Bits The story of artificial intelligence

Very interesting article BT.

I'm shocked that you managed to write the whole thing without mentioning Skynet once

 

@fodder

" Maybe, what we are trying to think of as AI, is self awareness. Once something is self aware, it becomes more self guided in it's decisions about the world it inhabits."

You have expressed this perfectly! This is the exact nature of consciousness, self awareness that we find in ourselves and, to a far lesser degree in other species. In fact, it is an evolutionary necessity.
Simply the navigational facility which enables an organism to interact optimally with its environment.
in,say, a bacterium it is miniscule, in w worm, tiny. In ourselves, because if our incomparable level of interaction with the "external" worlld it is humongous.

So, even today, computer systems that have sensors that feed back information of the external world and of themselves can be said to have some very small degree of self-awareness, though probably rather less that a bacterium. At the bottom end could even just about include such a device as a thermostat.

However, with respect to AI in general, it is, in my view, not likely to arise to any significant degree from any computer lab but, quite imminently, from the process of self-assembly that can be already seen as a work-in-progress as what we at present call the internet.

Consider this:

There are at present an estimated 2 Billion internet users.
There are an estimated 13 Billion neurons in the human brain.

On this basis for approximation the internet is only one order of magnitude below the brain.

That is a simplification, of course. For example:

Not all users have their own computer. So perhaps we could reduce that, say, tenfold.
The number of switching units, transistors, if you wish, contained by all the computers connecting to the internet and which are more analogous to individual neurons is many orders of magnitude greater than 2 Billion.

Then again, this is compensated for to some extent by the fact that neurons do not appear to be binary switching devices but can adopt multiple states.

Without even crunching the numbers, we see that we must take seriously the possibility that the internet may well be comparable to a human brain in processing power. And, of course, the degree of interconnection and cross-linking is also growing rapidly.

From a quite different evolutionary perspective we can also see that there is a very good case to be made for this entity to become a new, and predominant, phase of the on-going evolutionary "life" process that is traceable back to the formation of the chemical elements in stars and supernovae.

This broad evolutionary model is outlined, very informally, in "The Goldilocks Effect: What Has Serendipity Ever Done For Us?", a free download in e-book formats from the "Unusual Perspectives" website

 

Well, this is a fascinating story, and one that hits me quite close to the heart.

I am currently living in rural Africa, running an internet cafe and teaching centre, and coming to terms with developing attitudes towards technology, and how things slip and slide in and out of public acceptance. In the UK (where I'm from) we have grown up and become accustomed to having "machines" that help us in many ways, and although this isn't AI, the fact that nowadays I can tap a few keys on my phone, and arrive home later to find that the new series of a TV show that was aired in America just a few hours before has been ripped, uploaded, then downloaded, unzipped and placed onto my media centre, and all I have to do is sit in front of the screen and watch it. Just ten years ago this wasn't such a "normal" or feasibly possible endeavour, even for geeks.

Our world is a fabricate one. Even those of us that live "rurally" in Europe are only a maximum of a few kilometres away from a monstrosity of engineering that we call a city or town. This is an entirely frabircated environment, largely automated already, and the machine that drives it is already intelligently making decisions for us all the time, giving us more time to play, waste money and forget what we're really here for.

THe pursuit of happiness drives our wanton need for entertainment and consumerism, yet our own happiness is directly affected by such desires, and forgetting where the money comes from, accessibility to technology has made us ever more lazy and incapable of realising our own potential,.

Put yourselves into my shoes, and I live in an area where people have not grown up with landlines and universally watched TV and radio, and has suddenly been given a mobile phone. Whereas we had decades to build a culture of telephonic use and practice, your average African has a cheap nokia, and can now magically speak to anyone, wherever they are. THis changes their attitude towards the technology, and gives them an opportunity that we have taken for granted and missed completely. The mobile phone to my friends is their main point of contact, but also their email account, their friend list, their facebook access and also more recently their wallet and credit card, all rolled into one. Most don't have a computer at home, or at work (if they are lucky enough to have a job at all). We as westerners have shrugged off the need for such massive integration because we are "scared" of it, or the powers that be have decided that they won't make enough money out of us to risk implementing its adoption. Your average iphone user has no idea how powerful their "toy" is, yet I know people who get far more done with a basic internet-capable 2G handset than your average office type who just wants the new best thing in town and buys an android or iphone or blackberry or ipad, and believes they are living in the future.

We may not have robots yet, but the technology has already taken over our lives, and even when there is little water or sanitation, the farthest reaches of the planet are no longer far reaches, but a single cell-tower away from everything else, and when the button gets pushed, it will affect everyone on the planet equally and indiscriminately.

AI is something that is fairy tale, that is hollywood, that is fictional, but within that vision of a future ridden with robots lies a truth that we are already heading towards, that technology drives us, not the other way around, and perhaps the machine we should be more scared of is our own imagination, or conversely for those of us who believe that arguing over the 50p tax cut is going to save the planet, ultimately will become our own demise as normal people over the world realise that the power resides wtihin them, and an educated man with an internet connection should be feared far more than the politicians or warmongers of the past.

The game of the future is ours, not the machines, but what I will predict is that it won't be london or washington holding the cards....

 

or Morpheus and Trinity...

 

Compelling arguments, from someone who in past discussion has shown:
- He does not understand the difficulties in defining "intelligence;
- He does not understand brain function (not that old chesnut of "we only a small part of our brain" again);
- He does not understand how computers and code work;
- He does not understand evolution, chaos theory, nonlinear dynamics, emergence etc.;
- bases his entire argument on the belief that intelligence is the result of a God-given soul and therefore only humans are intelligent. Oh, and you can't clone humans for that reason either.

To emphasise the cogency of his argument he then finishes with an image or video involving monkeys, gay sex and/or penises.

OK, thehippoz, hush now; grown ups are talking. And the next time you post any inappropriate image you'll enjoy a week's suspension, incrementing each time you repeat the offence.

 

That's very nice post and very nice discussion related toThe story of artificial intelligence. I am looking forward for your next post.

 

Oh god, I've accidentally connected my Raspberry Pi to my radio controlled Dalek and its ran amok, luckily I made it upstairs before it used its vaporising suction cup on me. It's down there now shouting " The end for mankind is nigh, you will all be exterminated...EXTERMINATE...EXTERMIN........", oh he's stopped. Luckily the batteries I used were from the Pound Shop and not Duracells.