Hard News: A thing that rarely ends well
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Hi Ben, most interesting.
I think Turing thought sentience or consciousness was an offshoot of intelligence.
Well, I can't model Turing's actual thoughts on that (heh), but in the early days of computer science, some optimistic people were thinking that consciousness was an inevitable corollary of intelligence, which they thought was demonstrated by raw calculating ability. That line of thought was quickly refuted. A common scientific joke is that hypersonics/string theory/fusion/AI is very promising - and has been for a long time.
Searle's thought experiment of the Chinese Room seeks to illustrate his contention that a complex system following purely formal rules can give the appearance of comprehension without actual comprehension.
Consciousness is a very controversial topic at the moment, but as a consequence very interesting as various disciplines try to pin it down or show that unconscious processes are more efficient (Peter Watts, biologist and sf writer puts it thus: if your brain were Dilbert, your consciousness is the Pointy-haired Boss).
I'm certainly not going to get into the essentialist argument that there is some unique quality to the human mind that no machine can ever duplicate, but current thinking is that intelligence is not consciousness and simply increasing its quantity does not produce the quality of consciousness. Very dumb creatures can be conscious, very 'intelligent' machines that can model weather systems and so forth show no signs of consciousness whatsoever. As you say,
I think we still have quite a long way to go before there's any kind of general intelligence in machines that even vaguely resembles human intelligence.
Or ESL people as you say, yes. I did see a transcript of a conversation between a human interrogator and a programme that gave an impression of an obsessive Trekkie. I'm sure someone could writer a programme that simulates the posts of Redbaiter or DFJ - and I don't mean that as a joke. Their monocausotaxophilia (attributing everything to one cause - 'socialism/'dykeocracy' in their cases), rigidly stereotyped statements and limited vocabulary are eminently imitable.
And
But who knows, it could just be a small chance in paradigm and architecture.
Indeed.
Certainly the hardware is powerful enough now, something we couldn't really say when I was first studying AI.
There's been some interesting work lately in simulating a mouse brain (well, half of one), so in principle, yes...
You probably know about that, right?
Google, for instance, is better than most human librarians at finding you the info you need.
I know some librarians who would probably like to make balloon animals with your intestines for saying that. :)
I don't know about Web 1.0/2.0, but the 'semantic web' or 'Web 3.0' would probably start to demonstrate Chinese Room like qualities successfully.
Of course a lot of the debate about AI and consciousness comes down to it actually being two different questions: 'What is the feeling of "I"?' and 'How can we make this machine perform better?' One's a philosophical issue that has been taken up by neuroscientists, with practical and ethical consequences in medicine and the other is a technological one with philosophical implications.
(One commentator on the latter extreme put it, 'Who cares if submarines really swin or not?')
Of course I'd like to be confident that I could have the choice of downloading my mind into a machine when this body finally gives up rather than it simply being the equivalent of an autobiographical hypertext or an animated portrait.
I'm getting into lecturer mode.. thank you for giving me the opportunity.
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So Howie Morrison has confirmed Glenn bribes everyone all the time and only his virtue stopped him being in parliment.
Our Parliment which is there to be bought and sold never mind a little concept of Democracy.
Remove both their Honours. -
Morrison and Glenn should both take more water with it.
And Paul, you seem to be affirming what I said rather than the reverse.
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Sometimes it seems the basic requirement for migrating to Australia is not to know - and above all, not to want to know - about the political culture that people are heading for. NZ is squeaky clean by comparison.
If Australia is the solution, Helengrad is not the problem.
I think that's pretty reasonable myself. I possibly could have been a little clearer in my post but I did only mean corruption in NSW (many still genuinely believe that the legacy of the 1808 rum rebellion is alive and well) although you could also note the ongoing scandal around disgraced former WA Premier Burke or the legendary corruption of Qld.
Howard's government might not conform to a narrow definition of corruption, but he clearly and repeatedly handed out funding for naked electoral advantage to say nothing of the endless lying that occurred around children overboard or the Wheat Board bribery.
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If interested, the story of the rum rebellion is pretty fascinating, check it out here
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Yes, Paul, I wasn't meaning to suggest that your reasons weren't sound.
Just this constant refrain in NZ of "I'm going to Australia because ..." so often ends in an illogical comment on the state of our politics.
Weather and wages are fair enough, though. And food. And big city culture. And wildlife. And sport. And ...
Hell, I'm off to the airport. Bloody Clark.
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And Paul, you seem to be affirming what I said rather than the reverse.
I'm not saying you're wrong in all instances Dale, I'm saying that your theory doesn't apply to me. I prefer Simon's approach though, that there's a bit of willful blindness.
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Kracklite, I was never really convinced by Searle on the Chinese room. It seemed like the kind of sleight of hand which was all through his work. OK, the guy manipulating the symbols might not understand Chinese, but the 'system' of him doing that with his book of rules (which, incidentally has never been done and strikes me as far less feasible than a computer doing the same thing), does understand it. A more modern approach would probably be to use Altavista's Babelfish or some other translation service. I find it not particularly feasible to say that a person in conjunction with Babelfish conducting a workable conversation is not functionally equivalent to that symbiote actually speaking (probably quite poor) Chinese. Certainly my wife has conducted quite a number of communications that way with her non-English-speaking German relatives, and to all intents and purposes, she can read and write German, albeit very slowly. By the time she'd mastered it to the point that Searle hypothesizes, doing it rapidly and with few errors, she-plus-machine basically would be a German reader/writer. There is no disputing that she 'comprehends' what is going each way, with the aid of that tool. Quite extensive arrangement have been successfully negotiated like that.
I'm sure someone could writer a programme that simulates the posts of Redbaiter or DFJ - and I don't mean that as a joke.
I doubt it. An amusing parody could be written, but everyone would know the difference, the moment they flamed it and it failed to grasp anything about what they were saying, or display any understanding of anything outside of simple abuse.
Personally I'm coming from the point of view of the engineer trying to make those kinds of systems work, so the question of consciousness is of less concern. My experience from various systems I've bedded down over the years is that people only think an 'intelligent' system is intelligent if it does something like what they do. They find it really hard to accept if the system does something better and they can't comprehend why. Then it's just a 'dumb machine'. But when it does something just the way they would have, they think it's a 'smart machine'. I've spent hundreds of hours arguing with experts about the outputs of various systems, and it always seems to come to a 'us vs the machine' mentality which is not helpful. They don't seem to get that they are part of the system, that it's a bigger system when it's machine+human.
I have to say my degree in Philosophy has helped me out a lot in these discussions, if only to head off stupid philosophical arguments before they get any traction. But it's never actually helped me with anything 'technical' whatsoever. As in, solving the 'technical' problem. What philosophy gave me was an ability to solve the human problem of people trying to argue that there was more to it than just a technical problem.
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Hell, I'm off to the airport. Bloody Clark.
... and other ironic and earnest comments on that topic...
OK, my experience in a small segment, academia. There are a number of reasons for emigration that I can cite that have little to do with KKKlark, the effing Treaty, dandruff etc.
One, in a number of professions, universities are churning out far more architecture graduates and designers than there are jobs. This is the result of 'aspirational' marketing and enrolment (and that's why I hate that particular buzzword). This is compounded by the fact that these professions have international cultures and no-one can get real experience without at least a wanderjahr. Also, architecture in particular is very cyclic, depending on levels of investment in building which can fluctuate wildly. Where to go when the market stagnates but overseas? Housing for example is in trouble now...
(Actually, a friend of mine is involved in new fitouts of buildings put up during the eighties boom and he has some horror stories about the shoddy quality of construction. Now, on paper they met earthquake safety regulations, but in construction, well... Anyone working in a Wellington office building built in the eighties should start looking for a new job - quickly.)
As for the universities themselves, of course they depend on international exchange and high specialisation. Most of my friends and colleagues there have gone/come from/to overseas. Business is no doubt similar; Globalisation is simply the rule now, and has been for a long time.
With increasingly specialised work and limited contracts replacing permanent employment, a mobile workforce is inevitable and unstoppable.
The only reasons I haven't gone are the climate, that Australia is no less isolated from the sources of information that I need for my research. London, on the other hand, offers easy access to the continent in a mere couple of hours of flight time. New Zealand can't change that fact without some seriously accelerated plate tectonics (all the more reason to move out of those eighties office blocks!).
Eventually, when I finish my PhD, I'll probably be off to the UK - and not because I want to necessarily - my heart's firmly rooted in Dunedin (but then I've lived in Wellington since 1985 anyway).
Certainly there are many factors involved in emigration and people can articulate complex motivations through simple frustrations and these can be put into simple, crude statistics and used to support any hare-brained bit of rhetoric. There are liars, damned liars and political opportunists who use statistics - but we know that, don't we?
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Oh, and thanks for giving me the opportunity to go into engineer mode. I haven't had the chance recently, cause my current system doesn't raise the slightest questions - people are just happy that spam gets blocked and their eyes glaze over when I tell them how.
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...but everyone would know the difference, the moment they flamed it and it failed to grasp anything about what they were saying...
I think that would make it more believable.
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I would love to see some proper research done on attitudes to race in NZer's that have moved to Aussie. Not just surveys that ask people if the uppity Maori's getting everything is the reason they moved, but rather something a bit more nuanced about racial attitudes and migration from NZ.
It’s widely believed the Internet is white and speaks English, and to be born white in the first world is commonly (implicitly or explicitly) regarded to mean you have lucked into the premier class of human beings on the planet. Is it possible a lot of white migration to Aussie is partly because the migrants want to live somewhere that affirms their sense of being members of the global ruling empire rather than challenges them to come down a peg and hob nob with the prolitariat of other races?
I don't think it is so much racism as a sense of cultural superiority associated with but not always connected to race, the same sort of cultural zeitgeist that led the Romans to build little imitations of their culture - Colosseums, baths, forums etc -wherever they went.
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And on the AI front,
There is no disputing that she 'comprehends' what is going each way, with the aid of that tool.
Here's where I run away and hide under Donna Haraway's skirts and tell you that you're married to a cyborg. That indeed is the principle objection to Searle - that the room itself comprehends.
While your wife is conversing in German with intent, in Searle's model, the little man in the room is indulging in purely formal play, so I don't think that the analogy is exact.
Searle's ultimate point is one of scientific parsimony - that comprehension is not necessary for the room to operate.
Actually, on the cyborg issue, Samuel Butler wrote about that wayyy back in the mid-late 19th century in some letters to the Christchurch Press and later in Erewhon. A person who incorporates tools into the system of their being is, from one point of view, simply a highly organised person. Lynn Margulis, the microbiologist who adanced the symbiotic model for cellular evolution devotes significant parts of some of her books (with Dorion Sagan) to exploring the future evolutionary implications of out integration with technology.
If people like, say, Damassio are correct (his model is outlined in a book called The Feeling of What Happens), then consciousness, me, the feeling of 'I', the Pointy-Haired Boss, is the little man and my brain is the Chinese Room. Who cares if I connect it by various means to technological prostheses (be they the internet or a performance-enhancing drug such as caffeine).
Interesting times...
I doubt it. An amusing parody could be written, but everyone would know the difference, the moment they flamed it and it failed to grasp anything about what they were saying, or display any understanding of anything outside of simple abuse
Are your sure of that? That's exactly what they do. Even if there were subtle lacunae in their responses that would be visible to anyone who looked closely, most people wouldn't. In fact, much of theory of mind is really projection - and we project a lot onto inanimate, nonsentient objects such as cars, swords, ships, robots (toy models of the Sojourner Mars rover sold out in record time), dolls and so on all the time. These things offer the most minimal cues and yet people - not just children - attribute intentions and characters to them.
Then how do I know that you're real and I'm not a brain in a jar?
Anyway, I don't have a point to prove here really, since this started with a throway quip and I'm grateful for the discussion. I'm intrigued by your descriptions of people's responses to 'smart' versus 'dumb' machines, certainly.
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Most of the expats I know are overseas for reasons that the NZ government has no control over. For the bulk of my friends its because once we started travelling we did really well in large international organisations which can only exist in places much bigger than NZ and in industries/businesses that NZ simply doesn't have the scale to support. There's not a lot you can do about that unless you want to add another 10-15 million people minimum to NZ and at least double the size of Auckland. If or when I come home it won't be because of whichever party is in power, it will be closer to my friends and family in the place I still think of as home even after the better part of a decade living in 5 different countries.
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I would love to see some proper research done on attitudes to race in NZer's that have moved to Aussie. Not just surveys that ask people if the uppity Maori's getting everything is the reason they moved, but rather something a bit more nuanced about racial attitudes and migration from NZ.
Judging by the number of kiwis you see down at Bondi every Waitangi Day, I suspect the "uppity Maori" has nothing at all to do with people moving west.
In my experience at least, once you emigrate, you better appreciate the values of NZ society including the unique and invaluable contribution Maori have made.
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We would all wish that to be true.
But then talk to the ones who moved to Queensland... -
Come to think of it, much of the confusion and hopes that people have about AI may come down to language. I remember an article in the back pages of a New Scientist a few weeks back (can't remember the exact one) on Native American languages and the difficulties of translation. One couldn't for instance find a noun like 'parrot', so translators ended with all sorts of ambiguous terms. Instead of straight, simple nouns (in our terms), some languages would have 'being [verb] of parrotness here with me'. A dead parrot would be something like 'process of being an ex-parrot decomposing here.' All very experiential and contextually contingent, so that everything is identified according to its existence within a system. Discrete packages of 'I' and 'it' were not tenable.
In an Aristotlean system, there 'must' be binaries of self/other, so if a computer does something, it is because it's an entity, rather than one's use of it creating a loop of action and feedback.
Blame English. Language is a virus and all that.
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But then talk to the ones who moved to Queensland...
You'd be amazed at how many Maori live in Qld. I met an extended community, like 50+, in South Brisbane which is growing rapidly. Each time one or other a Maori-owned company picks up a new contract (mainly construction firms), rather than hiring locals, they recruit from back home!
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Kracklite opined:
One, in a number of professions, universities are churning out far more architecture graduates and designers than there are jobs. This is the result of 'aspirational' marketing and enrolment (and that's why I hate that particular buzzword). This is compounded by the fact that these professions have international cultures and no-one can get real experience without at least a wanderjahr. ...
As for the universities themselves, of course they depend on international exchange and high specialisation. Most of my friends and colleagues there have gone/come from/to overseas. Business is no doubt similar; Globalisation is simply the rule now, and has been for a long time.
...Eventually, when I finish my PhD, I'll probably be off to the UK ...
Indeed. I'd add to your comments that Universities are churning out far more PhDs than there are jobs where that qualification is a bona fide requirement ... also due to "aspirational marketing and enrollment", and deliberate policy.
There aren't too many options for many of these PhDs in New Zealand ... permanent academic positions are generally few and far between (and theoretically a supervisor only needs to have one PhD student in his/her entire career to replace him/her). That leaves the middle-to-upper echelons of the public service, private consultancy, or .....
In the public service and consultancy there's probably some qualification inflation going on, too, as previously a Masters sufficed for many of those jobs.
Not much for many of those newly-minted PhDs in NZ except a one-way ticket to somewhere else.....
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I know some librarians who would probably like to make balloon animals with your intestines for saying that. :)
Too bloody right.
Don't ever get caught up a dark alley facing a mob of chain-wielding, flickknife flashing librarians.
Look out! The Dewey gang's here....
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Searle's ultimate point is one of scientific parsimony - that comprehension is not necessary for the room to operate.
I think it's the opposite of parsimony. He's inventing entities, like 'comprehension' which are indistinguishable from the operation of the room, then simply asserting that the human has it and the room doesn't. Until you are the room, you couldn't know for sure.
He talks of 'purely formal play' as if inventing yet another phrase creates an important if completely unobservable distinction. How can he be sure that the parsing of language in our minds isn't 'purely formal play' at a subconscious level? Certainly when you are learning the language it's purely formal play. I mean has he actually tried to do what his thought experiment suggests would be a piece of piss? Thousands of engineers spent decades and managed to actually do what he rubbishes as purely formal play and millions of humans now use it for a lot more than play. When you do use computers for translation you become aware of the pitfalls and all the problems with his analogy. Doing good translation via rules actually doesn't work that well and it's easy to spot computer translations because of the lack of comprehension of the subject matter. For that reason I say that his Chinese room is extremely contrived. If it genuinely could do good translation so that people couldn't tell it wasn't a native then it would have to comprehend.
Are your sure of that? That's exactly what they do.
I am totally sure. It may seem that way to a human but it sure doesn't to an engineer. Redbaiter may be repetitive, and we don't know anything about him/her apart from that (well actually I'm pretty sure he/she's an Australian), but I can assure you that he/she is at least one human. It's not the high level understanding that he/she fails to display, it's the low level stuff that he/she does display, like picking up which object in a sentence you are talking about from context.
Of course there have been AI programs around since the very early days that can fool the unwary user - the famous anecdote of the author of the Gestalt psychoanalysis program ELIZA discovering that his secretary was having quite a meaningful relationship with the program springs to mind. And my 2 year old is clearly rather taken with the strange ability of his favourite stuffed elephant to talk to him when I'm in the room. Humans anthropomorphize. Other animals seem to do the same thing if you swap out the anthro for some other prefix. I'm sure my cat reconciles living with a house full of large dangerous animals by convincing herself that we're just big cats really.
I think you're ultimately right about language. Translation is a very difficult task, whether it be a language you don't know, or conversing with an old friend on topics that you both understand well, you can never really be sure that you get what the other person is talking about, that they're referring to the same kinds of things as you. The idea in the mind is perhaps not exactly the same thing as any word or set of them, even if words are by far the best invention in all of time for communicating them. That's why I never bother with arguing about what a word 'really means'. Because it doesn't really mean anything, it's just a way of communicating an idea, and if it did the job, then you were using it right. Dictionary Nazis really are a pain in the arse because they are trying to limit what can be communicated rather than understand it.
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Redbaiter may be repetitive, and we don't know anything about him/her apart from that (well actually I'm pretty sure he/she's an Australian)
We can be pretty sure he's a member of the Libertarianz party. Or at least a devotee.
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Don't ever get caught up a dark alley facing a mob of chain-wielding, flickknife flashing librarians.
Look out! The Dewey gang's here.
They'll file your arse under D for Deceased.
Obviously I wasn't running down librarians, who themselves can and do use Google. Just saying that what was a rare and sought after ability to know every last book in the library, where it is and what it's about, is now only a click away. Which actually makes librarians work much more interesting and probably valuable too.
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We can be pretty sure he's a member of the Libertarianz party. Or at least a devotee.
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You think Redbaiter is his real name and he just uses Andrew Llewellyn when he's dressed up like a human?
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