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I've done a little research into some of the anti-Rosennean AI
enthusiasts like Ben Goertzel and Greg Chaitin, spurred on by Aloisius'
deconstruction of Goertzel's argument. I've met Greg Chaitin, when at a
conference in Santa Fe, with my father, in the early 1990's. My assessment of
Chaitin is that he's been completely swallowed by the machine metaphor. He's all
math and engineering with too little knowledge of biology and he's convinced
himself that biology is expendable. OK. Whatever blows your hair back. I think
he should go right on trying as hard as he can to do it his way. As my father
used to say about people like that; it keeps them out of trouble.
Ben Goertzel is different. I find him vastly more
interesting because his knowledge base is far wider and his curiosity is still
way bigger than his arrogance-- as far as I can tell, anyway. He's got a
fascinating imagination. But I think he's accepted a few too many preliminary
conclusions too soon, which means he's stopped questioning them. If so, then
he's doing what I diagnosed as the main problem of AI enthusiasts: He's
forgetting the human factor. The reason Artificial Intelligence looks real to us
is precisely because its a bunch of chunks of real intelligence--
taken from human thought processes and plugged into a machine capability. The
question all AI enthusiasts seem to be asking is; When do you have enough
transplanted pieces of human intelligence to make it a complete and independent
artificial intelligence?
If my father's gut instinct is correct, the answer is: Never. You
can't reach infinity by accretion. Science in the reductionist mode cannot
create life it can only manipulate life. So it can splice DNA and transplant
organs and breed weird hybrids and so on. Computing in the reductionist mode is
doing the same exact thing, with intelligence or consciousness; splicing and
transplanting. But reductionism can never approach or understand complexity
because it destroys the main aspects of a complex system by reducing it; the
organization and the causal impacts that the organization generates. It's
the organization that brings infinity with it. You can't even study it if
you've destroyed it before you begin! Conscious intelligence is a complex
system within a complex system within........ and they're transplanting pieces
of it into a simple system; a machine.
But hey, if you can make it mimic human intelligence convincingly
enough, you'll probably get that grant money.
Judith
Tim Gwinn wrote:
Ah! That is a marvelous way to view it! Yes, yes - the human mind closes
the
loop and breaks off the incipient infinite regress of syntactic referents in the software; but only when the two are taken as a complete system: the "chimerical Unum"! Very nice! Regards, Tim Judith Rosen wrote:
One thing AI enthusiasts keep forgetting is the human factor; what my
father
referred to as the "chimerical system of human-and-computer or human-and-internet". When people are using the internet and/or computational technology, there really IS an "artificial intelligence" created by the combination. No single human being would be capable of the kind of knowledge base or speed of thought or global reach that these technologies give us. (Although Google reminds me a lot of my father in it's ability to answer questions and bring up all kinds of ancillary subjects of interest...) We use technologies to augment our natural capacities, which turns us into various chimerical systems of human/technology. So, with the Semantic Web up and running, and human beings manipulating it to extract information that they need for their own pursuits, THERE'S the entailment that was lacking in the internet as a separate, discrete system. The human mind closes the entailment loop. The Semantic Web is a Life Sciences project-- in order that scientific data will be searchable and retrievable in a much more precise and comprehensive way. The capability that will give individual human minds is going to be huge. The whole concept of E Pluribus Unum is one of pooling resources into one really versatile, creative, capable chimerical system. The internet gives each individual the opportunity to turn themselves into a chimerical "Unum"... |