danieltiger

anyone out there read "the age of intelligent machines" or "the age of spiritual machines"

From what I've read of the former book and the incredibly accurate forecasts he has made, I am very excited about what he predicts in "the age of spiritual machines" and I'm looking forward to thinks like nanotechnology, "real" virtual reality, and artificial intelligence.

I mean who can resist the idea of living forever inside a computer?

What're your thoughts on the subject?

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sometimes even the president of the united states has to stand naked

battlemouth

what i found most interesting was that soon computers will be used to create food and that computers will far surpass the human brain by ludacris amounts, computer battlemouth will be one hot kid.

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like a bullet through a flock of doves

Easytiger

I dunno, I was pretty put off by The Age of Spiritual Machines. It seemed pretty obvious to me after reading it that Ray Kurzweil was really looking forward to the day when he could enter into a deep and loving relationship with a piece of software. It was a bit icky.

Don't get me wrong, the man is a great inventor and something of a wizard with computers, but I don't really think I'd like to live in the world that he is predicting.

battlemouth

you know i go back in forth, between hating computers and loving them. and you're right, It sounds way too good to be true.

the whole virtual reality prostitution thing was certainly weird
and what's up with the conversations? does he think he's plato?

And the problem with more and more networking and communication comes these huge walls. I mean who on earth is exactly the same person online as they are in the real world? No one. Online you can be whoever the fuck you want to be. And when I meet people I like to know who they are. And I like knowing it's real.

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like a bullet through a flock of doves

JazzmanAl

If computers were to become powerful enough to provide a reality for us, what would be the point of living? Part of the reason for being alive, in my opinion, is having to work for what you want. If there was a machine to give it to you with little or no work, why want it?

This from the guy who spends most of his time in front of his computer.

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I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.
-The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, T.S. Eliot

Your dumber then me.

CSflim

What makes you assume that the human brain is algorithmic?

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Stare At The Sun

Not to be dumb, but uh, timeframe here?

danieltiger

within the next 100-200 years

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sometimes even the president of the united states has to stand naked

CSflim

No way. without a single shadow of a doubt.

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danieltiger

well if you look at the exponentially increasing rate of growth in the capacity and speed of personal computers then it seems like it'll be even sooner

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sometimes even the president of the united states has to stand naked

CSflim

Moore's law is staring to fade. Transistors are getting to the size where it is becoming increasingly difficult to discern signal from no.
The only light at the end of the tunnel is quantum computing, which ate the moment is far from impressive. Major research needs to be done in this area.
Even if a quantum computer is built proper, it still signifies an upper limit to how small/fast computers can be made. There is a definite boundry that cannot be surpassed.

To analogise: The world population is currently growing at an exponetial rate. Do you think that this means that such growth will continue indefinately? By year 2100 will we all be standing shouler to shoulder across the globe?

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Johnny Rotten

The technological singularity doesn't paint such a rosy picture, unfortunately:
http://www.ugcs.caltech.edu/~phoenix...inge-sing.html

Just something to add to the mix, not exactly a counterpoint.

CSflim

Further to my post above:

The A.I. enthusiasts are all putting forward the amazing power that we will have when our hardware catches up to the processing power of the brain.
It is implied that the barrier to The Human Computer is purely a hardware one.
Also it always seems that they want to "jump in at the deep end". Why start at the "pinnacle"...why try to emulate human intelligence?
If the barrier to "proper" A.I. is purely that of computational power, then why don't we have semi-intelligent computers around?
I mean our current computers certainly far surpass the processing power of simpler animals...yet we are equally incompetent in emulating their intelligence.
Why don't we have a believable robot dog at the moment? Sony's toy not withstanding.
Take a look at the robotic “tinker toys” being used in A.I. research at the moment. Not to take away from their research...some very important work is being done....but the “intelligence” of said robot pales in comparison to something as simple as an insect.
If you look at current A.I. research, the vast majority of what you come across could probably be described as misguided at best.

Now, I am not a ludite. I am not a nay-sayer. I love technology, and am always fascinated by what it has to offer the world. I have always been interested in how technology can redefine our experience of the world. I am studying Computer Science in college at the moment for precisely that reason.

I think the reason that I am so sceptical of the grandeous predictions of A.I. enthusiasts is that they are constantly focused on the speed/memory of the available hardware. It is assumed that the human computer is inevitable...it's just a matter of time.

They makes the damnable logical fallacy of making a completely unfounded assumption.
What makes them so sure that intelligence can be recreated even in principle by a computer? This issue is very rarely, if ever, addressed by these people. Instead we are constantly quoted figures of Gigaflops and statements of Moore's Law. This to me is the epitome of being misguided....not seeing the wood for the trees.

Also, another major problem with the current A.I. phenomena is the confusion in terms that it generates. A.I. research is one of the "In Vogue" and sexy areas of research, especially when it comes for looking for grants.
Because of this, many, perfectly viable in their own right, research projects end up being "dressed up" as A.I. research. This adds a very much unneeded confusion to the matter.
The biggest offender has got to be research on Expert Systems. To me, A.I. and Expert Systems are two fundamentally different topics, with nothing more than a tentative link between them.
People researching in these fields don't seem to possess the clarity of thought required to see what their ultimate goal is. Many people who believe they are working on A.I. are really only working on an over-hyped Expert System.

For instance one of the great success stories of A.I. is Deep Blue, the chess machine that beat Gary Karsparov in the late eighties.
To me this is an impressive feat, and it really shows the incredible things that can be done with these machines. But it is hardly intelligent is it?.
I mean, you can’t claim that Deep Blue had any understanding of the game of chess.
The only thing that Deep Blue had was speed. It could play through all of the various future possible games that could be played, and then make it’s choice based on the statistically most advantageous move. It didn’t play chess in an “intelligent” way. It didn’t think....Oh “Oh look...Gary is after moving his bishop...I think that he’s about to try and take my rook...I had better move it out of that square”, etc. You get my point.

I believe that creating human intelligence on a computer, is not just difficult in practice, but impossible in principle. I do not believe that our brains are nothing more than organic digital computers. That being said, I do not believe that it would be impossible, in principle to create an intelligent machine. I don’t see that there is anything “magical” in human intelligence. We should be able to create an artificial brain, at least in principle. However this machine would not be a Turing Machine. It would have to take advantage of the various non-computational aspects of nature.

Whether or not we will be able to create such a hypothetical machine, is however a different question. Certainly not in the immediate future. We are currently very much in the dark about so many of the vital aspects that would be involved with the construction of such a machine.

The first, most obvious problem, is the fact that we know so little about the operation of the brain. Now I’m not trying to claim that our aim should be to “reverse engineer” this machine, but rather A.I. research needs to be strongly coupled with neurophysiology research. Not enough cross-fertilization of ideas is going on at present, mainly because the disciplines are so very different in their current form.

Secondly, and perhaps more importantly is our lack of knowledge of physics. Why is it, that we make the assumption that we currently have the physics to describe the actions of the brain? I think that we will need to come up with a unified physical theory before we can put any serious consideration into creating intelligence in the lab. In particular, we need a fuller theory of quantum physics, which in my opinion, is, in its current form nothing more than a “working model” that we can use, until we come to a more fundamental understanding. (Such a claim would not make me popular among the current batch of quantum physicists, but there you go). I would liken our current quantum theory to that of Newtonian gravity, which was only a limiting case of General Relativity.
For more on this point of view, that we will need a Grand Unified Theory before we can hope to fully understand the workings of the mind, I strongly recommend The Emperor’s New Mind by Roger Penrose.

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The.Lunatic

winnar. Artifical intelligence will never become a reality. At least not in our lifetime.

I beleive that conciousness as we know it being aware, being able to ask why am i here. Is unique to the human brain. Its structure its illogical tendencies.

Ever wonder why there was billions and billions of dollars into artifical intelligence research a few years back, and its almost completely dried up, and is regarded as a hopeless pursuit by many of the doctors in our higher education institutions.

Nanobots will be a great advent to human survivablity (already at a rediculous level considering our biological disadvantages ) when implemented. Ever read the book PREY by michal crition or whatever his name is. Such BS. Simple terminal velocity physics restrict nanobots to very slow velocities, so you don't have to worry about swarms of these things attacking you like in his book.
You could easily stroll out of the way of the cloud.

Virtural reality is a possiblity, but i don't believe anybody in our generation will be able to successuflly interface the human brain with a computer system.

When biological sciences, and computer sciences really merge we might experience some really profound advances, but thats easier said than done.

Evoloution fanboy

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Proud memeber of the Insomniac Club.

CSflim

Anyway, I only now realise that the length of my last post might be seen as a bit excessive, to the extent of being offputting.

So to sum it up:
Why don't we have belivable robotic animals, given that our current technology far outperforms the computational abilities of these lower animals?
Why is it taken for granted that when our technology arrives to levels of power to match the human brain's computational ability that A.I. proper will appear overnight?

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CSflim

I declare this thread: Owned!

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BentNotTwisted

Lunatic, I have to assume you mean two way communication between a human brain and a computer. Research has already been done showing the capability of a mouse to move an electronic cursor on a computer screen. How long can it be before humans are able to use their brains as input devices for a computer? I realize humans won't turn the brain into a computer output device for centuries, if ever, but just being able to enter this reply by thinking about it would be an amazing acheivement.

CSflim

More recently, they have connected a robot (third) arm to a monkey's brain.
It can control it, close the hands, and use it to pick up things. (The arm is not physically grafted to the monkey or anything like that).

At a glance this seems incredible...don't get me wrong, it is an amazing achievement, but it is important to realise how it was done. It was not a case of "wire this IO line to this neuron...this line to that neuron, etc." That would require a VERY accurate understanding of how the brain works (which needless to say we are no where near).

The monkey was first taught to use the robotic arm, using a standard joy stick. It was engaged in playing various games. All the while its brains patterns were being scanned and being recorded, as were the movements of the joystick. After enough data was collected, it was crunched, trying to find correlations...e.g. the following brain patterns occur everytime he wants to bend the arm this way...a catalogue of these various patterns-actions was made, and then they disconnected the joystick, and connected the robot arm, not to the joystick, but to the computer recieving the brain scans,

You can obviously see how this is a fundamentally different process to brain-computer interfacing as is oft portrayed in science fiction.

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macro

It's been years since I've read that book, and cannot remember much of it in detail, but I found it quite inspiring. Some of his ideas definitely stood alone, but some were the culmination of a lot of common thought at the time. That of course is fine though I wish I could remember more about the book as it prompted quite a few deep conversations amongst my friends...