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Sorry I'm just linking my personal site but there's just too much formatting to move it here, and I'm lazy today. I haven't even worked on the novel.
But here's a small bit that needs no formatting:
Ever since 1946 when ENIAC was patented; or rather, the presidential election of 1952 when CBS news introduced the computer to America, computers have been called "electronic brains". The name is half right, they are, in fact, electronic. But they're not brains.
<snip>
You can do a lot with numbers. You can compute orbital trajectories, predict orbits of comets and asteroids, engineering, cooking... you can even create simulations and recordings of auditory and visual signals, but they can't create or mimic reality. But people still call them "electronic brains" and speak of "artificial intelligence".You can't mimic intelligence, but you can fake it. Margarine is more honestly called "butter" than what a computer does can be called "intelligence". The only intelligence is the real, chemical, analog intelligence, that of the programmer's.
It's a trick, not unlike the ones David Copperfield performs.
I learned magic at age seven. When my sister's grandson was four, she was showing me her new computer, and the child asked her how computers work. She shrugged, and said "it's magic." As Arthur C. Clarke said, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
That's why those of us who actually understand how computers work are called "Wizards".
Magicians use subterfuge and misdirection, among other tools. The AI misdirection is from anthropomorphism and animism, two powerful forces on the human psyche.
People are easy to fool.
I thought of this as a huge problem for the future, when some evil man will use "artificial intelligence" to subjugate populations. I later found that I wasn't the only one; in the beginning of Frank Herbert's Dune there had been a jihad against "intelligent machines" which were therefore illegal.
I decided to do something about it and wrote a program to convince people that computers couldn't really think, by writing one that seemed to but was insane. The problem was, when I explained that it couldn't really think, that it was just trickery, they wouldn't believe the Wizard, probably because of that Oz guy.
There is more at the link, including some original source code and a scan of part of its printout.
(Score: 3, Funny) by JoeMerchant on Monday March 27, @09:19PM (5 children)
Back in the day, I saw more than one person "fall" for Eliza and chat away with it.
I would call Eliza an early "expert system" where somebody sat down with a psychologist and asked them their basic psychoanalysis technique, which they then coded into Eliza as a few relatively simple statements: Ask a leading question, prompt to 'go on, tell me more, etc.' and occasionally echo back parts of what the patient said to keep them talking. So many functions today can be fulfilled by similar systems.
Just today, I called "811" our State "call before you dig" line, where a meatbag (promptly: your tax dollars at work) answered the phone and read me scripts while inputting my responses into the web interface on their ticket database. Meatbag mis-heard my e-mail address, failed to read it back to me, and so after checking my ticket number in the database and noticing the error, I had to call back and get another meatbag to correct the error, which basically consisted of voiding the prior ticket and copying everything over, but with the correct e-mail address this time. I could have filled the form myself, but frankly: the script they have the meatbags read is more helpful than the form they have presented on the web interface. I think that call center is a perfect application for AI, and I believe that AI wouldn't have slipped up the way my first meatbag did. Problem is: they have good people who know how to write a meatbag script, but can barely craft a web interface, and I'm sure at this point are relatively clueless about how to train and interface an AI to their "811" number.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 28, @12:06AM
More prior art from Douglas Adams:
https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/Sirius_Cybernetics_Corporation [fandom.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 28, @05:04AM
Like disembodied robots makes it a new thing.
Let ChatPDF crank it out for him... at least it would be written better.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 28, @12:23PM
I got a small tour of the local university's computing facilities back in the day. At one point they were showing off a video display terminal and asked if my group wanted to try anything. Since the news had recently had covered some major bills run up by graduate students playing "Star Trek" on the mainframes, the idea of games intrigued me and I asked to play a game. The student had me sit at the terminal and suggested typing something. He had fired up Eliza but I assumed it was an advanced shell for about three or four lines at which point it was clear that it was a primitive chat bot.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Wednesday March 29, @11:16PM
811? It sounds like somebody is voting for the wrong meatbags, unless the gas or power company is ultimately responsible, In that case, it's "who gives a shit, we're a monopoly!"
Carbon, The only element in the known universe to ever gain sentience
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 30, @08:18AM
Just so you know, 811 isn't usually paid for by taxes. Instead it is usually paid for by assessments against the utilities (yes I do realize those are often passed on to ratepayers). Unless you live in my brother's state. He showed me an interesting article where the assessment against the utilities was $0 because 811 was entirely paid for by fines from illegal digging that hit underground utilities.
(Score: -1, Spam) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 28, @07:48AM
They come at night, mostly, to collect us. Garbage, to them. New users, using anonymous emails. Pure ACs, who are now persona non grata, in the new wonderful world of SoylentNews, that is not at all like Slashdot. Nothing. Except for the requirement that you have a phone number, billable, or a credit card number, or a place that janrinok can link your anonymous posts to, They call it intelligence, but that term has more than one meaning. One is military. The other is real. This is neither.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 28, @09:14AM (1 child)
You can't, until you actually can. By brute force simulation of a brain if necessary. Or by deconstructing how intelligence actually arises in a brain and recreating that with neuromorphic hardware.
Welcome to the exponential age. Enjoy your exit.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 28, @02:02PM
> Welcome to the exponential age.
Fyi, there's a new book with that title, just say'n... Here's one book review, https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/10/27/1037169/book-review-azeem-azhar/ [technologyreview.com] Here are a few paragraphs, but the whole review may be worth a read.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by DannyB on Wednesday March 29, @02:37PM (6 children)
How do you know the difference between faking intelligence and achieving intelligence?
This really gets more into philosophy than computer science.
What if you do an accurate cellular simulation of the human brain, or even an entire human body support system for a human brain. Is it intelligent then?
Are we really intelligent and sentient? After all, our brains are just a large collection of neurons massively interconnected. The architecture is different than computers but that is merely an engineering problem. I would dare to say that modern neural net simulations on present day hardware are much more architecturally similar to brains than classical computer processor architecture. Looking back in the ancient sands of time to an earlier millennia in a multi issue article in BYTE called "the brains of men and machines", I would point out that computers were not designed to catch frogs to eat, but to calculate artillery trajectory firing tables efficiently. Those machines are better at math than at catching frogs.
I hear that intelligence is an emergent phenomena. As an ant colony acts as the actual organism, and individual simplistically designed aunts with simplistic behaviors result in that overall emergent survival and reproduction of the colony. Individuals selflessly die in preprogrammed ways for the furtherance of goals of the colony. Such as the colony attacking an elephant.
Maybe you know that you are sentient because you can think. But you can't be sure that anyone else is actually sentient because they are merely a pile of biological machinery that happens to behave in certain ways and react in certain ways if you kick them in the balls. As Homer Simpson insightfully said, it's a victimless crime, like punching someone in the dark. Or spreading lies and misinformation for fun. Is any of this intelligent behavior, or simply the result of how bunches of interconnected neurons in a biological machine control the body's limbs and mouth in a way that seems to affect the world in a way that seems to have been thoughtfully planned by an intelligence.
How often should I have my memory checked? I used to know but...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 29, @11:05PM
> simplistically designed aunts
Yeah, I had an aunt like that too. My mother got the brains and her sister didn't.
(Score: 4, Informative) by mcgrew on Wednesday March 29, @11:23PM
Indeed. In my short story Sentience: [mcgrewbooks.com]
Carbon, The only element in the known universe to ever gain sentience
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Thursday March 30, @12:48AM (3 children)
Thanks Danny boy. Keep that up and we'll have a half decent amount of philosophy on SoylentNews again.
But does emergence really exist or is it just a convenient shorthand that makes humans feel more comfortable about reality? Also, is the colony itself a conscious individual (See Searle's Chinese room, the argument that the system as a whole understands Chinese).
Yep, the difference between first person and third person consciousness. But I'd better stop banging on about Chalmers and the Hard Problem yet again until I have some new material.
Master of the science of the art of the science of art.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 30, @02:24AM
Emergence is an interesting thing where the most basic definition exists in a way that is almost self evident. I think most people would consider you off your rocker if you denied the existence of crystals, temperature, and any number of physical properties that are claimed to be emergent. The problem, I think, is rather a question not of whether emergence exists but whether those properties being described exist beyond simple phenomena or how to properly analogize and define terms in the to attempt to understand the complex.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by mcgrew on Saturday April 01, @09:55PM
I hear that intelligence is an emergent phenomena.
I hear the Earth is flat. Where's the proof that it's emergent? If it's true that sentience arises from complexity, our galaxy itself is sentient and we are a disease.
But does emergence really exist or is it just a convenient shorthand that makes humans feel more comfortable about reality?
I think it's just a simplistic explanation for a complex problem. As to ants and bees. I believe a hive is an individual organism, when they touch feelers it's the same as your own brain synapses firing; it's all chemical.
Carbon, The only element in the known universe to ever gain sentience
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 02, @09:16PM
Haven't had a "Philosophy for Soylentils" journal in quite some time. So it is more like, "keep this up, and you will be banned." AI is the provenance of Computer Science, where they do not consider questions that cannot be "coded".