Artificial Flight and Other Myths | Hacker News Reader

Artificial Flight and Other Myths

dresdencodak.com

57 pointsdmoney24 comments

This is in a similar vein to an earlier essay by the same author: http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/print/2181/

In the aforelinked one, he skeptically critiques the idea of evolution into hominids from the perspective of a primate. It's an enjoyable read, if not exactly the soundest case for a Kurzweilian singularity.

Amusing, but as a serious argument it critically fails in that "Strong AF" is measured by whether it fools a real bird into thinking it's a bird, and once you are "birdy" you can't be "more real than real", but in the real world everybody understands that passing a Turing Test is the beginning of AI, not the end. The Turing Test is a relatively unambiguous measurement of how successful the AI is, and it will progress from there.

Yes, it's true that the Turing Test does force a bit of possibly-difficult humanity onto the resulting AI, but all that probably boils down to is some constant factor improvement on human intelligence (on some hypothetical measure where we can quantify intelligence along a single dimension), with the resulting slightly-superhuman-AI just "faking" being human. That would still win, and I have a hard time imagining some sort of weird result where we have radically superhuman AIs that just can't seem to convincingly fake being human.

I have a hard time imagining some sort of weird result where we have radically superhuman AIs that just can't seem to convincingly fake being human.

I have a hard time imagining it too, but I see no good reason why that couldn't happen (which was the whole point of the article I think - our current technology can easily make many different things that can fly, but we are still incapable of making something that really flies like a bird).

Maybe it will be easier to build extremely intelligent, consistent, rational AI than to get the nuanced emotion and irrationality that regular people have.

Thing is, nuanced emotion and irrationality is often actually rational - not in the sense that the human brain thought logically through the situation and decided rationally to act irrationally, but in the game theoretic sense of producing a superior outcome.

For example, if you get angry you can lose control and do things you'd regret later (seemingly irrational). That forms a powerful argument to avoid angering someone, because you know that they might react badly even if it's not in their best interests. Thus, evolution can engineer in a defense against e.g. cheaters of various kinds, even when punishing any one cheater would be counter-productive for the one doing the punishing.

(It strikes me now that there's an argument in here about banking, bailouts, the angry public and avoiding collapse of the economy, but I'm not going to pursue it.)

which was the whole point of the article I think - our current technology can easily make many different things that can fly, but we are still incapable of making something that really flies like a bird

I read it differently. The aim is to make something that can fly. But we, from our position as birds, don't accept flying as anything other than bird-like flying - with wings and feathers.

Leaving the analogy, I think the article is saying that humans generally don't accept anything as artificial intelligence unless it exactly mimics a human, or is indistinguishable from a human. Thus the attempts to work out exactly how the brain (or wing) works and to replicate it.

In reality, AI research has progressed considerably - visual recognition, autonomous navigation, question answering etc. But these are only 'gliding', and are only leading towards 'other flight-like phenomena' such as bat and insect flight. We don't accept them as parts of an artificial intelligence because we think (rightly or wrongly) that there is something more to intelligence than just a set of special algorithms and feed back loops.

I thought it was a critique of people focusing on trying to create AI by modeling human intelligence. But I think it's a dumb article because I am reasonably sure that Avian aerodynamics undoubtedly inspired early aeronautics.

If his criticism is just of the Turing Test instead, then I think he's a simpering ninny.

I've long thought of the Turing Test not as an argument against the impossibility of AI, but rather an argument against the impossibility of a machine that thinks. Certainly, as an actual practical test of AI, it seems pretty poor to me - people doing real-world Turing Tests seem to me to be missing the point.

There are a lot of people, especially religious people, who try to argue against thinking machines by saying that the ghost, the soul, the existentialist bit, is missing. The Turing Test is an argument against that; that if you can't tell the difference between the machine and a human when the "interface" is something as simple as a terminal rather than the obvious differences between machine and flesh, then you don't have good grounds to still say that machines cannot think - because it exposes you to the accusation that you're just pre-judging based on appearances.

I prefer EWD's take on the question of AI:

>The question of whether computers can think is like the question of whether submarines can swim.

In fact, I think the problem is in considering the turing test to be a definitive test for AI. Its certainly a definitive test of some subset of AI (which I am unsure how to define exactly), but to really consider it a definitive test of all AI is silly. I think this is the main point of the article. Sure, if a machine that acted exactly like a bird was invented and flew, that would be a flying machine, but thats not the only way to build a flying machine. Thats "bird like flying" in the same way that the turing test is a test for "human like intelligence."

We may build a functioning, flapping wing, but what if the essence of flight is deeper, hidden within the cells or elsewhere?

Oh joy. One of these articles. And yes, I do think that sentence is indicative of the whole article, though it's more instantly-recognizable-as-stupid than most of it. The rest of the article takes a few seconds more.

Well, I guess we won't be "really" flying any time soon. I like my enhanced-gliding just fine, thanks.

Strong A.F., as it is defined by researchers, is any artificial flier that is capable of passing the Tern Test (developed by A.F. pioneer Alan Tern), which involves convincing an average bird that the artificial flier is in fact a flying bird.

The same goes for this one... Lovely :-)

Mildy apropos, I was talking to an aeronautical engineer this weekend, who dropped the phrase "You can make anything fly if you can make it go 200mph."

Evidently the speed constraint on very very fast cars doesn't come from making them go faster, it comes from making them not take off into flight.

The two things are linked. If they take off into flight they can't go faster, because the wheels will no longer be in contact with the ground!

Peter Dumbreck in the Mercedes, Le Mans, 1999

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ow3rxq7U1mA at about 33 secs.

Here's another: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8M3NQeDzedk

Yes, when cars go fast enough, keeping them on the ground is one of the challenges.

Silly article. Everyone knows you can't have strong AF without using ternary computers.

Oh wow, I just got that...

The pain... xD

Does this mock _Computer Power and Human Reason_?

Ah, Dresden Codak. I dropped him from my RSS a long time ago. Nice to catch up with his latest work. He always makes me think.

Not even an Airbus A380 would pass the Tern Test. So I guess we don’t have Strong A.F. after all …

Can you imagine what would it be to have an A380 flapping its wings?

These results are old because they're from the time I had a tour through the aeronautical research laboratories in Melbourne, Australia. However,

The wings of a boeing 727 flex about 8 inches in each direction in normal flight. In tests to destruction they were flexed repeatedly to nearly 8 feet in each direction before they showed any visible signs of distress, finally failing after 13 hours constant flexing at 8'4" in each direction.

I'm not suggesting I wouldn't be terrified in a major storm, but I felt a lot safer in flight after that. Aircraft wings are amazingly flexible and robust.

I know planes have flexible wings, but there is a good reason nature's largest flying critter is no bigger than a toy plane.

An ornithopter the size of an A380 would be... interesting.

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