. Cf The Golden Calf. You can easily find out what your god is up to and control Read More ›

Here is a piece I (O’Leary for News) wrote for the first edition of Salvo (2006). Interesting to see how it has held up after more than a decade has past. – 0 – About three years ago, I predicted that the intelligent design controversy would explode in a few years, with every instapundit punding away furiously — some thoughtful, some foolish, some merely malign. The latter mood was expressed beautifully by a board member of Kansas Citizens for [promoting materialism in] Science, who summarized her public relations strategy against intelligent design advocates in February 2005 as follows: She advised her troops to portray them “’in the harshest light possible, as political opportunists, evangelical activists, ignoramuses, breakers of rules, unprincipled Read More ›

From Becky Feirrera at Motherboard: All stories about robots are, on some level, reflections of human behavior, and Thom’s efforts to flirt like a human—borrowing overheard phrases from others to compensate for his lack of self—is familiar enough in the human dating scene. But by the end of “The Flirtbot’s Condition,” a friendly chat with some barflies seems to temporarily ground Thom in an otherwise flighty world. In exchange, the human characters are reminded that even a malfunctioning robot can stumble across poetry. More. Isn’t the main problem that the robot doesn’t really want or need a relationship anyway? Reminds one of something J. Scott Turner said in Purpose and Desire:What Makes Something “Alive” and Why Modern Darwinism Has Failed Read More ›

From Shivali Best at Daily Mail: Professor Cox said that he found ‘no reason at all’ why human intelligence couldn’t be simulated by computers – although he did not express a timeline for this to happen. Classic. Last we heard, the mind doesn’t really exist and our perceptions are hallucinations. funny, all that stuff disappears when these immortality-through-AI ideas hold the floor instead. In a recent article for The Conversation, Professor Richard Jones, Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Research and Innovation at the University of Sheffield outlined some ‘serious problems’ with the idea. He said: ‘To replicate the mind digitally we would have to map each of these connections, something that is far beyond our current capabilities. Even if we could create such a Read More ›

Yes, that Dan Brown, of da Vinci code fame, on the book tour circuit. From Reuters via Daily Mail: Brown said technological change and the development of artificial intelligence would transform the concept of the divine. ‘We will start to find our spiritual experiences through our interconnections with each other,’ he said, forecasting the emergence of ‘some form of global consciousness that we perceive and that becomes our divine’. … ‘Our need for that exterior god, that sits up there and judges us … will diminish and eventually disappear,’ he added. More. The perceived “need” for moral judgement disappeared a long time ago, actually. Governments today prefer secular systems where they can make and impose the rules themselves without reference Read More ›

We’ve been hearing a lot about that. From Rodney Brooks, former director of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT , in “The Seven Deadly Sins of AI Predictions” at Technology Review, featuring the fourth sin: When people hear that machine learning is making great strides in some new domain, they tend to use as a mental model the way in which a person would learn that new domain. However, machine learning is very brittle, and it requires lots of preparation by human researchers or engineers, special-purpose coding, special-purpose sets of training data, and a custom learning structure for each new problem domain. Today’s machine learning is not at all the sponge-like learning that humans engage in, making Read More ›

From Sarah Jones at New Republic: The bots, our children, do not behave. They have taken over the internet—bots account for more than half of internet traffic—and interfered with our elections. But instead of being unnerved by the bot’s growing power, Anthony Levandowski would like to make one God. The Silicon Valley engineer, who has been accused by Waymo, Google’s self-driving car company, of trying to steal trade secrets and give them to Uber, in 2015 “founded a religious organization called Way of the Future,” Wired reported last week. “Its purpose, according to previously unreported state filings, is nothing less than to ‘develop and promote the realization of a Godhead based on Artificial Intelligence.’” Nobody but Levandowski knows if he Read More ›

Proof found that we are not living in an AI simulation? From Cheyenne MacDonald at Daily Mail: Theoretical physicists have discovered that it is impossible, by principle, to simulate a quantum phenomenon that occurs in metals – and, ultimately, something as complex as the entire universe. … As the number of particles required for the simulation increased, the researchers found the simulation itself became far more complex. … While the computer simulation theory continues to gnaw at the minds of many, with people such as Elon Musk backing the idea, the new study suggests it would be impossible to generate the illusion of reality in this way. More. But once we go down the road of thinking that all this Read More ›

From cognitive roboticist Murray Shanahan at Aeon: n 1984, the philosopher Aaron Sloman invited scholars to describe ‘the space of possible minds’. Sloman’s phrase alludes to the fact that human minds, in all their variety, are not the only sorts of minds. There are, for example, the minds of other animals, such as chimpanzees, crows and octopuses. But the space of possibilities must also include the minds of life-forms that have evolved elsewhere in the Universe, minds that could be very different from any product of terrestrial biology. The map of possibilities includes such theoretical creatures even if we are alone in the Cosmos, just as it also includes life-forms that could have evolved on Earth under different conditions. We Read More ›

From Charlie Martin at PJ Media: Hawking is certainly the most famous theoretical physicist since Albert Einstein, and rightly so, as he’s been very creative, developed theoretical ideas that have turned out to explain real physical observations — as well a a lot which haven’t been physically verified — and has done so while setting an apparent world record for the longest-surviving Lou Gehrig’s disease patient. This means that anything Hawking says about any scientific topic is news. On the other hand, that doesn’t make it right, especially as he strays beyond the edges of his own field. Recently, he has been doomsaying about artificial intelligence as well as carbon dioxide and evil alien intelligences. Re the latter (2010): Even Read More ›

From comments made to Jamie Condliffe by Demis Hassabis at Technology Review: Building AI that can perform general tasks, rather than niche ones, is a long-held desire in the world of machine learning. But the truth is that expanding those specialized algorithms to something more versatile remains an incredibly difficult problem, in part because human traits like inquisitiveness, imagination, and memory don’t exist or are only in their infancy in the world of AI. In a paper published today in the journal Neuron, Hassabis and three coauthors argue that only by better understanding human intelligence can we hope to push the boundaries of what artificial intellects can achieve. First, they say, better understanding of how the brain works will allow Read More ›

From biologist and computer scientist Arend Hintze at LiveScience: We have some time – somewhere between 50 and 250 years, depending on how fast AI develops. As a species we can come together and come up with a good answer for why a superintelligence shouldn’t just wipe us out. But that will be hard: Saying we embrace diversity and actually doing it are two different things – as are saying we want to save the planet and successfully doing so. We all, individually and as a society, need to prepare for that nightmare scenario, using the time we have left to demonstrate why our creations should let us continue to exist. Or we can decide to believe that it will Read More ›

Here’s a question for a lazy summer evening, should you be so lucky as to score one: From James Vincent at the Verge: Most economists agree that advances in robotics and AI over the next few decades are likely to lead to significant job losses. But what’s less often considered is how these changes could also impact social mobility. A new report from UK charity Sutton Trust explains the danger, noting that unless governments take action, the next wave of automation will dramatically increase inequality within societies, further entrenching the divide between rich and poor. … For example, the demand for paralegals and similar professions is likely to be reduced over the coming years as artificial intelligence is trained to Read More ›