Artificial Intelligence

A new reason? ET is HAL, but not psychotic. From Aeon: From the evolution side, a number of futurists are predicting the singularity: a time when computers will soon become powerful enough to simulate human consciousness, or absorb it entirely. In parallel, some visionaries propose that any intelligent life we encounter in the rest of the Universe is more likely to be machine-based, rather than humanoid meat-bags such as ourselves. These ruminations offer a potential solution to the long-debated Fermi Paradox: the seeming absence of intelligent alien life swarming around us, despite the fact that such life seems possible. If machine intelligence is the inevitable end-point of both technology and biology, then perhaps the aliens are hyper-evolved machines so off-the-charts Read More ›

After reading about how AlphaGo managed to trounce Lee Se-Dol 4-1 in a series of five games of Go, I had a feeling of déjà vu: where have I read about this style of learning before? And then it came to me: pigeons. Both computers and pigeons are incremental learners, and both employ probabilistic algorithms (such as the various machine learning algorithms used in artificial intelligence, and the computation of relative frequencies of positive or negative reinforcements, which is what pigeons do when they undergo conditioning) in order to help them home in on their learning target. Of course, there are several differences as well: computers don’t need reinforcements such as food to motivate them; computers learn a lot faster Read More ›

The news that a computer program has beaten Go master Lee Se-dol in a best-of-five competition may have shocked some readers. In this post, I’d like to explain why I don’t think it matters much at all, by telling a little story about three guys named Tom, Sam and Al. Tom has a brilliant mind. He puts his perspicacious intellect to good use by playing mentally challenging games, and he always wins. Tom’s freakish ability to win games by performing astonishing leaps of mental intuition leaves many spectators baffled. “How on earth do you do it?” they ask him, whenever he chalks up a victory against yet another hapless opponent. “It’s a strange gift I have,” Tom answers modestly. “I Read More ›

According to computer scientist Leslie Valiant. From John Pavlus at Quanta: Valiant’s self-stated goal is to find “mathematical definitions of learning and evolution which can address all ways in which information can get into systems.” If successful, the resulting “theory of everything” — a phrase Valiant himself uses, only half-jokingly — would literally fuse life science and computer science together. Furthermore, our intuitive definitions of “learning” and “intelligence” would expand to include not only non-organisms, but non-individuals as well. The “wisdom of crowds” would no longer be a mere figure of speech. … How can a theory of learning be applied to a phenomenon like biological evolution? Biology is based on protein expression networks, and as evolution proceeds these networks Read More ›

From Jonathan Bartlett (aka johnnyb) in his new book, New Programmers Start Here What separates modern computers from the calculating machines of the past is that modern computers are general-purpose computers. That is, they are not limited to a specific set of predesigned features. I can load new features onto a computer by inputting the right program. How did we get the idea of creating such a general-purpose machine? It turns out that a question in philosophy led to the creation of general-purpose machines. The question was this—was there a way to create an unambiguous procedure for checking mathematical proofs? This seems like an odd question, but it was a big question in the 19th century. There had been many Read More ›

That seems like a strange question, but there is a background to it. Marvin Minsky, artificial intellignce pioneer, died on Sunday at the age of 88: Professor Minsky, in 1959, co-founded the M.I.T. Artificial Intelligence Project (later the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory) with his colleague John McCarthy, who is credited with coining the term “artificial intelligence.” Beyond its artificial intelligence charter, however, the lab would have a profound impact on the modern computing industry, helping to impassion a culture of computer and software design. It planted the seed for the idea that digital information should be shared freely, a notion that would shape the so-called open-source software movement, and it was a part of the original ARPAnet, the forerunner to the Read More ›

Not exactly, but computer use can, they say, distort it in unexpected ways. From RealClearScience: How Computers Broke Science For most of the history of science, researchers have reported their methods in a way that enabled independent reproduction of their results. But, since the introduction of the personal computer – and the point-and-click software programs that have evolved to make it more user-friendly – reproducibility of much research has become questionable, if not impossible. Too much of the research process is now shrouded by the opaque use of computers that many researchers have come to depend on. This makes it almost impossible for an outsider to recreate their results. Recently, several groups have proposed similar solutions to this problem. Recent Read More ›

From How We Get to Next: If, many decades from now, some form of rogue artificial intelligence does manage to follow the playbook of a thousand science-fiction narratives and enslave the human race, I suspect the last remaining historians will look back to an obscure computer science experiment conducted at the turn of this century as an augur of the revolution to come. The experiment was the brainchild of two researchers at the University of Sussex named Jon Bird and Paul Layzell, and it involved a programming technique known as “evolutionary” software that uses a kind of simulated version of natural selection to engineer and optimize solutions to a design problem. If Darwinism produces intelligence, why aren’t Boltzmann brains floating Read More ›

Within our lifetimes, according to Daily Dot’s Dylan Love: Neal VanDeRee, officiator at the Church of Perpetual Life: I believe that it is inevitable that the arrival of a superintelligence is bound to happen, and when looking at the current course of AI, this should be within our lifetime. I would imagine that it could very nearly replicate life as we know it now, but without pain, suffering, and death. Naturally, time will tell. Lincoln Cannon: For practical and moral reasons, I trust in our opportunity and capacity as a human civilization, to evolve intentionally into compassionate superintelligence. I don’t think it’s inevitable, and I do think there are serious risks. But I do trust it’s possible, particularly if we Read More ›

From the Edge: Ubiquitous computing, or the Internet of things, is all supposed to disappear. The problem is, is it going to disappear into us? What could possibly go wrong? There is an argument that these machines are going to replace us, but I only think that’s relevant to you or me in the sense that it doesn’t matter if it doesn’t happen in our lifetime. The Kurzweil crowd argues this is happening faster and faster, and things are just running amok. In fact, things are slowing down. In 2045, it’s going to look more like it looks today than you think. Readers? But see also: Will robots really take over? That depends. It depends on what people can do that Read More ›

Though Gary Marcus tells us it is, in “Face It, Your Brain Is a Computer”at the New York Times: … Finally, there is a popular argument that human brains are capable of generating emotions, whereas computers are not. But while computers as we know them clearly lack emotions, that fact itself doesn’t mean that emotions aren’t the product of computation. On the contrary, neural systems like the amygdala that modulate emotions appear to work in roughly the same way as the rest of the brain does, which is to say that they transmit signals and integrate information, and transform inputs into outputs. As any computer scientist will tell you, that’s pretty much what computers do. Of course, whether the brain is Read More ›

That’s the claim at Wired : For the first time ever a computer has managed to develop a new scientific theory using only its artificial intelligence, and with no help from human beings. Computer scientists and biologists from Tufts University programmed the computer so that it was able to develop a theory independently when it was faced with a scientific problem. The problem they chose was one that has been puzzling biologists for 120 years. The genes of sliced-up flatworms are capable of regenerating in order to form new organisms — this is a long-documented phenomenon, but scientists have been mystified for years over exactly what happens to the cells to make this possible. Really? Physicist Rob Sheldon writes to Read More ›

Hey, that idea was actually invented a long time ago, but don’t let that deter us from this: The human universe: Could we become gods? … But perhaps the most curious of all is the idea that the universe isn’t real, and we live in a computer simulation created by a superior intelligence. In fact, according to Nick Bostrom, the philosopher who developed the idea, this is the most likely explanation for our existence. Whatever the plausibility of this claim, it begs a tantalising question: could we ever create such a simulation? Could we become the gods of an artificial universe inhabited by creatures so smart they are able to question their own place in their universe? [subscribe wall follows Read More ›