XPost: rec.arts.sf.written, rec.arts.sf.science
From: rod.speed.aaa@gmail.com
"Robert Bannister" wrote in message
news:bkj8gvF3bu8U1@mid.individual.net...
> On 26/01/2014 7:26 am, Gutless Umbrella Carrying Sissy wrote:
>> JRStern wrote in
>> news:1238e9dot92ieomstdc66qkq2g0hs0nqkf@4ax.com:
>>
>>> On Fri, 24 Jan 2014 15:47:53 -0700, Gutless Umbrella Carrying
>>> Sissy wrote:
>>>
>>>> Your Name wrote in
>>>> news:250120141214165689%YourName@YourISP.com:
>>>>
>>>>> In article , Ryk E. Spoor
>>>>> wrote:
>>>>>> On 1/24/14 3:13 PM, Gutless Umbrella Carrying Sissy wrote:
>>>>>>
>>>>>>> The point Greg made, that has not been disputed in any way,
>>>>>>> is that the definition used to be "do only one thing well,"
>>>>>>> until computers could do only one thing really well, and
>>>>>>> now the definition has changed.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Oh, I would DEFINITELY dispute that. AI was always "A
>>>>>> machine that
>>>>>> thinks like a human, only maybe better", and the Turing Test
>>>>>> (as a general concept -- making one that really works is
>>>>>> harder) was always the general idea of how to really measure
>>>>>> it. Can it pass for human in realistic circumstances?
>>>>>>
>>>>>> The fact that the concept is as foggy as our understanding
>>>>>> of what
>>>>>> intelligence IS is what causes the confusion.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> The definition of "thinks like" has been refined through the
>>>>>> years,
>>>>>> yes. And people -- usually laymen -- would put up examples of
>>>>>> tasks that "only a true AI could solve!", like chess, but
>>>>>> anyone with any skin in the game knew that this wasn't true;
>>>>>> enough brute-force would beat any human without any actual
>>>>>> intelligence involved. It WAS thought that computers would
>>>>>> never HAVE such brute force available and that, therefore,
>>>>>> any computer that could do grandmaster chess must be doing
>>>>>> something intelligent, but Moore's Law changed that.
>>>>>
>>>>> "Artificial intelligence" has never been defined as the
>>>>> ability to do just one particular thing well, no matter how
>>>>> complex that thing may seem to be.
>>>>>
>>>>> Even ignoring Turing, the true test of "artifical
>>>>> intelligence" would require the ability to do many, many, many
>>>>> different things, and to be able to learn to do new things.
>>>>>
>>>> Is driving a car "one thing"? Or is it many, many things, all
>>>> performed at the same time? How about "driving and navigating at
>>>> the same time, while also mointoring the physical condition of
>>>> the vehicle, fuel usage, and driving conditions"? Is that one
>>>> thing, or several?
>>>>
>>>> You can't even come up with an meaningful, objective definition
>>>> of "one thing." And you still haven't addressed Greg's point,
>>>> that once you do, when computers can do that, the definition
>>>> will be changed again, so that computers cannot, by (meta)
>>>> definition _ever_ be "intelligent," because the people doing the
>>>> defining will simply not stand for it.
>>>
>>> What you said.
>>>
>>> But let me rant some along these (familiar) lines.
>>>
>>> One of the first uses of the term AI was that it was going to
>>> take "intelligence" for a computer to juggle multiple threads.
>>> Now that is entirely a commonplace, done with a few lines of
>>> code.
>>>
>>> Chess is still on the bubble here, originally it was said to
>>> require so much creativity and insight it was unthinkable that a
>>> machine could ever do it. Of course such statements showed
>>> gross ignorance of mathematics and game theory, or at least a
>>> pessimistic view of how fast computers could ever get.
>>
>> Indeed. Nobody worth taking seriously ever said it was impossible.
>>
>>> Fifty
>>> years later chess grandmasters still go on about how they hate
>>> being beaten by a machine that uses just pure search, but if
>>> they add a few heuristics it looks so much more "human" and
>>> "creative" and that makes it better. Hmm.
>>>
>>> So maybe there is a tad of truth to the idea that some stuff can
>>> be labeled as "requiring intelligence", and then it turns out,
>>> "oh, maybe not so much after all." But what it suggests,
>>> frighteningly, is that ALL things eventually fall to that
>>> process.
>>
>> There are those who argue that the human brain is, in fact, a
>> deterinistic computer. The more we learn about intelligence,
>> artificial and otherwise, the more firmly they believe that.
>>>
>>> I think the "truth" is probably a little more tricky than that
>>> and both sides are a little bit right, say you had a program you
>>> could put into your PC and it acted just as intelligently as
>>> anything else you can communicate with via computer. Maybe it
>>> really is as "intelligent" as you, as feeling, and as screwed
>>> up. But, um, what then? Good topic for some scifi stories,
>>> boatloads of which have already been written. From scifi,
>>> truth.
>>>
>> There are also those who believe that there is more to the human
>> brain than the organic equivalent of transistors, and that it is
>> not purely deterministic. Some talk about quantum effects, some
>> talk about "soul," but notobyd has come up with anything that can
>> be measured so far.
>>
>
> There has been a lot of work to determine how various chemicals can affect
> how and even what we think. We may discover that free will is an illusion.
Unlikely. The most that might happen is that we have rather less
free will than we thought we had.
--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)
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