Bill Joy On Extinction of Humans

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Wired (Score:1) by -ryan (me at ryanmarsh dot com) on Sunday March 12, @11:27AM EST (#1) (User Info) http://www.ryanmarsh.com

There is a great article in the latest issue of Wired covering Bill and this interesting topic. -ryan "Any way you look at it, all the information that a person accumulates in a lifetime is just a drop in the bucket." -- Bateau / Ghost In The Shell

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Wired (Score:1) by -ryan (me at ryanmarsh dot com) on Sunday March 12, @11:35AM EST (#9) (User Info) http://www.ryanmarsh.com

BYW: There is also a few pages from CmdrTaco's diary in there (pg 128).... It's always been my dream to be featured in Wired. Rob, you are my hero! One day I'll be in there, .... oh yes, one day.. I WILL be in there.... -ryan "Any way you look at it, all the information that a person accumulates in a lifetime is just a drop in the bucket." -- Bateau / Ghost In The Shell

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Re:Wired (Score:1) by Tuxedo Mask on Sunday March 12, @12:18PM EST (#67) (User Info)

There is a great article in the latest issue of Wired covering Bill and this interesting topic. Actually, that article is what the article that this article is about is about! :-)

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ya got me there! (Score:0, Troll) by -ryan (me at ryanmarsh dot com) on Sunday March 12, @01:12PM EST (#117) (User Info) http://www.ryanmarsh.com

ya got me there! "Any way you look at it, all the information that a person accumulates in a lifetime is just a drop in the bucket." -- Bateau / Ghost In The Shell

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Bill Joy, God of vi! (Score:0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 12, @12:22PM EST (#75)

Eat flaming death emacs scum!

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Re:Bill Joy, God of vi! (Score:0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 12, @01:17PM EST (#121)

Vi that's one nasty thing, it WILL leed to death of childern. EMACS is true..

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"Scientific Advances" - What a joke. (Score:0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 12, @12:24PM EST (#78)

We still cannot cure the common cold. We still dont have a cure for AIDS or cancer. We still use operating systems with their roots from the 1960s. Artifical intelligence and nanotechnology are going nowhere fast. What a joke. We haven't progressed enough technologically as he thinks we have. I guess to a person who thinks Java is revolutionary...

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Re:"Scientific Advances" - What a joke. (Score:0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 12, @05:55PM EST (#273)

If you think that AI is going nowhere, then you're misinformed. It's true that most of the stuff you read in AI textbooks (rule-based approaches) won't get you anywhere towards real intelligence. But huge advances are being made now in the long neglected field of neural networking. We're very close to having working mathematical models for implementing human level intelligence. You won't find this in any books written today. You'll find some amount in papers. But some of the really amazing discoveries aren't even ready for publication yet (and of course I can't disclose that information). It turns out that we don't even have to be able to understand all the nitty-gritty details of the human brain. We now know almost all we need to know to be able to implement intelligent systems. In a few years, some of this technology will be ready for commercial application. The goal of passing the Turing Test is not as far away as one might think.

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Idiot Hemos (Score:0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 12, @01:19PM EST (#123)

"we need to consider these issues /now/ so that they don't come true" Are you really serious? When our Sun [celestial body in this case] goes through it's life cycle, as it must, we are all toast anyway. Why panic about the inevitable? And so what if we all end up like The Matrix. Neo will come and save us all.

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Re:Idiot Hemos (Score:1) by workingman on Sunday March 12, @09:24PM EST (#309) (User Info)

I would hope that by the time our sun finally finishes it's life cycle we as a race are long gone from this solar system.

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Re:Wired (Score:1) by noahb on Sunday March 12, @02:45PM EST (#187) (User Info)

It seems inevitable that eventually we will create something that ‘replaces’ us. The difference is that I don’t see this as a bad thing. Evolution is amazing, and is responsible for creating humans, but ultimately slow and unreliable. All species are able to adapt to their environment. It is generally accepted that the species with the best survival advantage are those species that are able to quickly adapt to environmental changes, and able to adapt in the most flexible ways. Evolution is one way that species adapt over long periods of time, and species are able to adapt without an evolutionary design change. The human body is able to quickly adapt to different diets depending on what food is available for example. But evolution is a kind of random generate-and-test algorithm. Advances in technology are directed, intentional, and much more efficient. Eventually human life (as we know it) will not be able to compete with a system (that we created) that is able to directly modify and improve it’s own design. The idea that this system will be purely mechanical, computerized, or nano-tech based seems a bit far fetched, at least for the immediate future. Far more likely to replace us is a hybrid genetically modified version of ourselves, combined with mechanical, computer, and nano-technology. You get genetic information from your parents, but you don’t directly get the experience or knowledge from them – you have to relearn everything from scratch. Computers and robots don’t have this limitation. If the planet was to see dramatic environmental changes, either due to technology, pollution, etc., or due to a natural but radical event, the human race will not be able to adapt quickly enough. But a self-modifying organism that is able to directly and purposefully modify it’s own (genetic) design will have the ultimate ability to adapt, and therefore have the ultimate chance of survival. It is silly to think that the human race will last forever, given the mere blip of time that we have existed in the history of life on this planet, and given that virtually all species eventually become extinct. (Not to mention that we are generally speaking resistant to radical change) I look at technology as the natural evolutionary next step, from a random, inefficient process to a directed efficient one. The ability for improvements (adaptations) to be implemented in a single generation instead of millions of years will make evolution obsolete.

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Re:Wired (Score:0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 12, @10:51PM EST (#319)

Well said and I agree. Humans are always making babies and then freaking out when they arrive.

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Goddamn (Score:0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 12, @02:47PM EST (#192)

And this guy is a BILLIONAIRE???????

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In response to noahb (Score:1) by saBBath on Sunday March 12, @11:25PM EST (#327) (User Info)

As you read this, please don't lose sight of the fact that it is the morality of the issue we're discussing here. I don't see how can you view the technological advances as a step in evolutionary progression. Evolution happens in accordance with the natural laws. Technological progress may be analogous to the Darwinian evolution but it is not the same thing, because it involves intelligent, structured, and conscious development of things. Another thing that we need not forget is that humans are not the only species on this planet (although we often act like that) and are not the only ones to suffer the consequences of the possible disaster. Perhaps due to our short-sidedness we humans deserve to be extinct. But if we fall, do we have the moral right to take down the rest of this planet's life along with us? I also disagree with the comment that humans are able to adjust their diet based on the food that's available. That simply isn't true. Humans need the basic nutriens (like protein, vitamins, and certain minerals) to survive, or at least stay in good health. In summary, I tend to think of technological progress as a disruption, not a continuation of the evolution. I also view it as something quite unnatural (by "natural" I mean without intervention of human >>or other intelect).

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Re:Wired (Score:0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 12, @11:44AM EST (#30)

the next time you want to post something anonymously, i suggest you take out your signature. -notryan

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Re:Wired (Score:0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 12, @12:19PM EST (#70)

oops, hit submit by mistake. i meant to say, 'i'm a stupid idiot.' -notryan

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1 ph33r j00 (Score:1) by -ryan (me at ryanmarsh dot com) on Sunday March 12, @01:31PM EST (#132) (User Info) http://www.ryanmarsh.com

<sarcasm> oh, how could you. how hurtful. great way to start a flame war... d00d j00 4r3 s0 31337!!! j00 |-|4XX0r3d /\/\Y |-|4|\|dL3!!! c4|\| j00 +34c|-| m3 h0\/\/ +0 |-|4XX0r /. ??? </sarcasm> "Any way you look at it, all the information that a person accumulates in a lifetime is just a drop in the bucket." -- Bateau / Ghost In The Shell

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1 reply beneath your current threshold.

Ishmael (Score:1) by eomir on Sunday March 12, @11:29AM EST (#2) (User Info)

If this interests you, I would recommend the book Ishmael by Daniel Quinn. I don't know how to sign my name with a keyboard!

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Re:Ishmael (Score:1) by CWCarlson on Sunday March 12, @12:06PM EST (#53) (User Info)

And if Ishmael grabs your attention, don't stop there! Go on to The Story Of B, My Ishmael, and Beyond Civilization. All good stuff, assuming you can open your mind enough...

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Pathetic (Score:0, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 12, @12:19PM EST (#69)

I'm barely able to understand the references to homosexuality here. First, they are off topic. Second, these comments are supposed to degrade both Rob and gay people. Third, whether or not Rob is gay is totally irrelevant to anything. Fourth, being gay is no better or worse than being straight. And finally, those who post such comments are obviously seriously troubled with regard to their sexuality. I pity you.

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Re:Ishmael (Score:0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 12, @03:46PM EST (#222)

_Ishmael_ is terribly soppy. It doesn't present any kind of rational argument at all. (I really enjoyed the blanket condemnation of people who practice agriculture. Good move, Quinn.)

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Re:Ishmael (Score:1) by delong on Sunday March 12, @03:57PM EST (#229) (User Info)

"And if Ishmael grabs your attention, don't stop there! Go on to The Story Of B, My Ishmael, and Beyond Civilization. All good stuff, assuming you can open your mind enough..." LOL! Open your mind enough. Ishmael is moronic hippie stoner-circle material. Givers and Takers indeed. This is the same kind of material that enthusiastically makes a case for american indians having been some sort of eco warrior race. Get out of Oregon while you still have clue.

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Re:Ishmael-to criticize one must first understand (Score:1) by saBBath on Sunday March 12, @11:35PM EST (#331) (User Info)

I found Ishmael to be indeed very rational and well drawn. It speaks from a different perspective, which is why one needs an open mind to understand its deed. I see that Deldong did not understand a bit of it as the above message is completely off the point the author is making. I suggest taht our friend deldong gets out of whatever secluded place he is in and gets a clue that there are other than the mainstream trains of thought out there. BTW, it's LEAVERS (not givers) and Takers.

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1 reply beneath your current threshold.

Full article in Wired (Score:2, Informative) by Carey on Sunday March 12, @11:30AM EST (#3) (User Info) http://carey.myip.org

Bill Joy's full article on this subject appeared in this month's Wired. He warns us against three technologies he feels could be dangerous to the human race: Genetic Engineering, Nanotechnology and Robots. (Also in Wired, see the Rob Malda diaries) I thought the article was very well researched and raised some provocative points. It's always good to re-hash ethical arguments in science, and I think the article is very balanced in the way it addresses the luddite mindset.

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Re:Full article in Wired (Score:0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 12, @01:34PM EST (#135)

There is a picture of CowboyNeal, also. Based on his trremendous girth, his name should be IAteACoupleOfCowboysNeal.

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A Lot Like Medicine... (Score:1) by Bilbo (bilbo@NOSPAM.questra.com) on Sunday March 12, @02:23PM EST (#168) (User Info) http://home.rochester.rr.com/baggins

> It's always good to re-hash ethical arguments in science ... It's a lot like medical research. We come up with new and interesting technologies, but just because something can be done doesn't mean it should be done... I think sometimes the nay-sayers are written off as hopeless Ludites and crackpots, but they can make us think.... if we just take the time to listen. -- Your Servant, B. Baggins

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Re:A Lot Like Medicine... (Score:1) by delong on Sunday March 12, @04:18PM EST (#236) (User Info)

Medical ethics are, IMO, more interesting that speculating about nanites and robots snuffing us out. For instance, medicine has this nasty habit these days of trying to preserve a person's life, irregardless of the persons stated wishes or the quality of life that person may expect. Does a doctor have a moral right to extend a failing life when such extension is futile and only extends the suffering of the patient? Is it MORE ethical, with the consent of the individual in question, to end that life? Premature infants are another case in point. Extremely premature infants, around 3 months premature, will be preserved whether the parents wish to or not. The STATE overrides all parental considerations, preserves the life of the child, and then hands it off to the parents, along with the bill. Does medicine, and especially the State, have moral responsibility to preserve a life whose quality may be less than fair (extremely premature children are susceptible to all manner of problems, including downs syndrome), and what more damn the parents to caring for a terminally handicapped child, against their wishes? These are interesting ethical questions. And immediately applicable. To hell with the Unabomber. Lets discuss Kevorkian.

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Re:A Lot Like Medicine... (Score:0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 12, @09:34PM EST (#310)

Babies may be premature because they have down's syndrome. They *never* have down's syndrome because they are premature - down's syndrome is a genetic defect consisting of an extra copy of a particular chromosome, and therefore the abnormality can arise, at the latest, before the first cell division the fused sperm and egg make.

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I think he is DEAD on. (Score:0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 12, @02:26PM EST (#171)

This is something that I have been thinking about alot lately. One of the key tenets of the "Third Wave" is individual empowerment. Joe Blow is able to do a heck of alot more than he was 300 years ago. Crude example, 300 years ago one guy could take a musket, run to the town center and maybe take out 5-6 people. Now the guy takes a couple of Uzi's and heads to down town NY. Watch out!. Compound the mayhem if instead their 25 people instead of just 1. It just seems that as we add more people and and potentialy destructive / dangerous technology we are adding energy to the system, and at some point chaos will set in and watch out! Now I disagree that it will be Genetic Eng, Nanotech, or robots. Chances are we won't identify it before it's too late.

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Re:Full article in Wired (Score:1) by saBBath on Sunday March 12, @11:50PM EST (#334) (User Info)

Everyone here is so terribly concerned with humans. What about other species of this planet? If our own technology leads to our own extinction, then it's our own fault, and maybe a right price to pay for our short-sidedness. But what about other species on this planet? Do we have a moral right to destroy it along with us?

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1 reply beneath your current threshold.

Wipe out the world (Score:2, Funny) by cowscows on Sunday March 12, @11:31AM EST (#4) (User Info) http://www.zoomnet.net/~cowscows/

Ah, so now I understand Hemos' obsession with nanites...I think we know where the plague will be coming from.

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2 replies beneath your current threshold.

Not really surprising... (Score:1) by No Such Agency on Sunday March 12, @11:32AM EST (#5) (User Info)

Hmmm, perhaps Kaczynski believed that technology would bring about the extinction of humanity because he thought everyone else was a sick murderous fu*k like him... Hell, all he needed was stamps, some dynamite and a couple of cut-up pie plates to kill people. Of course, what Joy really means to say is "Technology will bring about the downfall of our species, unless you all start running 'Jini' on your toasters RIGHT NOW!" :-)

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Re:Not really surprising... (Score:1) by Carey on Sunday March 12, @11:36AM EST (#11) (User Info) http://carey.myip.org

The quote from Kaczynski in the article is surprisingly coherent. The context of the quote in the article is what is important. Joy explains the controversy about having Kaczynski's work published under the threat of continuing terrorist acts. He also says its a good thing that Kaczynski was a mathematician and not a computer scientist. Jini is harmless compared to the potential horrors this article discusses.

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Re:Not really surprising... (Score:0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 12, @04:19PM EST (#237)

Have you ever read Kaczynski's work? Yeah I know he was a psycho killer, but his manifesto is very well written and thought provoking. I hate to admit this but there is a lot of truth in it.

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Sounds a little familiar... (Score:0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 12, @11:33AM EST (#7)

Doesn't this sound a little like the terminator movies? Doesn't this sound a little like "The Matrix"? Maybe hollywood has some decent ideas about technology?

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It's Bill Joy who's clueless here (Score:1) by mangu (orlo_porter@hotmail.com) on Sunday March 12, @12:54PM EST (#103) (User Info)

Catastrophist stories about the future of technology are nothing new. The Terminator movies and The Matrix are nothing but remakes of the Frankenstein story, first written in the early 1800s. A catastrophe is always on the near future, according to those predictions, yet never materializes. Why? Because technology is made by engineers. To be an engineer, there is one initial condition: you can't be stupid. Engineers have far more foresight than writers believe.

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Re:It's Bill Joy who's clueless here (Score:0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 12, @01:17PM EST (#122)

You mean like the engineers that did the Titanic. I know that they didn't drive it in to the berg, but it still sank.

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Re:It's Bill Joy who's clueless here (Score:1) by mangu (orlo_porter@hotmail.com) on Sunday March 12, @02:01PM EST (#155) (User Info)

You mean like the engineers that did the Titanic. I know that they didn't drive it in to the berg, but it still sank. The Titanic was a well engineered ship that had bad luck. It was divided into several watertight compartments, a sound engineering practice which has kept many ships from sinking. But it just happened to glance an iceberg in a way that too many compartments were punctured at the same time. Its twin, the Olympic, lived its full planned life and was scrapped when it became obsolete. The sinking of one ship doesn't mean it was badly designed, much less that the entire science of ship engineering is doomed to failure. What Bill Joy is saying seems more something like "all the ships in the world will suddenly sink at once".

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Re:It's Bill Joy who's clueless here (Score:0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 12, @04:23PM EST (#240)

Actually, the design of the Titanic was not at all at fault, it was the construction. The metal used in the hull was not formulated properly, and was too brittle at the freezing temperature of water. The ship hit the iceberg, and the hull cracked (not punctured) for quite a distance. I saw a show about the _two_ sister ships of the Titanic, one of which was noted for its' durability. One of them, in it's lifetime, collided with (from memory, but probably still close): a battleship (almost took it out, too, iirc) a harbor tug a torpedo the sub that fired the torpedo (sent it straight down) a couple of other things too, I think. I think the other sister ship was sunk by torpedoes in WW2. Sort of a side note, there were several American ships (Liberty ships) lost as late as WW2 due to brittle fracture of their hulls in cold water. -M

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Re:It's Bill Joy who's clueless here (Score:1) by mangu (orlo_porter@hotmail.com) on Sunday March 12, @05:12PM EST (#262) (User Info)

The ship hit the iceberg, and the hull cracked (not punctured) for quite a distance. I read John Ballard's book on how his team found the Titanic. He says it was more likely a long series of small punctures, rather than one big gash as has been conjetured, because the ship floated for several hours after hitting the iceberg. IIRC, he said that a 100 meter long hole, which would damage enough compartments to sink the ship, would be no more than one inch wide in order for the ship to sink so slowly. Unfortunately, the ship is lying on the side that hit the iceberg, so it's hard to verify this. The Titanic had two sister ships, the Britannic, which was sunk by a torpedo in WW1, and the Olympic, which was cut up in pieces and sold as scrap sometime in the 1930s. Its piston steam engines had become obsolete by that time, turbines were much more efficient. I think the Liberty ships were designed intentionally flimsy, to economize metal. They figured those ships would not stand a very high probability of surviving long in the war, anyway, so they were never designed for durability.

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Re:It's Bill Joy who's clueless here (Score:0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 12, @01:31PM EST (#131)

Actually the matrix is a blatant rip of Descarte's first meditations, writen mid 17th century I believe. The whole Evil Genious argument which spurred on various arguments on epistemology, etc.

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Re:It's Bill Joy who's clueless here (Score:1) by delong on Sunday March 12, @04:24PM EST (#241) (User Info)

Yes and it was a very bad attempt as far as Philosophy goes. Interesting premise - appearance and reality. Then they mucked it up with all sorts of incoherent and inconsistent shite about fate. They royally screwed the whole free will/determinism dichotomy.

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Re:It's Bill Joy who's clueless here (Score:1) by zigzag (mzauzigSPAMMENOT@atl.mediaone.net) on Sunday March 12, @03:35PM EST (#216) (User Info)

To be an engineer, there is one initial condition: you can't be stupid I dunno. I'm an engineer and I'm pretty stupid.

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huh? (Score:0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 12, @04:23PM EST (#239)

Engineers are smart but they aren't gods. They fuck up ALL THE TIME. And not only that, but deployment of technologies is not really up to engineers, it's the suits who decided that stuff. Look at nuclear technology.

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Of course engineers fuck up. They do *NEW* stuff. (Score:0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 12, @09:16PM EST (#307)

Engineers are smart but they aren't gods. They fuck up ALL THE TIME. And not only that, but deployment of technologies is not really up to engineers, it's the suits who decided that stuff. Look at nuclear technology. Instead of sitting on their ass being a "pundit" making "predictions" about the future, engineers are always tinkering with new stuff. Most of it will end up in the junk bin, but some of it becomes the tech of tomorrow. Some of it behaves badly, whaddya expect? It's new. It's experimental. It's stuff the suits haven't asked for nor even looked at yet. It was done of the engineer's off time.

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I have discovered a new theorem! (Score:0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 12, @11:34AM EST (#8)

the proof of which can't fit in this post, but anyway: Hemos + CmdrTaco = Homos

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Ahhh then you've never.... (Score:1) by Jonathan Hamilton on Sunday March 12, @01:48PM EST (#147) (User Info)

You must have never seen all the hot slashdot groupies. They follow Rob to all the Linux Showcases. (Ok their not all hot, but their are a couple of them.)

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Re:I have discovered a new theorem! (Score:1) by zigzag (mzauzigSPAMMENOT@atl.mediaone.net) on Sunday March 12, @03:45PM EST (#221) (User Info)

What is it with all of this gay bashing stuff? Here's a clue: Men who gay bash are not confident about their own sexual orientation. In other words, Methinks he doth protest too much. Heh, I got it. You've got the hots for CmdrTaco. You're just are having a hard time admitting it to yourself.

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Artificial Intelligence (Score:2, Insightful) by IO ERROR (...nospam!blackout.net!error) on Sunday March 12, @11:36AM EST (#12) (User Info) http://underground.ath.cx/

Sounds to me like Bill Joy watched The Matrix. What's truly frightening is he's not at all off base. What he's obliquely referring to in this article is Artificial Intelligence. It doesn't seem unreasonable to me, given Moore's Law, that by 2030 we could have computers that exceed the capacity of the human brain to process information. That being a given, it doesn't take much of a leap of logic to conclude that some of those machines might just be capable of hosting an artificial intelligence. The question nobody even has a coherent theory for right now is: what would an (artificially) intelligent computer do? What would be its desires? Would it also have emotions? If so, what would it feel? They're questions we can't really answer right now. But we really need to be thinking about these things. If we don't NOW, then we might just find ourselves living in the Matrix. --- Lost: gray and white female cat. Answers to electric can opener.

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Re:Artificial Intelligence (Score:1) by cowscows on Sunday March 12, @11:41AM EST (#22) (User Info) http://www.zoomnet.net/~cowscows/

We could ask the intelligent computer what operating system it prefers to run, and end the argument forever.

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Re:Artificial Intelligence (Score:0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 12, @11:43AM EST (#27)

and if it gives the answer we don't like, it's obvously incapable of human intelligence + emotion

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Re:Artificial Intelligence (Score:1) by Chandon Seldon (nat-at-calug-dot-net) on Sunday March 12, @12:52PM EST (#102) (User Info) http://www.calug.net/

Because it would obviously answer with whatever OS it was currently running on. -------- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. -Chandon Seldon

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Re:Artificial Intelligence (Score:0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 12, @11:42AM EST (#24)

The question nobody even has a coherent theory for right now is: what would an (artificially) intelligent computer do? The logical answer - preserve self and reproduce. It would interesting to see if they are more foresighted than humans, and don't rape their environment for shortsighted goals.

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Re:Artificial Intelligence (Score:0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 12, @01:06PM EST (#109)

how do you rape a piece of hardware?

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Raping hardware (Score:1) by Dr. Spork (spork@clerk.com) on Monday March 13, @12:10AM EST (#335) (User Info)

You wouldn't think it's possible, but Microsoft found a way...

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Re:Artificial Intelligence (Score:1) by zigzag (mzauzigSPAMMENOT@atl.mediaone.net) on Sunday March 12, @03:48PM EST (#224) (User Info)

Motivation gets to the heart of the matter.

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Re:Artificial Intelligence (Score:1) by delong on Sunday March 12, @04:30PM EST (#245) (User Info)

Keep yer environmental blathering on track there skippy. They would be MACHINES. MACHINES dont have to worry about global warming, carrying capacity, animal extinctions, degradation of the environment, etc etc name your favorite eco cause here. A MACHINE would have no reason to worry. A MACHINE could thrive perfectly happy on a dead planet. What makes you think an intelligent machine wouldnt be WORSE than humans?

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Re:Artificial Intelligence (Score:5, Insightful) by ucblockhead (sburnapSPAMSUXlinux@attSPAMSUX.net) on Sunday March 12, @11:51AM EST (#36) (User Info)

It didn't seem unreasonable to people in 1950 that we'd have artificial intelligence by 1965. It didn't seem unreasonable to people in 1970 that we'd have artificial intelligence by 2000. It didn't seem unreasonable to many of my professors and or fellow students to think we'd have it by 2010 when I studied it in 1985. The error is in thinking that AI is just a matter of getting enough transisters together. Hardly! The real problems in AI are not hardware speed so much as what to do with that hardware to make it intelligent. This is not a trivial problem. it is an extremely difficult problem, IMHO probably the hardest problem the human race has ever faced. The question nobody even has a coherent theory for right now is: what would an (artificially) intelligent computer do? What would be its desires? Would it also have emotions? If so, what would it feel? And this is really the key thing. You can't build an artificially intelligent computer unless you have a damn good idea of those things. You can't build something with desires, emotions, etc. unless you know, in detail, what desires and emotions are, at a far deeper level than we do now. Those who will not reason, are bigots, those who cannot, are fools, and those who dare not, are slaves. -George Gordon Noel Byron (1788-1824), [Lord Byron]

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Top-down vs. bottom-up AI design (Score:4, Insightful) by Kaufmann (kaufmann@toostupidtoremovethis.infolink.com.br) on Sunday March 12, @12:16PM EST (#64) (User Info)

You can't build an artificially intelligent computer unless you have a damn good idea of those things. You can't build something with desires, emotions, etc. unless you know, in detail, what desires and emotions are, at a far deeper level than we do now. Your entire argument is based on the premise of top-down design - that the Right Way to build an AI is the classical engineer's approach of designing the thing as you would design any other machine or piece of software. Fortunately, most people now recognise that this approach is doomed, for the exact reason that you point out: an "intelligence" of any sort is much more complex and less well-understood than anything we've ever had to design. So, what's the alternative? Automated bottom-up design. Specifically, the idea is to first work out the building blocks - the equivalents of neurons - and then have a GA or somesuch start trying to put together a "brain" out of these neurons, which is fit for a specific purpose. Note that this alternative doesn't require one to understand in excrutiating detail (or at all) the high-level abstractions which we consider as "intelligence" - it only requires a good GA and a good understanding of the brain at the cellular and subcellular level. Now this I don't consider far-fetched at all. (Of course, it's always worth mentioning that we could go the other way - first using nanotech to completely redesign ourselves into super-intelligent cybergods, then analysing our own new brains and replicating them to create completely new, fully artificial intelligent beings.) Kaufmann's First Law: All following laws are true. Kaufmann's Second Law: All preceding laws are false.

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Re:Top-down vs. bottom-up AI design (Score:2) by Harvey on Sunday March 12, @12:36PM EST (#88) (User Info)

(Of course, it's always worth mentioning that we could go the other way - first using nanotech to completely redesign ourselves into super-intelligent cybergods, then analysing our own new brains and replicating them to create completely new, fully artificial intelligent beings.) I don't see how we can make ourselves into cybergods, at least in terms of intelligence, without having a much fuller understanding of our brains than we do now. Another issue is that unless we copy the brain exactly, it's impossible, or at least extremely difficult, to make a machine emulate the brain until we know what the brain does and how it does it. However, your approach implies that we know everything about the neuron, and that the neuron is the only thing that matters in the nervous system. Hormonal levels and the extracellular fluid also play a role. It seems to me the most expedient way to make a brain is to either do a "black box" copy, e.g see how we behave and write a program to copy that, or a full "white box" copy, see how the brain works to the necessary level of detail and then write an implementation from there.

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Re:Top-down vs. bottom-up AI design (Score:2) by ucblockhead (sburnapSPAMSUXlinux@attSPAMSUX.net) on Sunday March 12, @12:42PM EST (#92) (User Info)

Specifically, the idea is to first work out the building blocks - the equivalents of neurons - and then have a GA or somesuch start trying to put together a "brain" out of these neurons, which is fit for a specific purpose. yes, and you've got to problems. 1) What exactly does a neuron do? and 2) how are they organized into a brain? Neither are easy questions. Yes, neural nets don't have to be explicitly designed at a low level. But that doesn't mean that you can just throw one together, throw data at it, and get it to work. First, you've got to design your network, then you've got to figure out how to train it. One thing we do know about the brain is it is not just a bundle of neurons. Those neurons have an organization that is genetically programmed. Those who will not reason, are bigots, those who cannot, are fools, and those who dare not, are slaves. -George Gordon Noel Byron (1788-1824), [Lord Byron]

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Re:Top-down vs. bottom-up AI design (Score:2) by Kaufmann (kaufmann@toostupidtoremovethis.infolink.com.br) on Sunday March 12, @01:55PM EST (#151) (User Info)

yes, and you've got to problems. 1) What exactly does a neuron do? and 2) how are they organized into a brain? Neither are easy questions. No, but they are much more easy to figure out than the Big Question of "what exactly constitutes intelligence". Yes, neural nets don't have to be explicitly designed at a low level. But that doesn't mean that you can just throw one together, throw data at it, and get it to work. First, you've got to design your network, then you've got to figure out how to train it. We don't have to do even that - all it takes is rudimentary understanding of the way the neurons are organised. Once you know that, you can have the GA do the rest. One thing we do know about the brain is it is not just a bundle of neurons. Those neurons have an organization that is genetically programmed. Yes, of course. But we also know that this organisation can't be too complex - specifically, it must be possible to describe using a fraction (I don't know how large a fraction, though) of the storage space of human DNA. By the way, this also hints at the possibility that a fuller understanding of the genome may provide an additional insight into the composition and organisation of the brain. Kaufmann's First Law: All following laws are true. Kaufmann's Second Law: All preceding laws are false.

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Re:Top-down vs. bottom-up AI design (Score:2) by gargle on Sunday March 12, @10:27PM EST (#315) (User Info)

Yes, neural nets don't have to be explicitly designed at a low level. But that doesn't mean that you can just throw one together, throw data at it, and get it to work. First, you've got to design your network, then you've got to figure out how to train it. Neural nets can be evolved through Genetic Programs. You basically have a genetic program that decribes how to grow the neural net (I don't have a reference handy at the moment unfortunately). So it's not necessary to design it. One thing we do know about the brain is it is not just a bundle of neurons. Those neurons have an organization that is genetically programmed. Well then evolve the organization through genetic programming!

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Re:Top-down vs. bottom-up AI design (Score:0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 12, @02:21PM EST (#166)

We've gotten a decent little cockroach this way. Of course, they only require 6 basic instincts. Intelligence could possible arise from bottom-up. A recognizably human-like intelligence and one we could easily communicate with [the ultimate goal] would require a certain amount of top-down. This means that an AI would have to be somewhat based on our own limited understanding of ourselves. And if an AI is as neurotic and self-obsessive as we are, we'll do okay. =) Or we could just not let them self-reproduce... [Sci-Fi Movie Rule #5 - never let the automated AI control the life-supportand weapons systems.]

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design vs synthesis (Score:1) by Zorikin (zorikin@nearmiss.com.com.com) on Sunday March 12, @02:54PM EST (#197) (User Info)

> So, what's the alternative? Automated bottom-up design. I'm hesitant to call that process design - it's being grown like a plant, not constructed like a house. Such a synthesis is a good form of empirical study. Ultimately it won't be a replacement for design, but it will give many clues as to how design must take place. > have a GA or somesuch start trying to put together a "brain" out of these neurons, which is fit for a specific purpose. Don't do that. Doing that will produce an animal brain (of a particularly dumb animal). Instead, fit simultaneously for a wide variety of specific purposes, including competitive interaction. Humans have many mental abilities which seem to be selected for naturally. This kind of bottom-up synthesis could work as a means of creating intelligence, but the prerequisites for this approach are as hairy as for classical design, it's just that the design has been taken care of by a GA. It has to be able to interact with people. This is required to make sure that the program forms mental patterns connected to behaviors we can understand, so that when we have the Turing test for the final test of fitness, we have some way of telling whether or not it worked. And you obviously can't have a computer do it for you. > Note that this alternative doesn't require one to understand in excrutiating detail (or at all) the high-level abstractions which we consider as "intelligence" That's fine as far as creating disposable intelligence goes (once we're finally through with all that brute-force testing), but as far as science goes, it puts us right back where we started. The mind, though suddenly inexpensive, remains the mystery it was before. Also keep in mind that the mind may not really be the inseperable gestalt we tend to think of it as. It may be possible to replicate the various mental abilities separately, and gradually integrate them as we come to understand them more fully. There's really no reason to expect that we will get it all in one shot. Infinite improbability drives aside, no other technology has worked that way. Rather, AI will continue to be approached in incremental steps, building on each other. Probably for a very long time, and perhaps forever (though by then the AI will be doing the AI research ;). I think the long view advocates extensive research (including bottom-up synthesis), practical implementations, more specific domains, and perhaps most importantly, patience. Bottom-up (of this kind, and the ALife kind) has been a big deal for a while now, but the check is still in the mail as far as implementation goes. Chances are good that there will be at least one more reframing of the question, and probably several, before we lick the Turing test. I think the long view advocates research (including bottom-up synthesis), practical implementations which make incremental steps, focus on more specific domains, and patience.

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-1, Redundant (Score:1) by Zorikin (zorikin@nearmiss.com.com.com) on Sunday March 12, @02:59PM EST (#199) (User Info)

preview first, preview first, preview first ...

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Re:Top-down vs. bottom-up AI design (Score:1) by Zarf (hartsock@ModZer0.cs.uaf.edu) on Sunday March 12, @04:56PM EST (#256) (User Info) http://i.am/hartsock

Good GA's aren't easy to come up with... what is the "fitness factor" for a "brain"? What keeps that from falling inside a local minimum? As anyone who's coded with GA's knows, sometimes you can't hit your mark by starting out with any-old set of assumptions. Neural Nets and Genetic Algorithms both require some intelligent design choices to ensure that they come close to the desired goal... and then the previous point still holds, you can't make something you don't sufficiently understand. I personally think that top-down and bottom-up AI are both idealistic, a realistic designer has to compromise. The amount of compromise that is needed between the two approaches is totally beyond knowing... even after someone succeeds in building a human-level AI or AI-generator. Then there is the other problem of what is "intelligent". A nanite that's as smart as an ant in a colony with sufficent number may have a collective intelligence... is that our dreaded human-race-ending AI? - // Zarf // Live to Code, Code to Live!

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Re:Top-down vs. bottom-up AI design (Score:2) by Abigail-II (abigail@delanet.com) on Sunday March 12, @08:34PM EST (#296) (User Info) http://www.foad.org/%7Eabigail/

So, what's the alternative? Automated bottom-up design. Excuse me? Bottom up design isn't a magic wand. If you don't understand the problem, no design, whether bottom or top down will work. If you don't have a deep understanding of what you want to simulate - you won't simulate it. -- Abigail

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Re:Top-down vs. bottom-up AI design (Score:2) by stripes (stripes at eng dot us dot uu dot net) on Sunday March 12, @10:05PM EST (#312) (User Info) http://www.eng.us.uu.net/staff/stripes/

Excuse me? Bottom up design isn't a magic wand. If you don't understand the problem, no design, whether bottom or top down will work. If you don't have a deep understanding of what you want to simulate - you won't simulate it No, but Genetic Programming is. Sort of. It can, given enough time, work out a rough program (very rough) that can solve a problem the programmer can't descibe an algorithm for. "All" you need to provide is a fitness function that indicates how close the answer is (say 0.0 for not at all, and 1.0 for perfect), primitaves to be used to solve the problem (turn left, move forward, pick-up-food...) and a genetic cross over function (which is almost trivial, they can normally be reused from one GA to another). And a shitload of time. If you look at some of the GA derived programs for simple problems like an ant colony collecting food, they suck. Full of dead code (like "if (next to water) then if (not next to water) then 100-lines-of-never-reached-code-here"). But they work. At least for the sample problem set, and problems that are similar. If you look at some of the GA FPGA programs you will see designs with far fewer transistors then a person would have used. But they also only work within (roughly) the tempature range used during the GA test runs. And they have circuits that don't appear to do anything, but if you remove them the design stops working (capatictance issues I expect), and other crap a humon designer would avoid like the plague. In both cases it took a really long time for the GA to find the winning "program". GA uses the same sort of techniques that it is beleved "mother nature" uses to "design" plants and animals. In other words lots of trials, a handfull of mutations, some sexual reproduction (or asexual, but that is less effecent), culling the less efficent, and time. The results are somewhat more comprehensable to man, but only (in my opnion) because the fitness functions is so much simpler. The real one changes over time. GA is a magic wand that may give us AIs. But I don't think it will give us ones we can understand the working of any better then the natural intelegences we allready have to study. On the plus side, it can give us some kick-ass smart simulated ants :-)

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Re:Top-down vs. bottom-up AI design (Score:2) by gargle on Sunday March 12, @10:37PM EST (#317) (User Info)

If you look at some of the GA derived programs for simple problems like an ant colony collecting food, they suck. Full of dead code (like "if (next to water) then if (not next to water) then 100-lines-of-never-reached-code-here"). But they work. At least for the sample problem set, and problems that are similar. Imo, this is a strong piece of evidence that natural life did evolve (rather than get created). Because in natural organisms, like in GPs, there is a lot of redundancy, or dead code so to speak, in the DNA (and no doubt in our brains as well).

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Re:Top-down vs. bottom-up AI design (Score:2) by Kaufmann (kaufmann@toostupidtoremovethis.infolink.com.br) on Sunday March 12, @10:05PM EST (#313) (User Info)

If you don't have a deep understanding of what you want to simulate - you won't simulate it. That's not really true. A GA-based approach requires you only to understand the behaviour expected of the subject, not its necessarily its internal workings (even though, as another poster pointed out, it won't help in enlightening us as to how the mind actually works). My memory fails me, but I remember reading last year about a FPGA, configured by a genetic algorithm for a specific purpose, which was __BIGNUMBER__ times faster than special-purpose chips, but which operated in ways that its original designers didn't understand at all. This FPGA was relatively simple - only 100x100 IIRC - and yet GA-based design made it do completely unexpected things. What knows what can happen with a really large FPGA... or with a big bunch of nano-engineered artificial neurons. Kaufmann's First Law: All following laws are true. Kaufmann's Second Law: All preceding laws are false.

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Exactly (Score:1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 12, @12:27PM EST (#82)

Please mod up. There is almost no correlation between computing power and advances in AI. If there were, then we would have seen significant advances in AI already (which we haven't).

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Have you ever heard of Deep Blue? (Score:2, Insightful) by mangu (orlo_porter@hotmail.com) on Sunday March 12, @01:44PM EST (#145) (User Info)

There is almost no correlation between computing power and advances in AI. If there were, then we would have seen significant advances in AI already (which we haven't). Don't you consider the creation of a computer that no human can beat at chess a "significant advance in AI"? Before Deep Blue, the inexistence of a computer that could defeat a human grand-master at chess was considered evidence of "no significant advances in AI". Now that this computer exists, it's dismissed as nothing important. The entire field of Artificial Intelligence suffers from this public perception problem. Whenever a significant milestone is reached, the problem is immediately redefined to be something else. The funny thing is that the same people who say "we have no idea at all on how human intelligence works" are the same who say "Deep Blue isn't really intelligent, all it's doing is a very fast search on different possible plays". If they really have no idea on what is intelligence, how can they say intelligence is not the ability to do a quick search on different possibilities?

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Re:Have you ever heard of Deep Blue? (Score:3, Insightful) by friedo (mnf7228@spam-me-not.osfmail.rit.edu) on Sunday March 12, @02:13PM EST (#161) (User Info) http://friedo.rh.rit.edu/

The funny thing is that the same people who say "we have no idea at all on how human intelligence works" are the same who say "Deep Blue isn't really intelligent, all it's doing is a very fast search on different possible plays". If they really have no idea on what is intelligence, how can they say intelligence is not the ability to do a quick search on different possibilities? Well, because it's not. Deep Blue is able to beat chess masters because it has enough computing power to permutate all possible moves several generations into the future and pick the best one. Obviously, no chess master's brain can do that. Deep Blue's accomplishments are NOT that significant at all. The mathematics of what it does could have easily been worked out centuries ago - it's simply the first machine capable of actually doing the math. Human chess players have intuition. Because they've played several thousand games during their lifetime, they can see a certain combination of positions on a board and just know what play to begin excercising and what predictions to focus on. They can stare at their opponent to try and see if he's bluffing. They can make instinctual decisions without predicting every move in the future. When a computer can do that, please let me know - I'll be impressed. Every day you are confronted with thousands of choices. Most of them you make without really thinking, and most have several factors involved. Everything that you've done prior to that moment has a bearing on your current decision. You weigh actions vs. consequences. Priorities vs. Wants, etc., etc., etc. I have yet to see a machine that can make these types of decisions appropriately. Take the example of something more fast-paced than Chess like Soccer. If you're playing defense, and a forward is running the sideline with the ball, you have very little time to move. There are a million different things you could do, but only one will save the day. The only way you could know which one is to be in that situation right then - and have to make a split second decision. So, no, we don't have AI. I don't predict we will for quite some time. My DeCSS mirror is here. Where's yours?

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Re:Have you ever heard of Deep Blue? (Score:0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 12, @02:36PM EST (#180)

"Take the example of something more fast-paced than Chess like Soccer." Have a look at the RoboCup homepage. These people are designing some really cool soccer-playing robots.

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Re:Have you ever heard of Deep Blue? (Score:1) by mangu (orlo_porter@hotmail.com) on Sunday March 12, @03:09PM EST (#203) (User Info)

Deep Blue is able to beat chess masters because it has enough computing power to permutate all possible moves several generations into the future and pick the best one. Obviously, no chess master's brain can do that. How do you know? Actually, Deep Blue has far less computing capability than a human brain. It's able to beat humans at chess only because it's so specialized. You make many assertions, such as "humans have intuition", "they can make instinctual decisions", "without really thinking", etc, which all mean the same thing: we are not really sure about the detailed paths which our minds follow when we make some decisions. We do have some fairly detailed knowledge about how neural nets work, however. We have created artificial neural nets which exhibit a lot of those same "intuition" characteristics, it's not entirely obvious at first how they achieve some results. The main obstacles to human-like AI today are two: we still do not have powerful enough hardware, and we need databases for all the little facts that constitute "common sense". Look here for some information on the generation of artificial common sense.

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can't have a forest without some saplings (Score:2, Interesting) by Zorikin (zorikin@nearmiss.com.com.com) on Sunday March 12, @03:28PM EST (#210) (User Info)

Your argument seems to be, I understand it and can express it mathematically, therefore it isn't inteligence, and isn't what's going on in the brain, but this doesn't address the challenge at all. You don't know what's going on in the brain, and you don't know what intelligence is. If intuition, or primary-process thinking, isn't understandable and expressable mathematically, then the goal of AI is literally impossible, and Turing-machine completeness is a crock. > They can stare at their opponent to try and see if he's bluffing. This is not a measure of intelligence, unless you think that a polygraph is intelligent. > Priorities vs. Wants, etc., etc., etc. I have yet to see a machine that can make these types of decisions appropriately. My operating system doesn't run a distributed.net client if other programs are taking up all the CPU. That's a decision based on a priority. If what you want is a program that can make decisions that are human enough and complex enough for a human to fret about, well, there's a lot of work in that, and pretending that the incremental steps don't count just puts you that much farther from the goal. They do count. > Take the example of something more fast-paced than Chess like Soccer. Uhh ... I think it's pretty clear that the problem here has nothing to do with intelligence. It's a question of motor coordination and perception. Reliance on intelligence may actually make the game harder.

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Re:can't have a forest without some saplings (Score:0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 12, @11:21PM EST (#326)

Assuming that humans are the only intelligent, i.e. sentient, life in existance, and assuming that however we are sentient is the only way to have sentience... If we can understand how something does what it does while still not understanding how we think, it is not intelligent.

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Re:Have you ever heard of Deep Blue? (Score:1) by NovaX (maneben@charlie.cns.iit.edu) on Sunday March 12, @03:56PM EST (#228) (User Info)

I'd be surprised if Deep Blue just tried every possibility (or close) between movies. It would be impossible, as there are at least 10^18 possible (and this is a small estimate). To play chess effectively, heuristics are used. The more advanced, the better the computer plays. This is artificial inllegence, in its simplist form. Read A.M. Turing's "Computing Machinery and Intellegence" or better yet, just grab Mind Design II. Human players work by seeing patterns along with heuristics, and only old-fashined (GOFAI) AI believes in just dumping all the data into the computer and letting it sort through it. That failed, and newer AI designs are great at pattern recognition. Computers are still at a disadvantage because of this "intuition" that people have. Its difficult to build a computer and just plug an adult brain into it. How can you write a program that passes the Turing test when your asked an extremely wide range of questions from political/historical/scientific, emotional, common knowledge, etc? Tests right now show grammer problems, and are to tough. Turing's answer was to make a computer like a new-born, and let it learn. That's when computers will get the intuition. Until we get so far, Deep Blue's AI capabilities are quite good. Its damn tough to design AI. The computing power really doesn't matter in the end.

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Re:Have you ever heard of Deep Blue? (Score:1) by QuadPro (jurjen@stupendous.org) on Sunday March 12, @04:04PM EST (#230) (User Info) http://www.stupendous.org

Deep Blue is able to beat chess masters because it has enough computing power to permutate all possible moves several generations into the future and pick the best one. Obviously, no chess master's brain can do that. 'Obviously'? Why do you dismiss that as a possibility that easily? It's unknown how human brains play chess, so I wouldn't rule out the 'brute force' method that quickly. - Jurjen

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Re:Have you ever heard of Deep Blue? (Score:1) by Wolfbaine (wolfbaine@NO.hotmail.SPAM.com) on Sunday March 12, @08:29PM EST (#295) (User Info)

However, it could be argued that intuition is merely a way of providing the best possible alternative to the conscious mind from the probabilities processed from the subconscious mind. Weighing actions and consequences is not a problem; it is based on ratings we have established since childhood. Whilst a machine may not have accomplished this, perhaps we havent really defined the problem; perhaps a machine's understanding of consequences is different from ours. My 2c anyway. Deep Though v0.1 Alpha int main() {  /* Fix this later */  sleep(10^30);  cout<<"The meaning of life is 42"  return 0;

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Re:Have you ever heard of Deep Blue? (Score:0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 12, @02:27PM EST (#173)

Deep Blue was powerful, not intelligent. It was a slave to its own best-method algorithm, which was entered by chess masters. It could not adapt to Kasparov on its own. It was changed between matches 2 and 3 to react to him better. It did not and could not do this on its own. Beep Blue was a giant calculator running a single equation. It merely ran is faster than Kasparov did. [In fact, it would most likely struggle against a chess master who played differently than Kasparov] DB had no adaptative abilities. It was not intelligent at all. No more than ChessMaster x000 is, merely better programmed and with a better processor.

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Re:Have you ever heard of Deep Blue? (Score:2) by ralphclark (ralph_clark (at) bigfoot (dot) com) on Sunday March 12, @05:17PM EST (#264) (User Info)

<i>Beep Blue</i> [sic] <i>was a giant calculator running a single equation</i> <br><br> According to quantum physics, so is the entire universe as a whole... Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction The self does not exist

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Re:Have you ever heard of Deep Blue? (Score:2) by Abigail-II (abigail@delanet.com) on Sunday March 12, @10:49PM EST (#318) (User Info) http://www.foad.org/%7Eabigail/

Don't you consider the creation of a computer that no human can beat at chess a "significant advance in AI"? No. In fact, it shows we have barely made the first steps. Chess is an utterly trivial process compared to what goes on in humans. It's small, bounded domain, which can be formalized easily. It took decades to match humans - and that in an area where computers should excell compared to humans. And also note that the computations done by chess computers in no way simulate the thinking process of humans behind the boards. Another small, bounded domain with trivial rules is Go. There's no Go equivalent for Deep Blue, and it isn't likely there will be one anytime soon. Humans wipe the floor with computers, in what should be the computers home turf. The human brain and though process have been studied for longer and by more people, than the concept of automated computing. We still understand little of it, and there's no useful formal model. The effort and time it took to create Deep Blue makes me think that noone reading slashdot right now will ever see a computer(program) passing the Turing test. -- Abigail

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Re:Artificial Intelligence (Score:0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 12, @01:33PM EST (#133)

Is AI even possible? I just read Searle's Chinese box argument along with his reply to the replies, and all of a sudden I lost a great deal of certaintiy in the feasibility of AI. Does anyone have a good website or know of a good counter response to Searle?

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Re:Artificial Intelligence (Score:1) by Pinball Wizard on Sunday March 12, @05:18PM EST (#265) (User Info)

www.kurzweiltech.com Also, if you haven't read Ray Kurzweil's Age of Spiritual Machines, thats a mind blowing book you definitely want to read. AI is already composing poetry, creating art, and it is beginning to be able to hold conversations. Kurzweil is another elite scientist in the same league as Bill Joy, having started Kurzweil Music Systems, and his speech recognition software, which became Lernout & Hauspie. The book especially demonstrates convincingly that AI is reaping the benefits of Moore's law and will meet human levels of intelligence by the year 2020.

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Re:Artificial Intelligence (Score:1) by Pinball Wizard on Sunday March 12, @04:55PM EST (#255) (User Info)

I think Artificial Intelligence has already come a long way. Consider the following poem written by Ray Kurzweil's Cybernetic Poet(must have been running on a Windows machine) I think I'll crash. Just for myself with God peace on a curious sound for myself in my heart? And life is weeping From a bleeding heart of boughs bending such paths of them, of boughs bending such paths of breeze knows we've been there I don't know about you but I'm starting to see signs of life

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Re:Artificial Intelligence (Score:1) by Izubachi (Izubachi@mechpilot.com) on Sunday March 12, @12:15PM EST (#62) (User Info)

A point that should be made here is, why does everyone assume that we'll ever be able to make a real "intelligent" computer? We don't even have the faintest idea how the brain exactly works in humans, much less recreating it in the context of a computer. And even if we could, what happens when we do that and find that one factor of intelligence is still missing? Or perhaps we have the intelligence, but not the emotions. I'm not exactly a very devout person or anything, but I think there's something more to us then just neurons in a series of connections. The human mind is an incredable thing, and I don't see it being replicated very easily at all. The truth does not set you free, it just makes everyone irratable. Your mother lied to you.

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Re:Artificial Intelligence (Score:1) by Zorikin (zorikin@nearmiss.com.com.com) on Sunday March 12, @03:30PM EST (#211) (User Info)

We like a challenge.

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Re:Artificial Intelligence (Score:0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 12, @12:47PM EST (#97)

So let's all make sure the first person to create, train and nurture a computer consciousness will teach it morale, good values and understanding.

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Re:Artificial Intelligence (Score:1) by Blue Lang (blue@gator.net) on Sunday March 12, @02:11PM EST (#160) (User Info) http://www.gator.net/~blue

So let's all make sure the first person to create, train and nurture a computer                               consciousness will teach it morale, good values and understanding. I don't think I've ever been in a room with any ten human beings who agreed on morality, good values, and understanding. If we as a species do not agree on these things, then how should our progeny be so imbued? What if, for instance, someone built a robot, and did exactly that - but that person was Muslem? Mormon? The proper morals would be very, very, very different from mine. And, all in all, it just plain does not matter by what method humanity is extincted - it will happen. Is there any real difference in us doing it to ourselves or it being the results of unforseen external factors? Nopers. We all die, and in 3 million years, the cockroach religious right argues about the true nature of the human fossils. Whee. --- blue

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Re:Artificial Intelligence (Score:0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 12, @02:38PM EST (#181)

So let's all make sure the first person to create, train and nurture a computer consciousness will teach it morale, good values and understanding. I don't think I've ever been in a room with any ten human beings who agreed on morality, good values, and understanding. If we as a species do not agree on these things, then how should our progeny be so imbued? Uhhh... the original poster said "MORALE" not "MORALITY". I'd rather have a robot with self-confidence rather than one who always preaching to me!

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Re:Artificial Intelligence (Score:0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 12, @01:13PM EST (#119)

Artificial intelligences or genetically engineered organisms would be just as much our descendants as biological offspring would be. What you leave behind when you're gone is information. Whether this includes your genes is fairly irrelevant.

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Read Isaac Asimov (Score:1) by mangu (orlo_porter@hotmail.com) on Sunday March 12, @01:25PM EST (#127) (User Info)

what would an (artificially) intelligent computer do? What would be its desires? Would it also have emotions? If so, what would it feel? These are the questions that Asimov's robot stories answer. First of all, there's the Three Laws of Robotics: 1- A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm 2- A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. 3- A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law. You can be absolutely certain that all intelligent robots or computers will always have these or similar laws built in. Asimov's robot stories have many interesting considerations on what would be the thoughts and feelings of robots built around these laws. If we don't NOW, then we might just find ourselves living in the Matrix. The Matrix is really stupid, a brain-dead remake of Frankenstein. For a film based on a similar story, yet infinitely more intelligent, with some really deep considerations on the ethics of artificial intelligence and the simulation of human minds, try "The 13th Floor".

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Re:Read Isaac Asimov (Score:0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 12, @01:38PM EST (#139)

what happens if the person programming the AI has his own agenda? What about viruses?

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Re:Read Isaac Asimov (Score:1) by mangu (orlo_porter@hotmail.com) on Sunday March 12, @02:15PM EST (#163) (User Info)

what happens if the person programming the AI has his own agenda? AI is too complex for one single person. We would need a whole bunch of mad scientists working together and, as we know from Holywood, mad scientists always work alone. Seriously, the bigger and more complex a project is, the less likely it is that a group of evil-minded maniacs will act together to dominate it for their purposes. For a practical example, look at the nuclear weapons systems that several governments have developed. Despite being intended for extremely destructive purposes, they all have very sophisticated built-in systems to avoid their illegal use. What about viruses? Viruses are a problem. They are the reason why we catch cold, and our bodies have immune systems to take care of them. People with impaired immune systems, such as AIDS patients, often die of viruses. Oh, you mean computer viruses? Sure, we will have computer immune systems to take care of those. A computer or robot catching a virus and starting to kill people as a result is far less likely than your human neighbour catching a virus in his brain and starting to kill people as a result.

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Re:Read Isaac Asimov (Score:2, Funny) by quonsar (quonsar@meepzorp.com) on Sunday March 12, @06:37PM EST (#283) (User Info) http://meepzorp.com

AI is too complex for one single person. So, what you are saying is, it takes a village to raise an AI entity. :-) ====== "Rex unto my cleeb, and thou shalt have everlasting blort." - Zorp 3:16 ======

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Re:Read Isaac Asimov (Score:1) by Steve Bergman on Sunday March 12, @01:53PM EST (#150) (User Info) http://www.netplus.net/~steve

My first thoughts as well. Isaac dealt with at least part of this issue decades ago. In his robots, the three laws were so inate to the brain that designing a positronic brain *not* based on them required a *HUGE* redesign and investment. We need to start thinkin