An unexpected jab in the second-last paragraph, seems the author has some strong opinions about AI. I wonder how he'd respond to Hawking's recently newsworthy worries.
>In fact, computers can’t “win” at anything, not until they can experience real joy in victory and sadness in defeat, a programming challenge that makes Go look like tic-tac-toe.
It seems like when it comes to AI advances, there's always a shifting of goalposts as soon as an AI is able to do a task that was once thought to be a defining characteristic of human cognition. Why does it matter if a computer "feels good or bad" at the outcome of a competition for that competition to be somehow valid?
Emotions are orthogonal to rationality, that's why you can devise rational plans to minimize or maximize your likelihood of feeling an emotion. In other words it's perfectly rational to act in such a way to prevent sadness or pain, if that's the value you want to optimize for.
You can imagine a creature (natural or artificial it doesn't matter) that feels emotions and nevertheless it doesn't start acting irrationally just whenever the emotion is strong enough.
I could argue that human beings are in many cases such creatures; even apparently irrational behaviour caused by emotional response usually is not a bad strategy in the original environment where that instinctive reaction was selected for.
I'm not sure it would be a good idea to create AI that simulate humans in all aspects, including unpredictability, just for the sake of it. But I understand some might be tempted to explore that area in order to research creativity, assuming it had something to do with unpredictability.
Perhaps we are just fooling ourselves into thinking that our very failures are what enables us to be so $special (put whatever aspect you prefer in $special). Unfortunately we don't have much means to compare us with something else.
EDIT: This fact has been used to argue against the 'enlightenment' era approach to solving problems. Unfortunately I am unable to find the relavant talk on youtube right now, since all the results for 'enlightenment' return mystic sadhu bs.
Consider the ultimatum game[0]. "The ultimatum game is a game often played in economic experiments in which two players interact to decide how to divide a sum of money that is given to them. The first player proposes how to divide the sum between the two players, and the second player can either accept or reject this proposal. If the second player rejects, neither player receives anything. If the second player accepts, the money is split according to the proposal. The game is played only once so that reciprocation is not an issue."
If you are rational and the other player offers you a cent, you will accept. But humans will become disgusted and angry and therefore refuse. A rational counterparty is hence forced offer more.
http://www.psmag.com/magazines/magazine-feature-story-magazi...
Emotions are not really unpredictable, just very limited in comparison to rationality. They essentially can't deal with unexpected or unprogrammed situations.
The idea of naive learning is very much a goal of most interpretations of what "Artificial Intelligence" encompasses. The scope of the self directed learning though I think is what distinguishes between narrow AI and AGI.
They're also not one of "the most basic concepts in philosophy of mind." They're a very pointed way of illustrating the Hard Problem of Consciousness, and specifically Epistemic Asymmetry, but it's the latter two that are fundamental to modern philosophy of mind, not zombies.
Do you somehow not see the fundamental disconnect between making an argument based on p-zombies and attributing internal state to someone else?
Usually it's because people all over the discussion fail to correctly distinguish between generally adaptive intelligence and specifically engineered "intelligence" (tool that appears to perform a task intelligently), and also between conscious and unaware mechanical intelligence.
A Go or Chess program isn't a goalpost for generally adaptive intelligence, it's a milestone for specifically engineered intelligence. And it isn't conscious, which is the writer's point, though the expression is imprecise enough it could be misunderstood as criticizing the more specific form.
"You just let the machines get on with the adding up," warned Majikthise, "and we'll take care of the eternal verities thank you very much. You want to check your legal position you do mate. Under law the Quest for Ultimate Truth is quite clearly the inalienable prerogative of your working thinkers. Any bloody machine goes and actually finds it and we're straight out of a job aren't we? I mean what's the use of our sitting up half the night arguing that there may or may not be a God if this machine only goes and gives us his bleeding phone number the next morning?"
"That's right!" shouted Vroomfondel, "we demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty!"
A lot of people have strong feelings about where cognizant AI could be, I don't think fearmongering is the problem we should be focusing on.
I think it should be more focused on the problem solving potential of these systems and how they will become more relevant as computers get better.
[1]: https://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20140506213247-1...
So is that line really necessary? It seems to do not but make assertions about the motives and beliefs of others, and to do such in a negative light. It adds no value to the article, but creates a negative impression in the reader's mind without giving any evidence as backing.
He's not the author of the original post -- he's the author of the linkedin post he linked to.
With all of the marketing around things like big data, deep learning and other topics, it makes it seem like we're closer to cognizant AI than we really are.
At the heart of all this is still statistics and machine learning which in and of itself is just statistics with a lot more data used to achieve a set of tasks such as predicting a future value or labeling some thing (such as a fraudulent event)
Edit: I'd love to see some discussion on what people think we are close to.
We have to ask ourselves, what is AI and what is considered intelligent? Is it mimicking the human brain as closely as possible (with all the flaws that come to mind such as bias) or is it making the heuristically best decision given a set of circumstances (game playing AI, maximum likelihood learning).
Both of these mindsets can be beneficial. Let's just make sure we treat it for what it is: math and binary information.
:-)