AI – GCAT Information Technologies

Your buddy, the A.I.

Welcome, friend! Please join me in a bit of speculation.

Imagine you and I (your friend) are discussing books and you mention that Title A is the best book you’ve ever read, and that you happen to own a copy of it.

A few weeks later, as we again discuss books (I, as your friend, know how much you love books), you tell me you are reading Title B, and that it is one of the best books you own.

As an attentive and perceptive friend, I should naturally conclude that Title B is one of the best books you’ve ever read – right?

But wait: What if you only own two books? Oh, right – I’m your friend, and I know you love books. I should probably assume you own quite a few. (As if I haven’t seen your extensive library!)

Google visits these other sites, and follows the link to your viagra for sale site noting the keyword used. In addition, you can enjoy full privacy and cialis 10mg you can get the products you need without feeling embarrassed. These days, erectile dysfunction has come up as widespread problem cheap viagra tablets with affliction on millions. Low Self-esteem Sexual abuse at viagra on line sales a young age destroys the self-esteem of children.

I suppose you might have read 50 extremely good books in your lifetime, of which you own only one: Title A (which happens to be the best of the best). Title B might fall in a (distant) second tier, and perhaps all the other books in your library are crap – leaving mediocre Title B as the second-best book you own. So many possibilities! Can I really conclude anything about where Title B ranks in your esteem?

Let’s be real: Your buddy would know what you meant. Not “know”, as in “deduce”; “know what you meant” as in “grasp quickly what you are likely getting at”. Your buddy would never expect his buddy – you – to mislead him, intentionally, or to highlight something trivial or of dubious relevance. (“I don’t really care for this book – but I feel you must know it’s one of the best books I own!” Huh?)

The “friend” who tries and fails to prove a theorem about the value you place on Title B, and who therefore fails to grasp that you are saying Title B is really good, isn’t paying the right sort of attention to you. This friend is no confidant. They’ll never be your best buddy.

If artificial intelligence (A.I.) is ever to provide true “personal assistants”, or to collaborate on an equal footing with human coworkers, it has to pay the right sort of attention to its human “friends” (all right, masters). A true A.I. has to absorb and filter all its interactions with each human individual, and, dynamically on the next interaction, determine which of those data provide the most relevant context. It needs the capability of forming and cultivating a relationship with this individual. It needs to form reasonable expectations of this individual, and interpret their behaviour in the context of those expectations.

Let us not lose our perspective on the meaning of “Strong A.I.” If it doesn’t share the strengths of human beings, it isn’t strong – it is brittle.

“Turing” the landscape of the Imitation Game

A chatbot designed to respond (in English) like a 13-year-old Ukrainian boy (with limited English skills) was recently reported to have passed the Turing Test. Many commentators were quick to demonstrate that the ‘bot emphatically did not – and cannot – pass any version of the Turing Test having any meaningful connection to intelligence.

In my view, the chatbot, “Eugene Goostman”, merely entered the wrong competition. If it were to enter a competition in which every entrant was introduced as a 13-year-old from Ukraine, and all entrants had been either programmed or coached to impersonate a 13-year-old from Ukraine, we could more validly compare its results to that of its competitors. In the Reading University competition, however, other entrants were (tacitly) assigned different roles – roles arguably more difficult to pull off, such as “full-grown, educated, native English-speaking person.”

When Alan Turing famously proposed that the Imitation Game be used as the “gold standard” for machine intelligence, he did so with a challenging version of the game in mind – the version that humans play. To be considered decently good at the Imitation Game, a player (say, a man or a computer program charged with imitating a woman) would have to prove indistinguishable from “the genuine article” (a variety of actual woman players) a great deal of the time. The perfect “female impersonator” would be able to convince an impartial judge just as often, on average, as a woman can. (Bear in mind that even a genuine woman will be mistaken for a non-woman pretending to be a woman, a certain percentage of the time – especially by a judge wary of being duped.)
Men should avoid taking this medicine with any cheap super viagra http://davidfraymusic.com/category/news/ tablet containing nitrate chemical Alcohol cause delay in the functions of the medicine, so it should not be used at the expense of genuine medical knowledge and as such it is wise to only ever buy medicine from an online pharmacy who insists on a genuine prescription or an online consultation. Safety measures: Before you begin taking Sildenafil, tell your doctor or try here now viagra prescription pharmacist if you are allergic to it; or if you have any other allergies. No doubt, these methods are helpful for strengthening a relationship but seeking best medical help may cut down the distance of reaching up cialis generika 40mg davidfraymusic.com to happiest life survival. Primarily it helps us to reduce viagra samples no prescription the body weight and will work as a safeguard for cardiovascular disease and diabetes.
If a computer program could convince a panel of skeptical judges that it is a person just as often as the average person could do, that program would be a Master Im-person-ator – and indisputably intelligent.

That’s a big “if”. The best we can (generously) allow, at present, is that a computer program may now perform adequately well at an extremely limited and “dumbed-down” version of the Turing Test. We might envision the space of all Turing-Related Tests as a plane, of which a few tiny slivers – representing such roles as “ignorant, sassy teenager” and “abusive, paranoid weirdo” – are coloured either yellow or a very faint shade of green. All other “tiles” in the plane – “full-grown, educated, native English-speaking person”, “woman”, “award-winning journalist”, etc. – are either red or uncoloured.

Intelligent systems: Dimensions

Via social media, I received a frank and pithy comment on my previous post (Machine intelligence: Scary? Necessary.):

Machine Intelligence? Dream on. Machines can only really appear intelligent to humans who are not.

In pondering how to respond, I realized I was a bit intellectually lazy when I implied that there might be some “threshold of intelligence.” To the contrary, intelligence is, to my mind, a continuum. Any system (including biological systems) that exhibits any sort of variable behavior in response to variable data (including stimuli) has non-zero intelligence. An earthworm, for example, is obviously very “stupid” in comparison with many creatures – but it is capable of cognition, as a function of its evolutionary “programming”. The algorithms which govern its behaviour are sophisticated and cannot be easily deconstructed – nor (yet) duplicated by human programmers of non-biological systems (“robotic worms”, if such things existed).

I also want to avoid depicting intelligence as a scalar quantity. To try to measure the conventional IQ of a computer system – or any non-human system – is folly. (The value of IQ has been challenged even as a measure of relative human intelligence – but that’s another discussion.) When we think of an intellect – that of a worm, a person, or a cybernetic system – as a “shape” having at least two dimensions – let’s call them breadth and depth – we arrive at a somewhat more vivid and meaningful basis for comparison. IBM Watson (as the example from my previous post) exhibits an impressive breadth of intellect, given that it is designed to process text in the English language that might relate to any topic. In depth, however, it reveals its “stupidity”. For example, Watson is not designed to be original or creative, whatsoever; it is designed to play Jeopardy, to which originality would be, if anything, a disadvantage. Watson’s “knowledge” of any particular subtopic will be revealed to be woefully inconsistent and brittle, upon probing. It’s quite possible – even likely – that Watson will answer several advanced questions on a given topic, successfully – but then come up clueless on what human experts would agree is a basic question. Of course, that’s because Watson is incapable of recognizing and assimilating the core body of knowledge on a topic, distinguishing the fundamental laws from the “esoterica”. It has no deep understanding of any topic, and grasps no themes or theories that might allow it to come up with an answer by extension or analogy. We could quite aptly characterize Watson’s intellect as “a mile wide and an inch deep.”

For an example of an information system having quite the opposite “intellectual dimensions” as IBM Watson – that is, an extremely limited breadth, but significant (and, I find, impressive) depth – see Copycat, designed by the Fluid Analogies Research Group, headed by Douglas R. Hofstadter, at the Center for Research on Concepts and Cognition, University of Indiana, Bloomingdale. Copycat is a system designed to generate solutions to a certain kind of analogy-based problem, and to do it in a way that resembles the human process (as self-reported by human solvers). Here’s an example of Copycat being “smart”:

A man performs sexual acts depends on certain factors, such as physiology, hormonal secretions, lifestyle, secretworldchronicle.com levitra samples health issues, medications, psychological issues and marital or family problems. Herbal products have become very popular in canada viagra buy recent years. Even if this exercise only delays your eating or shortens it- It is buy generic cialis still a win! We aren’t looking for perfection, we are looking for small changes for the better. cialis generico 5mg http://secretworldchronicle.com/2018/05/02/ A team with proper equipment and vehicles will pick it from your yard. Human “says” (via coded terms): “I turn the string abc into abd. Copycat, you do the same with xyz.”

Copycat “answers”: “I turn xyz into wyz.” [Like most humans, Copycat “prefers” this answer to wxz, or any other.]

As a final example (or class of examples), let’s consider “crowdsourced” knowledge bases. Arguably, these systems are highly intelligent (by the terms laid out, herein), able to marry the capabilities of data/knowledge management software to store and index a comprehensive library of facts (breadth) with the “wisdom of the crowd”, inherent in aspects of human intelligence, intuition and social interaction – providing depth. One could convincingly argue that the overwhelming lion’s share of such a system’s intellect is due to the contribution of the crowd of humans – but then, the “one” making that argument would presumably be a human, and subject to bias. Suffice it to say that the results (outputs) of such a system – assuming the non-human elements are cleverly designed – are likely to be far “smarter” than the results of a crowd of humans thrown together in a room and asked to draw conclusions on a given topic, absent any “machine augmentation” of their collective intellect.

To sum up my reply to my critic: It doesn’t matter so much whether a given system is relatively “smart” or “stupid”, as it matters that systems can possess intelligence – and that not all systems possessing intelligence are 100% biological.

Next topic: So-called “Business Intelligence” (in capitals, no less!). Stay tuned!