(July 14, 2015 at 9:26 am)Rhythm Wrote:Quote:Most so called AI is trickery because it tries to simulate the effect rather than to have it arise endogenously. It's like creating a function and labelling it "anger" and writing it to produce a sudden arm movement in a robot if it senses loud noise. That's not anger, that's a function that produces a sudden arm movement if it senses a loud noise. It's us anthropomorphising it that sees it producing anger. But it doesn't scale. What about hitting the robot with a hammer? That should produce anger as well.Until you can establish that all of this doesn't -also- describe our own native system...........it's difficult to see the line as anything but arbitrary. Why does hitting my brother on the arm produce anger in him, but not in me? Didn't evolution create a function which we've labeled "anger" in ourselves? What should or shouldn't produce "anger", in your example, is a simple list of conditions....and it's difficult to see why that would be hard to scale. There's no point in criticisizing the anthropomorphic urges of others if you're going to follow it up, in the same breath, with an anthropomorphic assertion like "That's not anger"......you just said that it was......you mean it isn't "human anger" - but even amongst human beings "anger" is amorphous (que the difference between what angers me and what angers my brother). So, agreed - that's not human anger. Whats the problem? We're talking about creating artificial intelligence, not artificial humans, right? Is there some requirement that intelligence be human in order to avoid being a "trick"? Where does that leave all of the other examples of intelligence in our world? Is it all trickery and anthropomophism - and again why is our own model receiving such preferential treatment - how has it escaped the axe with which you hope to chop up the robot?
In any case, on the one hand I don't think that AI built to "model anger" is the best representative of AI - but I can see why it could be. Similarly, I don't think that the turing test took us down the right road - might have wasted alot of time, even though we learned plenty about those "tricks" chasing it. I suppose I could sum the majority of my comments up as so: I'm not disputing your understanding of -how- the machines we point to as examples of potential AI achieve their particular feat, it's a hobby of mine, and so I'm aware of how we model these things (and ways we -could- model these things) down to the level of hardware - though, my programming is shit.......- I'm wondering how you've determined that this is fundamentally different from how -you or I or a bullfrog- achieve that same effect. What do you know, that could justify such a line in the sand as to call "anger" a trick when one example achieves the effect, but the real deal when the other achieves the -same- effect? It's not your comp sci I'm picking a bone with, it's your biology.
Because these researchers are using top down approach to modelling an emergent phenomenon when a bottom up approach is required. The scenario about a robot with a function called anger causing it to hit something when activated is one I made up, but typical of what I have observed. This would be a top down approach because some researchers saw that it was a common occurrence in natural agents that certain situations and tried to model the emergent expression of an underlying mechanism. This approach does not scale because anger can be expressed in a myriad of different ways, but these researchers will still get interest from the media and use it to get more funding. This is what I mean by trickery.
What they should have done was to understand the function of anger. And there is a function within the agent otherwise anger would not have evolved. Using a bottom up approach you would argue that a natural agent lashing out is actually just emergent phenomenon of set of an underlying mechanisms. Based on observational science, you could theorise for example a neuro-modulator increasing the excitability of neurons within a part of the brain, overriding conscious control and causing it move out of a stable state to reduce some particular sensory stimuli or memory and better its own situation. That may result in it lashing out, or going off and working harder for example or cogitating about different ways to adapt. If you then created a robot that had an equivalent mechanism to agitate itself and better its situation based on similar stimuli, then you could argue that it was expressing anger even if the same functionality was implemented in a completely different way. The former is trickery, the latter is strong AI. You did not tell the robot how it should behave, you created it to adapt by itself and have no a-priori idea how it will behave. Unfortunately the latter is also significantly more difficult.
