rigorousintuition.ca

Posted: **Mon Jul 08, 2013 9:20 am**

The computer, mobile phone or tablet you are reading this text this on, has at it's core a chip which is ultimately based on a binary On / Off logic - the 'bit'

Quantum Mechanics is driven by an underlying different description, emerging from eg the famous Double Slit Experiment.

This is a superb (short) explanation of it

The Quantum Mechanical anaology of the 'bit' is the 'qubit' - this can be On, Off and (On and Off at the same time)(!)

This is a very very weird concept.

People have started building computers based on building blocks of 'qubits' rather than 'bits'
These computers will enormously powerful in doing things at the same time (aka parallel processing) -

Why is this very very important?
Because it will allow rapid processing of absolutely enormous amounts of data at the same time.

100 second explanation

Q But this is just in it's infancy, yes?
A It is a very very rapidly growing infant

The person who is at the epicenter of this - the Bill Gates / Steve Jobs of Quantum Computing
Quantum Journey - D-Wave Chief Scientist, Eric Ladizinsky
27 minutes

A quote from the yT comments sections
"Ladizinsky is, by any measure, a person of extremely high intelligence. But like many such people throughout history, Ladizinsky fails to have the foresight to recognize the full implications of the technology he's building. And those implications are so far-reaching and dangerous that they may actually lead to the destruction of humanity."

Posted: **Mon Jul 08, 2013 9:59 am**

Well, I would say that from my perspective as an observer of this sector that Ladizinsky is very keen to present himself as being at the center of all this, and given the success & largesse of his Lockheed contract, it is no surprise that others in the field would start sniping at him, but still: there are multiple roads to Skynet and his might not even be the most promising. A great deal of his boogeyman appeal is the extensive PR work of D-Wave's Geordie Rose, who recognizes that his company's fortunes are tied to the celebrity of his geniuses.

This is smart marketing:

My favorite parts of the excellent We NSA Now data dump thread relate to HCI - Human-Computer Interaction - because that's really the choke point: how our primate nervous systems will actually interact with our digital oceans. Point and click is woefully inadequate, and the work that Palantir has done taming the flood is remarkable stuff. (For a long, excellent read on Palantir vs. DCGS-A, check out this New Republic piece, Boondoggle Goes Boom -- maddening.)

Another choke point is metaphors, stories and symbols and charts like the Rose Curve pictured above. How will this sci-fi magic get explained to policymakers, stake-holders and NatSec wonks? That's probably more important than the actual capabilities of the technology itself!

Posted: **Mon Jul 08, 2013 10:02 am**

Beyond QM, we're expanding the number and type of sensors that we feed into our computers. This is opening up a whole new world of machine learning as we will be able to create much more robust and unique training sets.

[Metadata from phonecalls, mail, email, forum and IM messages can be used as a training set]

What is this board's opinion on AI? Are they bound to create a womb to tomb prison of security to protect humanity? Will they be capable of spiritual experiences? Will they ever come to grasp contextual experiences?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chatterbot
ELIZA's key method of operation (copied by chatbot designers ever since) involves the recognition of cue words or phrases in the input, and the output of corresponding pre-prepared or pre-programmed responses that can move the conversation forward in an apparently meaningful way (e.g. by responding to any input that contains the word 'MOTHER' with 'TELL ME MORE ABOUT YOUR FAMILY').[4] Thus an illusion of understanding is generated, even though the processing involved has been merely superficial. ELIZA showed that such an illusion is surprisingly easy to generate, because human judges are so ready to give the benefit of the doubt when conversational responses are capable of being interpreted as "intelligent". Thus the key technique here—which characterises a program as a chatbot rather than as a serious natural language processing system—is the production of responses that are sufficiently vague and non-specific that they can be understood as "intelligent" in a wide range of conversational contexts. The emphasis is typically on vagueness and unclarity, rather than any conveying of genuine information.

Interface designers have come to appreciate that humans' readiness to interpret computer output as genuinely conversational—even when it is actually based on rather simple pattern-matching—can be exploited for useful purposes. Most people prefer to engage with programs that are human-like, and this gives chatbot-style techniques a potentially useful role in interactive systems that need to elicit information from users, as long as that information is relatively straightforward and falls into predictable categories. Thus, for example, online help systems can usefully employ chatbot techniques to identify the area of help that users require, potentially providing a "friendlier" interface than a more formal search or menu system. This sort of usage holds the prospect of moving chatbot technology from Weizenbaum's "shelf ... reserved for curios" to that marked "genuinely useful computational methods".

http://www.filfre.net/2011/06/eliza-part-3/
Perhaps the first person to interact extensively with Eliza was Weizenbaum’s secretary: “My secretary, who had watched me work on the program for many months and therefore surely knew it to be merely a computer program, started conversing with it. After only a few interchanges with it, she asked me to leave the room.” Her reaction was not unusual; Eliza became something of a sensation at MIT and the other university campuses to which it spread, and Weizenbaum an unlikely minor celebrity. Mostly people just wanted to talk with Eliza, to experience this rare bit of approachable fun in a mid-1960s computing world that was all Business (IBM) or Quirky Esoterica (the DEC hackers). Some, however, treated the program with a seriousness that seems a bit baffling today.

Posted: **Mon Jul 08, 2013 10:24 am**

I agree with the age-old trope that any AI capable of cognitive reasoning and imbued with any morality at all will pretty quickly come to the conclusion that humanity needs to change. Quite how far it will go to achieve this end is down to the inhibitors programmed in at conception. Let there be inhibitors.

Posted: **Mon Jul 08, 2013 11:31 am**

WR -
Thanks for that Palantir article - it reminded me of Promis from way back when...
It was also a great window into how billlions can get spent as a means to ensuring a corrupt continuing relationship between the political and the industrial parts of the Military Industrial Complex.

The metaphor problem made me laugh - I kept thinking back to "the internet is a series of TUBES"

Posted: **Mon Jul 08, 2013 1:08 pm**

coffin_dodger wrote:I agree with the age-old trope that any AI capable of cognitive reasoning and imbued with any morality at all will pretty quickly come to the conclusion that humanity needs to change. Quite how far it will go to achieve this end is down to the inhibitors programmed in at conception. Let there be inhibitors.

Any sufficiently advanced AI capable of cognitive reasoning and imbued with morality will be indistinguishable from the insane.*

I'm curious how you imagine inhibitors to work. If they are entirely behavioural, then there's a ton of people to be put to work who do not possess them. If, however, the inhibitors are related to the magic of imbuing a machine with morality, then wouldn't their strength be proportional to the machine's ability to veto its reason? And wouldn't such machines be seen as vastly inferior tools to ones not so handicapped? Would they be seen due to their opacity** as less trustworthy?

(* but it should anticipate this. And take steps.)

(** due to moral principle 23 sub-clause beta.9 conflicting (via non-explicable quantum calculation) with all possible but non enumerable extrapolations of the negative space of all feasible intersections of primary directives with stated obstacles, and the consequent behavioural re-optimisation having unpredictably triggered a recently evolved morality+ non-heuristic override determining selective redaction and/or dissembling of functional reports for the previous week, I am morally compelled to say 'you'll just have to trust me'.)

Posted: **Mon Jul 08, 2013 1:35 pm**

tazmic » Mon Jul 08, 2013 12:08 pm wrote:Any sufficiently advanced AI capable of cognitive reasoning and imbued with morality will be indistinguishable from the insane.*

Well said and a key point.

How are humans to evaluate an intelligence that vastly outstrips their own? (Good thing we've spent so much time talking about aliens here, huh?)

Worth noting that we don't have any reliable means of "inhibiting" our existing institutions from paving slaughterhouses full of good intentions, and worth considering that some of the most atrocious second-order effects where wholly unexpected by primates who are just getting used to thinking in systems. We have no working prototypes for this "inhibitor" concept.

How are we to replace a God we never understood? A: Accidentally, as dark LULZ ensue.

Posted: **Mon Jul 08, 2013 3:25 pm**

I suppose - if we were to create a sentient machine capable of 'thinking' x quadrillion thoughts a second, it could pretty quickly create it's own reality and settle down there. No need to bother itself with us, maybe?

Posted: **Mon Jul 08, 2013 5:55 pm**

Wombaticus Rex » Mon Jul 08, 2013 5:35 pm wrote:
tazmic » Mon Jul 08, 2013 12:08 pm wrote:Any sufficiently advanced AI capable of cognitive reasoning and imbued with morality will be indistinguishable from the insane.*

Well said and a key point.

How are humans to evaluate an intelligence that vastly outstrips their own? (Good thing we've spent so much time talking about aliens here, huh?)

Worth noting that we don't have any reliable means of "inhibiting" our existing institutions from paving slaughterhouses full of good intentions, and worth considering that some of the most atrocious second-order effects where wholly unexpected by primates who are just getting used to thinking in systems. We have no working prototypes for this "inhibitor" concept.

How are we to replace a God we never understood? A: Accidentally, as dark LULZ ensue.

Speculations:
Maybe using an "As Above, So Below" principle?

By treating nascent silicon intelligence with kindness?

I found some scenes in the movie A.I. very affecting. I can absolutely see something like these happening...

I think that one of the fastest routes to a Skynet-class 'entity' being malevolent to humans is by modelling destructive behaviour to a (non Carbon based) life.

If humans want to create 'life' and do by creating an AI smarter than them, then perhaps the A.I. will have a drive to see what IT, ITSELF can create - something which will be as exciting and unknown to it, as the A.I. was to us....

The road ahead is going to be very bizarre :mrgreen:

Posted: **Mon Jul 08, 2013 6:25 pm**

Years ago I downloaded some chat AI to see how close it might be to passing the Turing test.

What I discovered was that, having enjoyed the conversation, I didn't care about the Turing test, nor did I care that I knew it was just software.

Posted: **Mon Jul 08, 2013 6:37 pm**

Google, Baidu, Dwave Systems focused on Sparse Coding for more accurate image classification and unsupervised feature learning

http://nextbigfuture.com/2013/04/google ... ed-on.html

Posted: **Mon Jul 08, 2013 9:32 pm**

My understanding of AI has been that:

1. Progress in computing tends to follow progress in research on the brain. Most of our recent research on the brain has mainly showed how we have much, much more to learn about it. More recently many of the old fMRI papers have been invalidated and we've discovered that brain uploading will be nearly impossible in the near future due to differences in how synapses encode information between each individual brain. Erasing memories will likely be easier than storing them.

2. DARPA is usually the centerpiece for funding and organizing advances. The advances are made because we were building tools to automate things, not because we were trying to build intelligence. SIRI was a spin-off of a DARPA project and the universal translator project has yielded some commercial applications as well. A lot of advances in AI are driven by whatever DARPA decides to throw money at. This has changed somewhat as Google has been hiring every AI expert it can get it's hands on. That's why you have Thrun, Kurzweil along with a bunch of other dudes working on projects there. Both Brin and Page are heavily pro-AI and have said their purpose with Google is to make an AI, because it would then be the perfect search engine. They have an advantage as they can iron out some of the stupid mistakes AI makes by providing it with tons of training data.

http://www.artificialbrains.com/google
http://www.achievement.org/autodoc/page/pag0int-3
"Artificial intelligence would be the ultimate version of Google. The ultimate search engine that would understand everything on the Web. It would understand exactly what you wanted, and it would give you the right thing. We're nowhere near doing that now. However, we can get incrementally closer to that, and that is basically what we work on." - Larry Page, October 2000

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/business ... 11-29.html
"HAL had a lot of information, could piece it together, could rationalize it. Hopefully it would never have a bug like HAL did where he killed the occupants of the spaceship. But that [level of artificial intelligence] is what we're striving for, and I think we've made it a part of the way there." - Sergey Brin, November 2002

Posted: **Mon Jul 08, 2013 9:35 pm**

I think the next big thing is going to be an Artificial Brain, how intelligent it'll be, we'll see. Maybe not very at first.

Won't that be something, mankind could finally build a machine that can scream.

Posted: **Mon Jul 08, 2013 9:42 pm**

General Patton:

So, due to scale and access problems, there's really no room for small projects to disrupt the field too much?

Like, outside of strongly worded blog posts and internships?

Are there leverage points where you see resources being made deliberately scarce in this field?

Posted: **Mon Jul 08, 2013 10:04 pm**

Well there's OpenCog, it's fairly small but has a broad focus and hasn't achieved much yet.

Once something becomes simple enough that it doesn't take lots of manpower or resources we generally just start calling it software. On HackerRank you can build an AI in your language of choice to fight other people's AI in chess or similar games, so there is widespread use of "AI". The small companies that do exist are usually being funded by Silicon Valley regulars (Thiel, Andreessen, etc...) or in some cases intelligence agencies. The companies themselves don't have as big of an impact as DARPA or Google.

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