Why AI is a dangerous dream - interview with Noel Sharkey
newscientist.com
newscientist.com
First of all: he doesn't use his definition of intelligence consistently. According to his usage of the word a being can be truly intelligent, and another one can _appear_ perfectly intelligent but be in reality a dumb machine that merely simulates intelligence. That's his chess example. But he _defines_ intelligence as the science of making machines do things that lead us to believe they are intelligent. A chess computer that outsmarts me most definitely fits that definition of intelligence.
He continually makes the claim that "Technological artifacts do not have a will or a desire". There is no reason to assume that you need some primal force to get a will or desire (perhaps any sufficiently complex system will have a will or desire as a side-effect), and there is no reason to assume a will or desire can't be perfectly emulated.
He claims that there are no signs that computer processing speed will eventually overtake that of the human brain. I say that computer processing speed is undeniably improving rapidly, and that the number of tasks that computers can do is rapidly increasing. Unless there is a hard limit somewhere the assumption should be that we will be eventually overtaken.
Computer AIs can play Chess, Checkers and Super Mario. They can create art, and compose music. They can drive some vehicles, and land planes at night. How about science? Some proofs are made and proved correct almost entirely by computer. Some proofs are so complex they can only be verified by computer. In many research fields a single human is almost guaranteed to contribute nothing. A computer, on the other hand, can probably brute-force his way to many new discoveries.
He again makes the claim that computers are innately unable to feel compassion or empathy. Only to finish with the dumbest remark of the article: "I don't think they will be very good at faking fouls", which is clearly a matter of basic game theory. And I think that robots will completely crush humans at soccer, even if they lack strategy. The moment robots are good enough to take the ball away from a pro human player, they will be able to do so consistently. Even if they run slower and shoot only semi-accurately, they will never make big mistakes. And history shows that in any game where computers can compete the humans have to play (almost) perfectly to even stand a chance (see: Chess / Checkers / Poker). We meat bags with our 100ms+ response times will never be in the same league as robots. Either we will be far superior to the robots, or the robots will run circles around us.
No, it may merely indicate that you are a lousy chess player. What you believe to be intelligent and what is intelligent are two different things.
An intelligent computer would not be programmed with anything specifically related to chess, it would simply learn the game like any human learns board games.
> He claims that there are no signs that computer processing speed will eventually overtake that of the human brain. I say that computer processing speed is undeniably improving rapidly, and that the number of tasks that computers can do is rapidly increasing. Unless there is a hard limit somewhere the assumption should be that we will be eventually overtaken.
That depends on the kind of tasks. Bookkeeping, data storage and retrieval, encoding, decoding, these are all things that a computer is exceptionally good at. But they are all at heart still simply ways to manipulate numbers, basic arithmetic if you want.
Composing a piece of music by computer takes a programmer. No computer ever woke up one fine Sunday morning and wrote a symphony because of the way it felt about the light.
They do not create art, they do not create music, they are excellent tools in the hands of artists and composers.
Given white noise as input the program would not produce a symphony that would strike us as a masterpiece or move us to tears. That takes a composer.
You are seriously underestimating what composing is, it is not merely 'coming up with sounds that are distinguishable and pleasant'. That's the mechanical end of the business, any piece of software that you teach about basic key signatures and tempo rules & phrasing could in theory do that.
Composing is much like story telling, to paint a picture in sound that evokes an emotion with a purpose in the listener.
On the day a computer comes up with something that moves me as strongly as Bach or Vivaldi I'll eat my hat, but I won't be holding my breath for that.
By the way, I'm a painter, so I'm not saying that when I do create a work that it was crafted by a set of logical, binary steps that I always follow for each painting. But I can say that my work can be analyzed to see why I did every single step, and none of those are impossible to express to a computer. Aside from my anecdotal experience, this is something that is also easily observable within the visual arts, and the artists that are recognized for defining the field.
An intelligent being (artificial or 'natural' makes no difference here) has free will and I believe (but can not prove) that eventually that leads to intelligence.
The prevailing belief here (certainly judging by the moderation ;) ) seems to be that you can algorithmically describe everything. I'm not sure that that is possible, neither am I sure that it is not.
But to date, nobody has designed a machine that on its own decide to go and do anything at all. Even the act of deciding to make a painting vs going out for lunch or talking to someone for an hour or two requires free will and intelligence. No computer in existence today can do that, and if there is not going to be some fundamental change in how computers work I doubt that one will do so in the future.
If you haven't read it yet look at the top of this discussion, rms has posted a link that makes for some very interesting reading on all this.
& thanks for the exchange, it has been educational, especially about the 'method' that could be abstracted from art.
And it's been a pleasant exchange on my end as well :)
That's simply not true. For example the Google bot decides every seconds if it wants to crawl this website or another one. I don't think you are up to date - might want to read up on "autonomous robotics". Many of the algorithms are so in nature that humans can not predict their results.
I think if you talk to robot builders they will tell you that the robots do stuff they weren't told to do all the time.
As for motivation, I don't think it is as magical as you presume it to be. We are not motivated to do arbitrary things - nature has motivated us to do certain things (think, learn, reproduce). So if we motivate a computer to do certain things (like crawl web site), why should it not count?
Anyway, I can see I am not going to be able to convince you of this and it is getting late so I cede to you.
But thank you for the interesting exchange.
I don't think it's me who is misunderstanding the discussion here. You're using double standards.
When a primal tribe is beating on drums: music. When a computer builds a primitive melody? That's not music! Those are just bits and bytes!
If I follow your logic to the extreme a computer can never compose music because there will always be a human who built the computer, or built the computer that built the computer that composed the music. I don't buy that.
When a primal tribe beats on a drum they've just invented music. When a computer beats on a drum it has been told by some human to beat a drum.
Well yeah, it seems likely that if a computer ever becomes really intelligent, it has been built by a human. So?
For that to happen though we have a bunch of formidable hurdles to cross, and in spite of all our processing power and data storage capability we have not yet been able to simulate the intelligence of even an insect or a small mammal.
Whether an AI is built by humans or aliens or comes in to being through some freak coincidence is irrelevant.
As long as it takes a human with their intelligence to tell a computer what to do it has not achieved intelligence, merely the capability to follow instructions very precisely.
This is possible, but not a certainty.
Physics as you know it ('classical physics') stops making sense at that level, things no longer have an apparent causal relationship.
What Roger Penrose argues in his book 'the emperors new mind' is that 'mind' springs from these effects.
He suspects that if we simply follow the classical physics rules that we will end up on a dead end and that it will take a full blown quantum simulation of a whole brain in order to simulate one with the emergent behaviour that is being sought.
According to that logic reading a physics book is "dumb", I should derive all physics knowledge myself. Reading a book is precomputed knowledge, and that's no different from precomputed chess strategies. If I'm allowed to use books as a foundation for my intelligence, then computers are allowed precomputed knowledge also. They're just better at retaining it. Good for them.
The problem with your definition is that you can have a humanoid who speaks a dozen languages fluently, is great at math and physics, can answer any history question, can correctly understand and act in different social situations and despite all those things, is still classified as dumb.
You can define intelligence as the capacity of learning, taking knowledge completely out of consideration. It does not, however, match the definition of intelligence in common language. It also means that when you have a robot that knows everything it is by definition dumb, because there's nothing left to learn.
> But they are all at heart still simply ways to manipulate numbers, basic arithmetic if you want.
And humans are just a bunch of atoms. Atoms form molecules. Molecules form nucleic acids and other building blocks. You can build things of immense complexity with primitive primitives. That something as complex as a human can consist of a few elements is pretty hard to grasp. But if I accept that, then why can't it be simulated with bits?
Art created by computers is primitive, sure. But human art started out pretty primitive too. I see this as a difference in complexity, not as some magic line computers have to cross for their output to become art-worthy.
Pretty much everybody alive has at some point in his time come up with some rule or law in principle that somebody else had already codified, there is nothing special about that, other than that we seem to have this generalization capability built in at a very deep level.
Your intelligence is what allows you to use the book, I can store the book in a computer but it will not get one tiny little bit smarter because of it. There not being any intelligence present to understand the deeper meaning of the string of symbols that make up the book.
Intelligence in common language is often confused with 'smart', you are either intelligent or you are not. But even the most stupid human is intelligent, and all computers are not.
I can see what you're getting at with the argument that if both humans and computers are built up out of atoms that in theory we could both be equivalent in intelligence.
But there are some very subtle differences between humans and computers. For one we operate in a mostly analog world, and computers are digital. That's a small difference at first sight, because after all if you add enough bits to your floats eventually the steps will be so small that it won't matter any more. Or does it ?
Even a small step is still a step, a thresholding operation.
Simulating a chemical soup, all the effects of things like quantum mechanics, including brownian motion and so on might some day yield an intelligence.
But simply assuming that more computer power will give us something that is intelligent is simply not plausible, more data does not mean you are smarter, just that you have more data at your disposal, a larger computer does not mean thinking in a different way, it merely means following programs and manipulating data at a higher speed.
If intelligence is a continuum between '0' (for a rock) and '1' for a human being with basic intelligence then we have departed a little bit along this axis away from the '0', but we are infinitely closer to the 0 end than we are to the '1' end.
And we seem to disagree on whether or not a computer has ever created art, but that's fine. A computer does not express itself in any way that it has not been programmed to do, and in those cases that it does we reach for the debugger.
No he doesn't. He defines AI that way, and that's the point. AI is an illusion of intelligence. He sees a danger in mistaking it for the real thing - in effect mistaking machines for people.
If it is a statistical model that produces a result given an input it's seen before then it's not real intelligence.
To me intelligences is the ability to learn by applying patterns/metaphors across domains. Computers aren't anywhere close to this.
I don't see why we should have a different metric of intelligence for computers and humans, though.
What about GO? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Go
you brought up a game where the condition does not apply. "competitive" in an understood word: can a computer tie consistently against what we agree is a moderately skilled player?
4 years ago, I would have said,
Computers "can compete" at go about like humans "can compete" with Siberian Huskies in multi-day footraces over snow-covered tundra. I'm a terrible go player, and yet I can still give the strongest go program in the world full 9-stone handicap and crush it.
Interestingly, more computing power hadn't really helped. The best programs of 2005 sucked just about as much as the best programs of 1995. Recently, though, it's changed. MoGo beat a 9-dan professional with just a 7-stone handicap this year at the 2009 Taiwan Open. And it's won multiple games against pros on smaller boards straight-up.
The only thing I'm saying here is that your counterexample does not make sense because Go-bots are famously bad at Go.
I don't think so. Please see the link below: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Go#Recent_results
Of course you can still refuse the recent results, and say they are not competitive :)
Conversely, if you're a bit better than the computer and manage to find a few of its weaknesses, you can exploit them again and again and it will never learn how to stop you (in any AI I've played against).
We can automate a process, and with technology we can automate increasingly complex processes. But intelligence is a fundamentally different problem from the things you describe. I am a believer in the possibility of strong AI. I can envision and would like to live a world of sentient machines. But your way of thinking, as expressed here, will not get us there.
Let's take the example of robot soccer players. I agree with you, it's basically just an engineering problem. We have robots that walk around, we have computers that can solve ballistic problems in real time, we have networking and so on. I can easily, easily imagine a winning soccer team made up entirely of robots. If I was rich I would tempt you with money to hasten the creation of such a thing.
What I can not imagine - or rather, what I am unable to conceive a route towards - is a robotic soccer player that announces one day it is sick of putting balls into goals and is retiring to take up painting instead.
Or take chess. I can't beat my computer at it any more, although that's not saying much as I was never all that good. Yes, I can envision a chess program that says 'hmm, you keep losing, how about I start without a pawn until you improve?'. Indeed, we're not so far away from being able to build a good chess tutor, not least because chess play has a fully defined grammar and so winning positions in chess games could be regarded as true statements in a formal system. On the other hand, further development in this area is unlikely to produce software with a secret addiction to backgammon.
We have software that can create pictures or music in a certain style. But although they can produce interesting and unexpected results they're still horrendously limited in other ways. If you request a new composition and don't like the results, will your computer denounce you as an ungrateful philistine, while mocking your bourgeois notions of formalism?
Computers don't want to do things. We want them to do things, and currently all we know how to do is build simulacra of ourselves. Doubtless, as time goes on, we will be able to build more general-purpose simulacra - our robotic soccer players will also compete at rugby and tennis, our chess programs will handle a wider domain of dynamic analytical problems, our artistic software will employ inductive processes that begin with general concepts of proportion, contrast and so forth.
But we are not going to get to real artificial intelligence until we start building systems that are a) self-modifying and b) allowed to engage in perverse behavior whose purpose is not obvious to us.
Even following his arguments, it would only be a matter of time before sentient machines are created, equivalent to our own minds.
His arguments against AI are mostly 'just because' and has little proof.
If the mind is a physical system then we can attempt to recreate it by computer but this is no guarantee that such an attempt will be successful.
For an example of such a situation, imagine that it would take all the resources of a planet in order to create a single AI then it might be theoretically possible but in practice it would fail anyway.
And that is assuming that it is possible, for which there is no proof until it is done. If the mind turns out to depend on mechanisms that we can not model accurately enough to get the desired effect then the whole deal is off.
There can be no 'proof' that AI is impossible, just as much as there can be no 'proof' that green elephants do not exist.
The only proof that would be acceptable is for someone to produce an AI.
Nobody needs to present proof that it is not possible.
Now, this entire hypothesis rests on the idea that our brain is super-Universal. That is, it cannot be phrased as a computable function (by the Church-Turing thesis). This is a fairly unpopular view in the AI community, but valid until we prove otherwise. Up till now there has been no evidence that such a Turing machine exists in theory, much less in practice, which is a minor blow. In addition, many of our psychological structures and chemical activities seem to suggest a Universal Turing machine.
Edit: I just realized that I implied that a super-Universal Turing machine is a Turing machine. This is obviously untrue, by definition. Consider my terminology to be a replacement for whatever name we would give to this noncomputable function solver (since we have no category for that at the moment).
Edit2: Not that we don't have a category for noncomputable functions, only that we don't know which category they would fall into. I guess the catch-all "hypercomputable" is suitable. Thanks, naveesunder
I saw an interview with the director of the Blue Brain project. He projected 10 years, before they can emulate a brain...
http://nextbigfuture.com/2009/08/henry-markam-project-direct...
"Computational Neuroscience over the past 50 years is a theory driven science, while Blue Brain is biology driven. When we reach the human brain, human-like perceptions and motor actions should emerge automatically. The model brains will be able to learn to do what we human’s can learn to do, perform complex decision-making, manifest emotions, intelligence and personalities. We see these all as straightforward emergent properties of the brain. Self-awareness and consciousness may also emerge if this phenomenon depends on neuronal, synaptic and/or molecular interactions. Anything that depends on the physical elements that can be measured in the brain should emerge if we are successful in building it accurately enough. If we inject some theories of brain while we build it and ignore the biology, then we are back to square one with computational neuroscience and we will almost certainly fail."
I think that was a very foolish statement to make, now the clock is ticking.
But I'll be very happy when on August 24th 2019 mr. Markham will reveal the artificial brain. For now all he's got is a great way to get a lot of funding. More power to him.
You really need to motivate that... The project has afaik finished the first phase with good results. (See the interview I referenced.)
Also, you don't have to wait until 2019 to see if you are right and the researchers are dishonest and/or idiots. The Blue Brain are going to work on emulating animals with much smaller brains at first.
Yes, the first phase has been successful, maybe even later phases will be successful.
But it all depends on how you define success.
Let's pretend we're living on an island and we are looking up in to the sky and we see aircraft flying over. Instead of going the 'cargo cult' route to building an aircraft we are a bit smarter and we realize it must be their forward speed that somehow holds them up.
So, we build a windtunnel, aim it into the prevailing winds and we make little wooden planes to test our theories of aircraft.
Sometimes the winds are strong enough to give us a meaningful result.
The shapes will check out, all kinds of stuff will be learned that is useful for making airplanes.
And that's where we get stuck, in spite of all our fantastic work in early 'phases' we do not have a functioning aircraft. For that we need other technology that we do not have and that we will not be able to simply acquire by looking at an airplane or even taking apart a crashed one. You need access to a functioning airplane for that, and preferably someone that can explain what technologies went in to building it and how important the various tolerances are. There is more to making an airplane than just the outside view of it. But there are many ways of making things fly, such as a balloon, a rocket or even a glider. Any one of those might be valid for our purpose of making an aircraft and by studying physics (the brain analogy breaks down here) you would learn what really goes in to making an aircraft.
For me there is only one phase here that you could claim to be successful or not with respect to the project as a whole, which is to have the thing become sentient, learning a spoken language or so and then to start asking critical questions.
All the other 'phases' are mechanistic and so will all be achieved for sure.
The last one is the only one that matters.
I'm sure we will learn a ton about how 'brains work' at a mechanical/chemical/electrochemical level. But the input data is the wiring diagram + the chemical composition of some of the ingredients.
If it would be that easy then it should be possible to restore dead people as well, but it seems that something crucial is broken when a brain is without oxygen for even a very short period. What that is is a big mystery. Religious people call it 'soul', technical people call it 'state'.
If you compare the brain with an Eniac style machine where the program is stored in the connections between the neurons then you have to also take into account that the brain is rewiring itself on a continuous basis.
But it might be more than that. What if the state is more like 'RAM', and it needs the software running on it now to keep it going. Once you unplug it the whole thing goes dead, and even when you plug it in again it stays dead. Just like a computer that only has a front panel and no bootrom. The bootstrapping is what it is all about.
A simulated brain might be fully capable of sentience but remain comatose. We'd have no way of knowing, since we do not sufficiently understand the state of comatose people as it is today. We end up feeding them intravenously for years sometimes hoping that they one day will 'wake up'.
To me this whole simulation business is just one small step on the way to 'building a brain', it may help you to get some of the details right but to boldly claim that in 10 years you will have a functioning human brain is not clever.
It makes the same mistake as the AI people in the past have made, to assume that because the first steps are easy all the steps are going to be equally easy.
As far as I am concerned this is open ended research, it may take decades, possibly centuries to achieve the last stage IF it can be done.
To put your career on the line with a hard claim like that either means that you have a crystal ball or that you are overly sure about yourself.
Scientists announce findings of fact, they do not predict the future in cases as complicated as this one.
Anyway, I'm getting seriously out of my depth here, I hope they will succeed with as many 'phases' as possible and I'm happy they have a charismatic project leader that has been able to get the funding required to do this research but I really would have been much happier if he had not named a hard date. That was an unfortunate decision.
I don't think they are dishonest or idiots at all, merely underestimating the scope of the problem.
Uhm, you argue here that it would be without value if you don't solve the hardest problem of all in ten years.
Have the Blue Brain project claimed anywhere that they aim for full human behaviour in 10 years?!
It would be wonderful if they can simulate a rodent's brain with nerve inputs and get it learn to run in a maze and do similar things.
>>If it would be that easy then it should be possible to restore dead people as well, but it seems that something crucial is broken when a brain is without oxygen for even a very short period. What that is is a big mystery. Religious people call it 'soul', technical people call it 'state'.
I thought the technical term was "biological damage"?
You really seems to argue that anyone with some biological brain damage from oxygen deprivation loses their "soul"?!
Either you're drunk, trolling me or you don't know anything at all about biology and damage to the brain and loss of partial function and therapy.
>>What if the state is more like 'RAM', and it needs the software running on it now to keep it going.
I think that argument was killed by electric shock therapy.
>>I don't think they are dishonest or idiots at all, merely underestimating the scope of the problem.
Uhm, (i) WHAT have the Blue Brain project really claimed? (ii) I'm not an expert (I'll read up on brain science in a few years, when it has stabilized... the field seems to move faster than light, right now) and the little I know is mostly on cellular level, but you really don't know anything at all about biology?
They predicted that an artificial human brain can be built within 10 years.
So, yes.
> It would be wonderful if they can simulate a rodent's brain with nerve inputs and get it learn to run in a maze and do similar things.
Agreed, that would be amazing.
But I can already do that with relatively simple electronics, that does not even require software. What would be even more amazing if this simulated creature showed initiative of its own.
> I thought the technical term was "biological damage"?
Not neccesarily. A computer that is running a stored program in ram is indistinguishable on an atomic level from one that has just been rebooted but is hanging at the boot prompt waiting for a key press because there is no network to boot from.
The one is a useful tool, the other one a door stop.
Damage did not enter in to it, the computer is fine, the bootstrap sequence is what is holding it up.
> You really seems to argue that anyone with some biological brain damage from oxygen deprivation loses their "soul"?!
You are trying to make me sound ridiculous because I tried to draw an analogy between how religious people (and I'm not religious) see the situation and how an electrician or a scientist would see it. State is information, the information is what can be lost, even though you still have all the physical components.
> Either you're drunk,
thank you for that.
> trolling me
Apparently not, I don't have time to waste in spite of spending a considerable amount of time on answering you.
I may be mistaken, and I'm certainly open to learning.
> or you don't know anything at all about biology
I've worked my way through a university grade course in Genetics, but do not have any formal education in the field, in fact I have very little formal education at all. That hasn't stopped me from learning though.
> and damage to the brain and loss of partial function and therapy.
There seem to be a multitude of failure modes, not all of them are well understood.
>>What if the state is more like 'RAM', and it needs the software running on it now to keep it going.
> I think that argument was killed by electric shock therapy.
Could you explain that ?
>> I don't think they are dishonest or idiots at all, merely underestimating the scope of the problem.
> Uhm, (i) WHAT have the Blue Brain project really claimed?
To be able to simulate a full brain within 10 years.
> (ii) I'm not an expert
Neither am I, but I do know that if you make a bold claim like that you have a problem if you fail to deliver. That would be a pity because I think that if there ever is going to be an answer to these questions that answer is going to come from a project like this. By overselling it they are damaging their long term prospects.
The same happened to 'regular AI'.
> (I'll read up on brain science in a few years, when it has stabilized...
I read as much as I can, several hours a day on lots of different subjects, including this one, I highly doubt that they have the trajectory planned out to the point where can state that they will have a functioning artificial brain in 10 years.
> the field seems to move faster than light, right now) and the little I know is mostly on cellular level, but you really don't know anything at all about biology?
That is your assumption to make, I don't think you are right.
But I will not resort to calling you either a drunk or trolling me as you just did, I appreciate the time you took to write your answer.
Not everybody that you find yourself disagreeing with is drunk or a troll.
Answer: >>They predicted that an artificial human brain can be built within 10 years. So, yes.
Note the difference between building a simulation of a brain and getting the full human behavior -- which is a totally different can of worms; just consider the lacking critical sensory inputs while "growing up"...
Please check the term on wikipedia, or something: Cerebral hypoxia
Damage from lack of oxygen to the brain is well documented and gives different results depending on in which part the damage is. (This is well known because of blood vessels problems can cut off specific parts and then different times to get back blood flow. Neuronal damage and its reasons has been researched, too.)
That is a basic part of common knowledge, which you contradicted when you wrote:
>>If it would be that easy then it should be possible to restore dead people as well, but it seems that something crucial is broken when a brain is without oxygen for even a very short period. What that is is a big mystery. Religious people call it 'soul', technical people call it 'state'.
I am sorry I took that as trolling.
(The point about ECT was that it "resets" electrical state. I don't really know, but suspect the same could be said for many grand mal attacks. As far as I know, there is very little support for your thoughts on a need for consistent state, since the chemical properties and other hardware changes can rebuild the state.)
The problem with the approach is that a simulation, by definition is not the real thing and that it will always end up being an approximation.
Our most powerful computers could not simulate all the interactions between atoms in a 1x1x1 cm volume of solid matter, let alone all the matter in a chemical soup as complicated as the brain, and expect it to behave like one.
So, this is also an approximation, only a very detailed one in spite of the researchers claims.
They are still simulating neurons, one brain weighs about 1.5 Kg, it contains roughly on the order of 100 billion neurons, but it contains much more than just the neurons, and other cells in the brain could easily be crucial for its functioning.
For example there are the 'glial' cells, which at least double the number of cells in any simulation that wants to take on the whole brain, the glial cells are part and parcel of brains all brains that we've looked at have them, they may be only there in a supporting role or they may end up being crucial.
Recent studies suggest that these cells are not as simple and passive as we used to think and that they may have a more active role.
That doesn't say it can't be done, it simply says that to stick a deadline on it is unwise. You should not make bold claims without the evidence to back it up.
Essentially they are saying they are only 5 orders of magnitude away from simulating a brain in real time:
The currently achieved milestone stands at 100 million neurons with 100 billion synapses 100 times slower than real-time, and that is assuming that the simulation model is indeed accurate enough to eventually lead to emergent behaviour, which to date has not happened. (And that would be the biggest news since the moon landings in terms of human achievement).
Especially the growing up (which already starts in womb) is where the problems may be, we have absolutely no idea what it takes to bootstrap a brain.
There may be more to it than we know about, in fact there probably is.
Some theorists postulate the existence of firmware like code present in the DNA, there are many other even weirder theories, one of them may well be right. That would mean that we are simulating a bunch of hardware here, completely forgetting about the software required to run that hardware.
Thanks for the explanation on hypoxia, I did not realize that the damage was always irreversible, even when the period without oxygen is short.
Regarding the electro shock therapy, yes, that is true but it starts out assuming that the brains state is 'electrical', which it doesn't have to be at all.
It could be chemical, it could be based on standing waves in the neural tissue, there are a great many ways to store state.
For instance, one of the first computers that ever existed used standing waves in tubes filled with mercury to store its state.
So until we know what that state is and how it is stored we will not know how to reset it reliably, nor will we know if it is possible to restore such a state once it has been 'lost'.
'Grand mal attacks' or seizures seem to have something to do with feedback loops within the brain, cycles where the end result sets the whole thing off once again.
By necessity the brain has to contain many such potential loops and under normal conditions the feedback factor is kept in check, but with the right trigger pattern a series of self re-inforcing patterns can be established.
edit: have a look here: http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dadgrp/research/poc/index.html
there is a lot of interesting information in there, even though it is already old (10 years), the numerical data is still accurate.
First, the neuron models will probably still be adjusted in a century. (For instance, I've seen papers just a few years old which discussed how water really worked; that doesn't mean the understanding of water isn't very, very good.)
Second, the brain researchers claim the research using new tools are going incredibly fast; see the claim in the interview of more information every year -- than in all of the 20th century! (So the article from ten years ago seems a bit outdated -- also, membrane receptors is a hard problem which just recently has even been touched. The Blue Brain people claims that they started with a molecular level emulation of the brain and then optimized it).
(Also note that the Blue Brains researchers are aware of differences between individual cells because of history, etc. They aren't idiots.)
>>The problem with the approach is that a simulation, by definition is not the real thing and that it will always end up being an approximation.
Third, I have a hard time thinking of a better way to learn than research groups like Blue Brain encoding the present knowledge in computer models -- to compare against the real systems. No one expects the models to be perfect at once.
Fourth, I trust the reviewers of the papers the Blue Brain research group writes to do basic reality checks, e.g. glial cell influences (when/if they are found to have a large influence). That would just be a factor of two in complexity, for parallel models like this, Moore's law works well...
Fifth, chemistry is generally slow -- there can't be too much happening in thought/reaction, so most stuff in a neuron's work is "prebuilt"; no, not with memcached but with structural changes while learning. (There is heavy evolutional pressure to optimize for speed.)
How good the emulations will be after refinement etc, is a much later question. But the researchers are evaluating (quite) modular systems "from below" -- they can't be too complex, because there just aren't enough building blocks (i.e. not enough genes).
It is a hard problem, but I don't see a reason why it should be impossible to reach good models. That doesn't matter, what is more important is that the researchers think so, too.
>>Regarding the electro shock therapy, yes, that is true but it starts out assuming that the brains state is 'electrical', which it doesn't have to be at all.
Well, give an alternative mechanism that isn't reset by electrical shocks or cooling down to low temperature (as with some surviving drowning victims in cold water or some operations.) (The point of Grand mal attacks was that I wondered if they were reset mechanisms.)
Note that changes in protein expression would be quite easy to find. And that human nerve cells aren't that different from other animals, which has been experimented quite heavily on. I can't have any ideas, here (also note the "fifth" point above.) Do you have anything except conjecture?
I don't have the time to keep discussing, sorry.
Edit: Cleaned up and was too hurried to mark it up carefully above. Sorry, if anyone ever reads this. :-)
For fun I studied some chemistry and biochemistry a couple of years (I followed the subject before). My girl friend follows e.g. brain research in a similar way.
I'm mostly a fan boy in cellular biology and (for a few years more) less than that in brain research. :-)
And who said HN has a shortage of humor :)
We know that intelligence can beget other intelligence, just like we know that life can beget life. But so far nobody to my knowledge has succeeded in creating artificial life without starting from something else that was already alive.
Intelligence might pose similar challenges.
> to understand AI we must first understand ourselves,
And therein lies the rub. We may get the mechanics down to every last nut and bolt and we may still not understand how intelligence arises. Just like we can not bring a recently deceased human back to life again. We have all the pieces but we do not know how to put the spark back in.
Compare it with a computer analogy, broken for sure, like all analogies, but it may bring the point across:
If an intelligence is a product of both software and hardware, and we seem to transfer the software through our genes and use that to build hardware that comes 'pre-programmed' then that program might not just run on any hardware. It may make lots of assumptions that we can not easily simulate without starting with a live brain and that would be cheating.
If we can not reliably bring people out of a coma, all the pieces are still there and appear to be 'plugged in' then how can we expect to generate an AI for which we do not even have the pieces ?
If I have a computer running an os in ram that I keyed in one fine sunday morning using the bootstrap panel, and which I then destroyed, next switch the machine off while it is working great you would have to know how I got the initial program in there before you could attempt to duplicate it.
Call it the case of the missing scaffolding, the last coupld of billion of years of evolution put that program where it sits, and from what we can see living creatures can pass it to the next generation in one form or another.
But it seems to be terribly difficult to switch the machine back on once it is of.
To me strong AI and life are quite strongly intertwined, I doubt you can have AI without artificial life, and that in and of itself may be quite enough of a challenge.
This is false. Sex produces the DNA. A whole lot more energy/resources go(es) into making an adult brain.
I don't see how the latter follows from the former. The physicality of the mind says nothing of its computability. You're assuming the computationalist axiom that reality is completely computable, which is quite an assumption.
The brain is still a combination of proteins, amino acids, and a few other chemicals. We would just have to move to using chemical computers (which are already being researched)
We already produce hundreds of thousands of them every day. The process is rather fun. As some point the definition of success has been stretched so far as to be meaningless.
I'm pretty sure that computers already play sports (minus the robots) acceptably well.
The person you refer to is not a child and displayed much more sophistication on these issues than any 'rapture of the nerds' advocates I have ever seen.
This sounds like the same kind of argument as "intelligent design" people use. ""What else could there be?" is not a religious argument, it's a perfectly reasonably question, and to suggest that there are physical systems that cannot be recreated by computers shows a lack of fundamental theoretical understanding of computation.
And, of course, you don't need anything close to general intelligence to do well in sports.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room
In sum,
(A1) "Programs are formal (syntactic)." (A2) "Minds have mental contents (semantics)." (A3) "Syntax by itself is neither constitutive of nor sufficient for semantics." (C1) Programs are neither constitutive of nor sufficient for minds.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room#System_and_virtual...