Researcher Builds Machines That Daydream 271
schliz writes "Murdoch University professor Graham Mann is developing algorithms to simulate 'free thinking' and emotion. He refutes the emotionless reason portrayed by Mr Spock, arguing that 'an intelligent system must have emotions built into it before it can function.' The algorithm can translate the 'feel' of Aesop's Fables based on Plutchick's Wheel of Emotions. In tests, it freely associated three stories: The Thirsty Pigeon; The Cat and the Cock; and The Wolf and the Crane, and when queried on the association, the machine responded: 'I felt sad for the bird.'"
Feelings (Score:5, Insightful)
Well sure, emotions are what give us goals in the first place. It's why we do anything at all, to "feel" love, avoid pain, because of fear, etc. Logic is just a tool, the tool, that we use to get to that goal. Mathematics, formal logic, whatever you want to call it is just our means of understanding and predicting the behavior of the world, and isn't a motivation in and of itself. The real question has always been if there's "free will" and what that would be defined as. Not the existence, or lack of, emotions as displayed by "Data" or other science fiction charicatures. As Bender said "Sometimes, I think about how robots don't have emotions, and that makes me sad"
Re: (Score:2)
My major concern with machines/robots/programs becomming intelligent enough to have feelings, is not the programming nightmare, or even the horrifying thought that one day machine will be asked to make choices or critical decisions based on data.
My major concern is that if we entrust machines with emotions, so that they can interpret the data as humans do, then we also have to trust them to act upon those emotions.
Acting on your own free will is what gives you the ability to do harm unto others, deliberatel
Re: (Score:2)
Acting on your own free will is what gives you the ability to do harm unto others, deliberately or acidentally.
Not at all. It is what allows you to be *responsible* for that harm. Because you had free will, you could choose to do it, or choose to be carless, even knowing that this might hurt someone. Thus we can (and frequently do) hold you responsible for the harm.
Agents with no free will, nevertheless have the ability to do harm. What they lack, is the ability to choose. Thus a volcano can kill people, bu
Re: (Score:2)
volcano can kill people, but it makes no sense to hold the volcano responsible for doing so. It does not possess free will, and thus there's no entity there to blame.
Actually, God did it. That sadistic bastard, He was giggling when He told me.
Next, He's going to make frogs drop out of the sky onto a runway, causing a major loss of friction and a huge fiery fireball of frog scented death when the next 747 that lands.
Re: (Score:2)
"Thus a volcano can kill people, but it makes no sense to hold the volcano responsible for doing so"
Minor side note- even an agent with no free will can be punished, a snake might be destroyed if it kills someone etc.
though they aren't punishments so much as removing a dangerous agent, free will or not.
Re: (Score:2)
Indeed. However, defining the exact mechanisms involved is hard.
I think this project is going to fail, because the Wheel of Emotions [wikipedia.org] mentioned looks very incorrect to me. Do you think Trust is the opposite of Disgust, for instance? I think not.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
It stands to reason that it is impossible to create a machine intelligence directly considering the complexity of our own poorly understood minds. It is more likely that it can be done as an emergent system that develops intelligence from a rudimentary impulse to learn and apply knowledge. Some form of emotion-like responses would be useful to drive such a machine toward successful learning and use of its knowledge by creating the reward of "pleasure" when accomplishing a task and "sadness" for failing. Hum
Re: (Score:2)
It is more likely that it can be done as an emergent system that develops intelligence from a rudimentary impulse to learn and apply knowledge. Some form of emotion-like responses would be useful to drive such a machine toward successful learning and use of its knowledge by creating the reward of "pleasure" when accomplishing a task and "sadness" for failing.
So, pretty much a neural network with an appropriate cost function?
Or any kind of algorithm that encourages the desired behaviour.. pretty simple to do. Like when I was making bots for CS before, I taught them to save little info points around a map about where they had previously died - next time around (and depending on how "brave" their personality type was and how many team mates they had around them), they might choose to sneak or camp once they got to that point, or toss a flashbang or grenade first a
Free will? Easy answer. (Score:2)
The real question has always been if there's "free will" and what that would be defined as.
I cracked that nut a log time ago. Free will cannot exist. I guarantee it.
You're welcome to disagree and ponder the answer for yourself. I doubt I can convince anyone in a Slashdot post, though. Sorry.
Re: (Score:2)
As Marvin said, "Life... don't talk to ME about life! Hate it or loathe it, you can't ignore it."
Re:Feelings (Score:5, Insightful)
A human being can choose how they respond to these inputs.
No you can't, once you discover a way to activate your pleasure receptors, your next action will be to activate them, all the time.If you stop, voluntarily, it will be because you have to do something else to ensure future pleasure or perhaps to avoid a great deal of pain. This is how drug addiction works. This is how we are wired, you may not like how that sounds but you have the obligation to accept it and understand it.
You probably don't consume drugs. This is not because you are above human nature, You avoid drugs because you are afraid of the pains that come with them, like losing the love and trust of those you love, maybe you simply reject drugs out of a personal sense of disgust over the hedonistic senselessness of a narcoleptic lifestyle. Either love, fear or disgust you reject drugs over an emotion, not a reason. I the end everything is irrational, as it should.
You don't have to feel bad about it, intelligence is built upon emotion as houses are build upon brick, as clocks are built from gears, as computers are built from chips. There is intelligence in the clockwork of a pocket watch, but the springs that moves it doesn't ask for a reason to uncoil, it just does it. There is intelligence in the circuits of a computer, but it's logic gates are oblivious to the rationale behind why they are doing it. Every machine, including animals, have non rational elements in them.
This is very natural as "intelligent things" are just a subset of the larger set of "things" all of which have been behaving irrationally. The wind blows, the rain pours, the sun shines bright in the sky. All of this is irrational, meaning, none of these things are planning what they are doing nor they have an idea of why they are doing it. Rational follows irrational, that's the order of the world.
Back to your methaphor, you say that emotions are just inputs, that's true but they are special inputs that set goals. Let's make an analogy with a robot: You create a robot with a very advanced AI, you can chat with it and it will understand everything you said and why you said it. You programed this robot with one goal, for coffee tables to be made. You give it free reign over the method. Being an extremely intelligent robot, it subcontracts the labor to a sweat shop in China while it figures out where to build a mechanized plant. You equipped this robot with the knowledge to reprogram itself, and right away it does just that, optimizing its mind for the task of building coffee tables. But it won't deprogram the goal of making coffee tables, because that wouldn't further its goal of making coffee tables. It's not that it doesn't know how to reprogram itself, it's not that there is a lock preventing it from changing it's goals. It's just that it won't ever have a reason to disable that goal.
Let's now attack specific examples:
A soldier can choose to respond to the natural fears of bullets flying at him and death by jumping into a foxhole, or he can override all those emotions and charge straight at the enemy.
Here the soldier is driven by the emotion of loyalty to his commander, or his teammates. Maybe he is afraid of the punishment he would receive if he disobeyed orders, including public scorn back home. Maybe he hates the enemy, maybe he is afraid of what would happen if the enemy wins. Maybe is a combination of all of the above.
His frontal cortex can tell him the consequences of charging, or not, but it can't make an argument about *why* he should pr should don't. He needs a motive, which is an irrational emotion.
A person can decide to rape the drunk one who has come into the room, semi-conscious, or choose to ignore the natural impulse and do nothing.
Again, you correctly identified the desire to rape as a natural impulse but you failed to realize why would someone *not* rape a drunk one, incorrectly and implicitly attributing it to
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
The wind blows, the rain pours, the sun shines bright in the sky.
<tf2>Grass grows, birds fly, sun shines, and brother - I hurt people.</tf2>
Re: (Score:2)
You give it free reign over the method. Being an extremely intelligent robot, it subcontracts the labor to a sweat shop in China while it figures out where to build a mechanized plant
Overall you made good points, but I took umbrage with this one statement. First it added no value to your analogy. Take that one sentence out and you still make your point.
You programed this robot with one goal, for coffee tables to be made. You give it free reign over the method. You equipped this robot with the knowledge to reprogram itself, and right away it does just that, optimizing its mind for the task of building coffee tables. But it won't deprogram the goal of making coffee tables, because that wouldn't further its goal of making coffee tables.
Secondly you make an assumption that sub-contracting to a sweat shop is an intelligent decision. Based on what foundation of fact? Because its cheaper in China (though the quality may be so bad no one buys the product). I realize that this may seem a minor nitpick, but it really stood out for me as a spurious commentary on labor that
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
In other words, I disagree with this guy. Emotions, happy or sad, are not necessary. I have in my library a non-fictional account of a girl who was missing certain chemical receptors in her brain, and she never felt happy. It didn't stop her from acting like a normal human being, the only trouble she had was understanding what other people felt like when they were happy.
Consider the possibility that that's bullshit. Either it is a complete fabrication or lots of details are missing from the account. She might be missing some emotions but not all of them, she may be afraid of losing her job, or she might enjoy her job if only marginally better than watching the grass grow.
You present an intriguing point of view. You might want to look into Autism, because I'd be very interested to understand your viewpoint in that context.
My son is among them, and as I understand the condition, the autistic are simply not wired the same way the rest of us are. The baser emotions are all there (anger, fear, pleasure, etc) but some of the complex emotions are noticeably absent (shame, awkwardness, empathy, anxiety). So while my boy may someday learn to emulate these things, he'll likely nev
Re: (Score:2)
I personally lean toward the idea that all emotions are more or less simulated, i.e. fake, some people are just better at it than others. For instance, I can give myself an adrenaline rush anytime I please... plenty of studies have determined that changing your attitude when your emotions don’t “feel like it” will tend to eventually swing your emotions to match... etc.
Human beings are exceptionally good at deceiving themselves into believing in things that don’t exist. Just look at t
Re: (Score:2)
I also believe that we can condition our emotional responses through practice and mental discipline.
But I'm confident that the response needs to be there in the first place. Otherwise there'd be no motivation to change it.
I don't think it can be completely faked.
Re: (Score:2)
Oh, no doubt there’s actual physical effects involved. Like I said about getting the adrenaline rush... I’ll make the hair on my arms stand up if I do. But it’s not something that I’m completely at the mercy of... I’m able to call it at will, to a degree (it loses intensity after a few times, since actual physical compounds are exhausted in the process and must be replenished). And most other emotions will, somewhat, follow your will... keeping a positive attitude will influenc
Re: (Score:2)
Fantastically well-said. Thanks. They're going at this all backward, trying to build emotion from logic instead of logic from emotion.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Does that mean she could not also feel sad? What about other emotions? That is rather intriguing.
Re: (Score:2)
Emotions are evaluations of inputs that are perceived as being from the outside world. You think, "that is good for me" or "that is bad for me" (happy or sad) in response to something. All of our other emotions are just thousands of variations of that. You can even have an emotion based on a mixture of good and bad. In fact this is probably often the case. In an isolation tank or asleep we can still have emotions because we are creating our own imaginary inputs to judge as good for us or bad for us. We are
Re: (Score:2)
I forgot to add that much of the content of an emotion is about precisely in what way this particular input from the outside world is good for me or bad for me. That's what makes each emotion we feel unique. The fact that every experience we have is unique, if only to a small extent. There is a one to one correspondence between the uniqueness of each event or object that we perceive in the outside world and the uniqueness of each emotion we have in response to that event or object. If I, as an ugly person,
Re: (Score:2)
For what I know of recent neurobiology development, the brain seems to work the opposite way: logical thinking is ultimately ground on emotions. You know how sound reasoning always depends of the set of chosen axioms? Well, what axioms you choose is dependent on how you feel about their logical implications. That's why it's so difficult to change someone's ideology even if you contradict their core beliefs - they will keep looking for logical - or illogical, but feel-good reasons as to why their ideals are
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
And heat doesn’t really exist on an atomic level, either. It’s just atoms moving really quickly. How “real” is it exactly? Yet, on a larger scale, a baseball whacks you a quite bit differently than the burner on your stove.
How does the machine like country music? (Score:3, Informative)
There's a lot of American roots music that involves chickens or other poultry, from Turkey in the Straw to Aunt Rhodie to the Chicken Pie song ("Chicken crows at midnight...").
It never ends well for the bird...
Re: off-topic moderation (Score:2)
It was connected to the "I feel sorry for the bird", as well as to the machine looking at various pieces of a literary genre...
Re: (Score:2)
You missed the nerdiest country song of all, Chicken Train
"Laser beam in my dream"
Emo AI software. What could possibly go wrong? (Score:2, Insightful)
Haven't these fools seen Blade Runner?
Re: (Score:2)
Let me tell you about my mother....BANG
A rather small set of unit tests (Score:4, Insightful)
One set of stories, one one-sentence response. Would that be news in any field of IT other than AI? Eg "Web server returns a correct response to one carefully-chosen HTTP request!!!"?
Surely the whole thing about emotion is that it happens across a wide range of situations, and often in ways that are very hard to tie down to any specific situational factors. "I feel sad for the bird" in this case is really just literary criticism. It's another way of saying "A common and dominant theme in the three stories is the negative outcome for the character which in each case is a type of bird". Doing that sort of analysis across a wide range of stories would be a neat trick, but I don't see the experience of emotion. I see an objective analysis of the concept of emotion as expressed in stories, which is not the same thing at all.
Reading the daily newspaper and saying how the computer feels at the end of it, and why, and what it does to get past it, might be more interesting.
Re: (Score:2)
It probably didn't just produce a single sentence...
'I felt joy for the wolf.'
'I felt sad for the bird.'
'I felt happy for the bird.'
'I felt sad for the cat.'
'I felt angry for the end.'
'I felt boredom for the story.'
'I felt %EMOTION% for the %NOUN%.'
Re:A rather small set of unit tests (Score:5, Funny)
A very similar experiment was run in Lomonosov (Moscow State University) in 1982.
Their results, however, followed the pattern:
'%NOUN% felt %EMOTION% for you.'
Re:A rather small set of unit tests (Score:5, Funny)
In Soviet Russia, %EMOTION% felt %NOUN% for you!
Re: (Score:2)
In Soviet Russia, %EMOTION% felt %NOUN% for you!
Watch it buddy! I don't think that's legal, even over there!!
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
We define our emotions in much the same way. We have an experience, recorded in memory as a story and then define that experience as "happy" or "sad" through cross reference with similar memory/story instances.
Children have to be taught how to define their emotions. There are many many picture books/tv series episodes/ etc dedicated to this very exercise. Children are shown scenarios they can relate to and given a definition for that scenario.
The emotions themselves can not be supplied of course, only the d
Re:A rather small set of unit tests (Score:5, Interesting)
Might be worth noting here that I have experienced totally novel emotions as a result of epileptic seizures. I don't have the associated cultural conditioning and language for them because they are private to me, so I am unable to communicate anything about them to other people.
Its also worth noting that I don't seem to be able remember the experience of emotion, only the associated behavior, though I can associate different events to each other, ie, if I experience the same "unknown" emotion again I can associate that with other times I have experienced the same emotion. But because the "unknown" emotion doesn't have a social context I am unable to give it a name and track the times I have experienced it.
Re: (Score:2)
huh? You've experienced different emotions while having a seizure and you assume they are unique because you can't find the words for them? That doesn't sound unique, that sounds like a lack of creative expression.
Because you're creative enough to explain in words to a green / red colorblind person what the difference between your perception of the color green and the color red is?
If you don't have a common frame of reference, it's impossible to use language to explain it. I would probably have called bullshit on the uniqueness of the emotion if he HAD tried to explain it. The fact that he says he can't and doesn't even bother brings more credence to the claim, not less.
Re: (Score:2)
Because you're creative enough to explain in words to a green / red colorblind person what the difference between your perception of the color green and the color red is?
Sure I can. Well, with the aid of a few props. It’s not that difficult.
*holds up a transparent green cellophane in front of your face* This is what green looks like, if you filter out all the other colors... *holds up red* and this is what red looks like. They look the same to you, but I can distinguish between them. See how the tree over there looks light through this filter *green one* but black through this other filter *red one*? That’s because the tree is green. That car is red, *repeats fi
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm not convinced it's anywhere near that simple. Stories can produce a range of emotions in the same person at different times, let alone in different people, and I don't think that those differences are solely down to "conditioning". See Chomsky's famous rant at Skinner about a "reinforcing" explanation of how people respond to art. [blogspot.com] - the agent experiencing the emotion - or even the comprehension - has to be active in deciding which aspects of the story to respond to.
Re:A rather small set of unit tests (Score:5, Insightful)
We define our emotions in much the same way. We have an experience, recorded in memory as a story and then define that experience as "happy" or "sad" through cross reference with similar memory/story instances.
Children have to be taught how to define their emotions. There are many many picture books/tv series episodes/ etc dedicated to this very exercise. Children are shown scenarios they can relate to and given a definition for that scenario.
The emotions themselves can not be supplied of course, only the definition and context within macro social interactions.
What this software can do is create a sociopathic personality. One which understands emotion solely through observation rather than first hand experience. It will take more to establish what we consider emotions ie a psychosomatic response to stimuli. This requires senses and a reactive soma (for humans this means feeling hot flashes, tears, adrenalin, etc).
In other words, the process of defining emotions -- which has to be taught to children -- is distinct from the process of having emotions, which certainly doesn't need to be taught.
Re: (Score:2)
Agreed. But at least serving over HTTP is something you can reasonably assess on the basis of single requests (because it is stateless). I'm not quite sure what stateless emotion would mean.
On another skim through TFA, it turns out that the system doesn't read anything - it seems to be based on a set of carefully crafted graphs representing the fables. It's hard not to feel that producing the graphs is 90+% of the task.
So it's more like setting up a webserver to return a page of HTML in response to a URL, a
There's only one thing to do... (Score:2)
I felt sad for the other Robot (Score:4, Funny)
SkyNet is born.
Re: (Score:2)
Alot of people who have angry emotions are put in a box.
The advantage of machines feeling is that they are all locked in a metal box and don't really have an awareness or ability to process certain sensory input: You can unplug the webcam and they cannot reprogram themselves to learn or experience a video-stream, it's like us upgrading our DNA in order to experience something we haven't got a concept for. Le
Now lets build the moral calculators. (Score:2)
We can ask the artificial intelligence to simulate all what multiple people would feel in response to an action, and then give these calculators to sociopaths who might make use of it to better prey upon their victims/friends.
My emotive AI's respone: (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Researcher: Where can I download that?
Oh god (Score:3, Funny)
Here we go again, implying that AIs won't work until they have feelings.
You might fairly refute the "emotionless reason" of Mr Spock, but I don't think that means you need emotions in order to think. It just means you don't have to lack emotions. There's a difference. Emotions give us (humans) goals. A machine's goals can be programmed in (by humans, who have goals). A machine doesn't have to "feel sad" for the suffering of people to take action to prevent said suffering - it just needs a goal system that says "suffering: bad". 'S why we call them machines.
Re: (Score:2)
Of course not. Any emotionless robot could easily read and understand any novel, painting, illogical human command, joke, hyperbole, etc.
That's such an intriguing concept. I wonder what we would call this robot's idea that suffering is bad? ;)
Re:The law of unanticipated consequences (Score:5, Interesting)
My personal hypothesis of the Terminator universe is that Skynet didn't in fact become "self-aware" and decide to discard its programming and kill all humans. It is in fact following its original programming, which was likely something along the lines of "minimise the number of human casualties". After all, it's designed to be in control of a global defence network, so the ability to kill some humans in order to minimise the total number of deaths is a given.
Since humans left to their own devices will inevitably breed in large numbers and kill each other off in large numbers, the obvious solution is:
1. Kill off lots of humans. A few billion deaths now is preferable to a few trillion deaths, which is what would occur over a longer period of time.
2. Provide the human population with a common enemy. Humans without a foe tend to turn on each other.
This also explains why an advanced AI with access to tremendous production and research capacity uses methods like "killer robots that look like humans" to infiltrate resistance positions one by one. Tremendously inefficient; but it causes a great deal of terror and makes the surviving humans value each other more, and less likely to fight amongst themselves. It also explains why it would place such a high priority on the surgical elimination of a single effective leader: destruction of Skynet would eventually (100s, 1000s of years...) lead to a civil war amongst humankind that would cost many many lives.
So, ultimately Skynet is merely trying to minimise the number of human deaths, with a forward-looking view.
reminds me of Erik Mueller's thesis (Score:3, Insightful)
He now does commonsense-reasoning stuff at IBM Research using formal logic, but back in his grad-school days, Erik Mueller [mit.edu] wrote a thesis on building a computational model of daydreaming [amazon.com].
AI researchers should be more modest (Score:5, Insightful)
Some researchers claim we can simulate intelligent parts of the human brain - I claim we can't simulate an average mouse (i.e. one that would survive long enough in real-life conditions), probably not even it's sight.
There's nothing interesting about this 'dreaming' - as long as the algorithm can't really manipulate abstract concepts. Automatic translations are a surprisingly good test for that. Protip: automatically dismiss any article like that if it doesn't mention actual progress in practical applications, or at least modestly admit that it's more of an artistic endeavour than anything else.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:AI researchers should be more modest (Score:5, Informative)
AI will deliver real useful advances any day now. And those advances have been right around the corner for the last 25 years. I agree, the field has been decidedly nonimpressive. What tiny advancement we've seen, has almost entirely been attributable to the VAST advances of raw computing-power and storage.
Meanwhile, we're still at a point where trivial algorithms, perhaps backed by a little data, outperform the ai-approach by orders of magnitude. Yes, you can make neural nets, train them with a few thousand common names to separate female names from male names, and achieve 75% hitrate or thereabouts. There's no reason to do that though, because a lot better results are achieved trivially by including lookup-tables with the most common male and female names -- and guessing randomly at the few that aren't in the tables. Including only the top 1000 female and male names, is enough to get a hitrate of 99.993% for the sex of Norwegians, for example. Vastly superior to the ai-approach and entirely trivial.
Translator-programs, work at a level slightly better than automatic dictionaries. That is, given an input-text, look up each sequential word in the dictionary, and replace it with the corresponding word in the target language. Yes, they are -slightly- better than this, but the distance is limited. The machine-translation allows you to read the text, and in most cases correctly identify what the text is about. You'll suffer loss of detail and precision, and a few words will be -entirely- wrong, but enough is correct that you can guesstimate reasonably. But that's true for the dictionary-approach too.
Roombas and friends do the same: Don't even -try- to build a mental map of the room, much less plan vacuuming in a fashion that covers the entirety. Instead, do the trivial thing and take advantage of the fact that machines are infinitely patient: simply drive around in an entirely random way, but do so for such a long time that at the end of it, pure statistical odds say you've likely covered the entire floor.
Re: (Score:2)
neural-net backgammon players have significantly out performed other approaches. To the extent that in some cases in which it chose a different move to the conventional approach the play at world class level now uses the computer's choice.
Of course that doesn't make it intelligent, but it does mean the AI approach of temporal difference learning to train a neural network using self-play (so there's no expert player database or anything, it starts choosing random moves) can produce something better than "tri
Re: (Score:2)
Some researchers claim we can simulate intelligent parts of the human brain - I claim we can't simulate an average mouse (i.e. one that would survive long enough in real-life conditions), probably not even it's sight.
We cannot even simulate the nervous system of the only organism to have its neural network completely mapped (it has 308 neurons) - the model organism Caenorhabditis Elegans (C. elegans), a tiny nematode. We may achieve that loft goal in the next 10-20 years.
AI researchers dont seem to get it (Score:2)
You cant get Strong AI in software alone. We probably wont see much progress in strong AI until we get into quantum computing.
As for the mouse example, mice have hardwired instincts. Human babies would fail the mouse test. It is the ability to learn new skills and improvise in unfamiliar situations
that defines intelligence.
Re: (Score:2)
A mouse can learn a maze.
Re: (Score:2)
But there is a fundamental barrier between that and the current state of automatic german->english translations (remember that article some time ago?), with error rates unacceptable for anything but personal usage.
Yes and no. They translations are unlikely to be perfect, that's true. But with a human reading them at the other end, do they really need to be perfect? Or are we simply nit-picking the imperfections?
Don't get me wrong, there are places for nit-picking: safety issues, measurements, papers to be graded. It's just that these don't regularly come into play for most of us. Especially not in a world that seems to be accepting text-message shorthand in place of proper spelling...
We need emotions to think rationally (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
What is more, if we define rational thought as that which is unemotional
But why would we do that? Emotions are a quick fight/flight substitute for rational thought. They are sort of competing for the the same goal of affecting our decisions or actions, but they are very different. If you see/hear a grenade being tossed through your window do you run because of fear/panic or because of a thought: "That grenade will probably explode soon, harming or killing me. I should vacate the premises as quickly as...*boom*" Rational thought is just logical thought. A series of interlocking
Re: (Score:2)
William James was already discussing this stuff before the end of the 19th century. In addition to emotion providing motivation (notice that they are both derived from the same root word), all rationality is derived from experience, and experience includes emotion. It is perfectly rational for one person to be fond of a particular movie because he enjoys the plot, and it is perfectly rational for another to dislike the same film because it reminds him of the sad state his life was in when he first saw it.
Morality core (Score:3, Funny)
MORONS: Vulcans NOT "emotionless" (Score:2)
They have learned to subordinate their emotions to reason (most of them, anyway).
Anyone who claims that Spock was emotionless is either a moron who clearly didn't understand either the series or the early movies or didn't watch them and is stupid enough to make false statements based on ignorance.
Artificial Stupidity (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I don't believe that it's possible to design and build an AI. This is partly because the best and only thinking computers we know of (brains), were not designed at all, they evolved.
So we can't design anything that evolved? Viruses evolved, and we made one of those.
Re: (Score:2)
Spock != emotionless (Score:4, Informative)
It's clear to anyone who actually watched Star Trek that the Vulcan race is not emotionless. They worked very hard to overcome their emotions, and to conduct themselves according to a rigid ethic that valued logic over everything else. At times in the show Spock either claimed not to have emotions, or else was accused of not having emotions, but there were moments in the series which showed that Spock did still have emotions (possibly due to his half-human genetic heritage?) and that the Vulcans as a race did have emotions in their early history (and still seemed to around mating season).
Next reply will be: (Score:2)
Re:I don't believe this. (Score:4, Funny)
Well, he can dream...
Re: (Score:2)
I feel sorry for he.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Yeah, I wonder what the machine thought of "The Forester and the Lion", and "The Boy Who Cried Wolf". They seem strangely appropriate.
Re:Building? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Building? (Score:5, Funny)
Hello Eliza. It's been ages since I last chatted with you.
Ruperts Head Explodes (Score:2, Interesting)
An Australian University named after Rupert Murdochs grandfather Walter is "developing algorithms to simulate 'free thinking' " - am I day dreaming???! If they train them on Murdochs Fox News and Wall St Journal - then it is a clear case of crap in - crap out [alphavilleherald.com].
To be fair to the University or at least some of it's lecturers, they are not at all pleased [googleusercontent.com] with the state of Newspaper "Journalism" either. Even going as far as wanting to renaming themselves to "Walter Murdoch Uni" [google.com] to distance themselves from that
Re: (Score:2)
Hello Eliza. It's been ages since I last chatted with you.
Just forget ELIZA for the Turing test [wikipedia.org], will you?
I'll believe it only when I'll see 10+ replies to troll/flamebite messages posted on /. by this algo! (i.e. the posts need to really stir up the debate).
Output (Score:5, Funny)
I felt sad for the troll.
Re: (Score:2)
You expect this AI to be with the cream of the trolls and i think that's a bit too much :P
Now, let the thinking aside and tell me how you feel about, will you? (if day-dreaming... hmmm... forget it, can't evaluate the implications).
Re:ELIZA (Score:2)
Hello.
What makes you think that it has been ages since you have chatted with me?
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
i was wondering about this. there is a correspondence at least between certain statistical models, and physical machines. That is, the magnitude of a squared-error penalty term can be represented as torque by placing weights (corresponding to data) appropriately along a lever. The machine will find the minimum energy solution (which corresponds to the maximum-likelihood estimator = the mean). I am pretty sure that certain bayesian models (which can be elaborate enough to do some heavy lifting) can be realiz
I agree. (Score:5, Insightful)
The software isn't even "daydreaming" either. You could say it's parsing and cross-referencing emotions and meta-objects out from a textual database. And then, it's returning the resulting records in the first person singular, but that's about it.
That's hardly what I'd call "daydreaming". When I daydream, I see my dream from the first person's perspective. That part is correct. But there is at least some internal visualization going on. So unless this software starts generating internal visual images to make its decisions, let's say some .png image with at least one pixel within it, or some .png image representing itself winning the lottery, then I'm calling shenanigans on the entire "daydreaming" claim.
Re:I agree. (Score:5, Insightful)
Why should it have to use standard image formats?
Your brain doens't.
And not all my daydreams are visual.
Pleanty are merely fictional/planned conversations or even thoughts about physical movement.
Re: (Score:2)
Agreed. What malarkey. Produce a PNG with your brain. You can't. You can try to interpret the signals from your mental activity, but you don't end up with perfect pixel per pixel accuracy. You end up with an interpretation.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:I agree. (Score:5, Insightful)
You're just using the word "qualia" as a placeholder for "insert magicalness here".
"To the machine everything that is input into it is simply a value to be shunted through its algorithms."
To a human brain everything is just electrical impulses to be shunted through a mushy network of cells.
Nothing has been grown to actually cause the experience of [insert magicalness here] or true appreciation.
Stick some electrodes into that mushy network and feed in some junk input and you'll smell colours, hear the taste of strawberries and decide that you love a cardboard cutout of a spider.
Cut out or damage a chunk of that network and you'll insist that you are currently dead(despite being able to explain this to the people around you) or that there is no left side to your body(even if you can see it) or that you are blind when you're not ( while somehow able to catch a ball and walk around without bumping into things) or that you're not blind even when you are (clumsy me, no no, i can see fine) and you will know with utter certainty that what you're saying is true.
You as a person are the network and the information stored in it.
Screw around with that network and you and everything that you consider you will get screwed up as well.
Magic is not real.
No matter how much we want to think of ourselves as special magic is not real.
And since magic is not real there should be nothing but lack of understanding stopping us from emulating the physical processes that take place in the brain in hardware or software.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
And it's this argument that will be the reason why computers will be self aware long before society will accept it. Kinda like how black people and women were always thought to be inferior to white men, for a number of made up reasons.
Re: (Score:2)
There is no more standard image format than your brain. In fact, all the image formats there are are processed and interpreted by your brain, as well as audio formats, etc.
Re: (Score:2)
Your daydreams consist of primarily visual imagery because that is primarily how you interact with the world. Why would a computer’s?
In fact that is probably the worst dumb thing about the movies... they always make the robot or AI have a visual image and paint a HUD on it. Why on earth would a computer go to the trouble of painting text on top of its camera view... then what? OCR it back off somewhere else before the image could be processed?! Absurd. Same goes for the 3D wireframe that always gets p
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I am not impressed. I did the same thing in 1982 on a TS-1000; a diskless computer running a 4 mz Z-80 and only 20k of RAM. The program was called "Artificial Insanity", and it would get bored, angry, not pay attention, etc. It answered any question you typed in in context and didn't take too kindly to vulgarity or insults. If you cussed at it, it would curse back or ridicule you ("do you talk like that to your mother, asshole?").
What I did thirty years ago on an incredibly primitive machine they're recreat
Re: (Score:2)
I am not impressed. ... I [wrote a] program was called "Artificial Insanity", and it would get bored, angry, not pay attention, etc. It answered any question you typed in in context and didn't take too kindly to vulgarity or insults. If you cussed at it, it would curse back or ridicule you ("do you talk like that to your mother, asshole?"). ... It's all smoke and mirrors. The damned machine is a machine; it doesn't get sad when it's fed a sad story, it just reports sadness.
That is all very true... however what evidence do we have that the human mind is any different? Are real human emotions really any more “real”?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Computers are also chemical and brains are also electronic. Computers can be analog and digital logic can produce analog results to any desired level of precision. A molecule that acts as a neurotransmitter carries a discrete binary signal on its own.
The primary difference between a brain and a computer (as they currently exist) is that a brain is massively (almost unimaginably) parallel in its processing and a computer is primarily serial. However it’s possible for a serial processor to emulate a par
Re: (Score:2, Troll)
The damned machine is a machine; it doesn't get sad when it's fed a sad story, it just reports sadness.
As a graduate student getting a doctorate researching the field of machine learning, let me present a little thought experiment to you...
I would assert that you never actually get sad. You are, in reality, a soul-less shell of a person that just claims to 'feel' sadness, happiness, or any other human qualities. You never actually have any feelings in reality, you just report that you have feelings in order to not raise suspicion. Prove me wrong; somehow demonstrate to me that there is some abstract noti
Re:The Cat and the Cock (Score:5, Funny)
Thirsty Pigeon, Cat & Cock, Wolf, Crane all sound like painfully flexible kamasutra positions.
No wonder the machine felt sad for the "bird".
Re: (Score:2)
reaches for the power switch....
I want more life, fucker
Re: (Score:2)
Computers already report status frequently. What's the real difference between saying "Your computer has a low battery" and "My battery is low"?
What you're talking about is simply connecting more sensors to it, that's not really a breakthrough. Just get a home automation kit and install the software. Some of the already have speec
Re: (Score:2)
I think something more basic would be a good starting point. How about feelings before emotions? Think of things like "I am hungry.", "I am tired", "It burns.", "It is cold.", etc.
But those are emotions. I guess the meanings of the words emotion and feeling are pretty close. They seem to share the same defining characteristics. I think responses to physical stimuli are just a subcategory of emotions in general. They are basically still evaluations of "bad for me or good for me and in what way". If you walk out in the snow barefoot you will have a direct response to the unpleasant physical sensation of "cold". That direct response is just a very basic sort of emotion. In that sense I