Happy Atheist Forum

hi! there my first post here ... sorry for my bad language ,content matter(never study english)

what do you think about artificial inteligence ?
or do you have some special reference i'm very interesed(eventualy for my futures career in informatics)


i think it's very important a separated topic at science category with AI==artificial intelgence,
because if a total or partial AI it's posible to be made, will be another argument of nonexistence of god presented in any religion

i have not read much (and i want to) about AI, but i see a lot of american mouvie with that(like: termintor :D)

i have a lot to say but hard to explain (language reasons ) and i must go now (to be continued)

 waiting for replies

I think the biggest undertaking in AI will be the job of creating consciousness in a computer. I don't really understand how consciousness works but I don't think it is anything beyond my physical components. The "me" in my brain is nothing special. There is no timeless soul that existed before my body or my brain. I had to learn about the world as well as myself from the beginning. If I existed before my body or my brain, then I would have had experiences/memories before then, but I don't. This is a good thing for AI because consciousness, in theory, is not magical or special. The components of my brain make me who I am. The more we learn about how the parts of the brain work, the closer we will get in creating a brain like computer. We have already developed advanced prosthetics, supercomputers, and experimented in cloning. In time we will merge these different technologies together. In the future, there may not be a difference between humans and machines. Yeah, we will all be a bunch of Borgs roaming around assimilating people.

It's difficult to learn how parts of the brain work in explicit detail without engaging in unethical methods of study. Often the case, unfortunately. We wouldn't know half of what we do today about biology if it weren't for grave robbery, illegal autopsies and even murders that went on in the early development of the science. Psychologists now, for instance, are extremely restricted in terms of what they can and can't do in their research, to the point of being a bit extreme arguably. I think we're a very long way from fully understanding how the conscience actually functions biologically.

I wonder if, in the very distant future, it would be possible to purchase your own personality traits and way of thinking. Circa 3010 Magazine: "Fashionable personality of the week: THE DEPRESSIVE INTROVERT. Best offer only £350!" That would be a very strange world.

Welcome to the forum, karl.

The Japanese have already created a robot which can mimic human emotional responses when it told various words and what those words are associated with.  It is programmed to make a face of disgust at the word president because it associates the word with Bush Jr....  

When dealing with AI, it seems to me that the way to define it as having consciousness is to ask if it is able to decide that it wants to disobey commands.  After all, we already have tons of robots that can sense their surroundings and exhibit a response (some in a bit more complex manner than others).  Consciousness in robots would require us learning how to make free will or at least free will to the same extent humans possess.

I don't think it would be a good idea to make robots with that level of consciousness because we don't need a bunch of metal humans running around...and that's basically what they would be.  Robots are helpful to us because they obey commands....robots with full AI capabilities would not be nearly as helpful and could potentially decide to turn against us (as is illustrated by many AI related movies).

Quote from: "laetusatheos"It is programmed to make a face of disgust at the word president because it associates the word with Bush Jr....

For real?  That's hilarious!

Quote from: "laetusatheos"robots with full AI capabilities would not be nearly as helpful and could potentially decide to turn against us (as is illustrated by many AI related movies).

Yeah - I always like to focus on the "artificial" part of the phrase.  In other words, an "artificially" intelligent machine is one that is duplicating a job that would otherwise require a human intelligence.  That doesn't necessarily mean the machine requires will, personality, emotion, or desire.  In other words, the machine is "acting intelligently" for whatever task it is performing.

And I'm okay with that.  Please, people, don't build any Cylons in your basement - it'll all end in tears!
 :wink:

Quote.robots with full AI capabilities would not be nearly as helpful and could potentially decide to turn against us (as is illustrated by many AI related movies).

Actually it depends on how intelligent the robots are. The current robots can't "think" beyond what is programmed into it. You tell it to associate a group of words to some actions. If asked to interpret a command it doesn't know it will give an error message. But it can't "guess" it. For example, if asked the number of stars that exist, it won't answer "millions". This gives the programmers more control on the robots.

Unless a virus attacks the robot, it won't turn against its owners. If the defense of a country is handed over to robots then there is a chance that the enemies of the country can easily hack into the defense system and turn all robot soldiers to their side. So, robots by themselves turn against us, but an enemy agent can hack into it and wreck havoc.

 

QuoteThat doesn't necessarily mean the machine requires will, personality, emotion, or desire. In other words, the machine is "acting intelligently" for whatever task it is performing.

I think, from a robot's point of view "intelligence" and "emotion" won't be much different. Both will be a type of input-output system and will have to be programmed. The programmer will have to sit down and program the robot to cry and work slower, when it is lonely. Emotions, like intelligence can only be simulated.

when i make delimitetion partial / total AI inteligence i was thinking more at the "software" not at physical part of robot.

i think we can simulate a partial/total AI in a safe virtualworld

forgot to say that a total AI is complete, only when is capable at his turn to build another totalAI / or emulate a human.
a normal human are acting like a partial AI, a total intelingent human know how his inteligence working, and know also how to build one. like we-are watching in 2 paralel miror at the same time or recording the screen of tv that play what we're recording. what's happend at 1 level its happening at all the level recursivly, this is the way how i think a total AI it's functions


all the actuals robots are preprogramed to do things, at the same level a insects is programed to search food. (difrences bettween a insects and a robot are: insect are also preprogramed to multiplicate itself, and the "software" of thes insects are more efficient because its builded dinamicly and have  high resolution /accurates sensors, )

after we build a partial AI in a matrix i think we can progame robots more faster to do things more elaborious. honda buld a robot that can walk/ run.
but this is not such a big deal because i'ts not efiicient at (dynamic biological)natural level of learningspeed

http://singinst.org/research/summary (http://singinst.org/research/summary) (singularity institute for artificial inteligence organization have already  started building a general AI ... )
http://singinst.org/media/interviews (http://singinst.org/media/interviews) (ontopic interviws)

http://youtube.com/watch?v=5hsvCib83ME (http://youtube.com/watch?v=5hsvCib83ME) ( ben goertzel's googletechtalk )

http://youtube.com/watch?v=AyzOUbkUf3M (http://youtube.com/watch?v=AyzOUbkUf3M) (59 min neural networks googletechtalk)

Interesting topic.

I've actually coded several differnt types of AI.  Some attempt to approximate how the human mind works, and others come at it from a variety of other algorythms.

There's no real reason why an AI system has to resemble a human one at all.  Just look at the variety of robots we've created.  I wouldn't say that the Mars rover or the Roomba resembles anything even vaguely human.

And so it may be with AI.  The first self-aware system may differ from us on a variety of levels.  It may have no emotions, or be capable of feeling emotions that we don't even have words for.

In any case, short of a major breakthrough, we're a long way off from true AI, IMHO...  The systems we've got today are very specialized in one topic (ie chess), or are at a very rudimentary learning level of "thinking".  Plenty of tricks are used to make AI seem more realistic, but in esscence most of them are still tricks.

I do recall reading about an interesting project with a system that was reading the dictionary.  As it read, it was making its own inferences based on cross-referncing words, phrases and concepts.  I wonder how that's doing?

Off to code SkyNet,
JoeActor

Hi all.

I'm new here. I have been summarily dismissed from a local religion forum for being too athiest, I guess, so I subsequently found this forum. Looks like a good one.

I am currently reading Physics of the Impossible by Michio Kaku and just yesterday finished the chapter on AI. The problems with AI are huge, especially when you get into judgement calls. Basically, a computer does just that...computes. You can fill it with all kinds of information but all it can do with it is compute. The human brain has trillions of connections and we are reaching the limits of what we can do with current computer technology. Everything in computers is getting smaller and eventually, you get to the point where you're dealing with individual atoms and electrons and the Heisenberg uncertainty principle starts to kick in. i.e., you can't know where an electron is and where it's going at the same time. There's a lot more to it than that, but that's kind of a boiled down explanation.

Have you ever heard of the Turing test? The idea is to have a person in one room and a computer in the other. The person would carry on a conversation with the computer (not knowing if it was a computer or a person) and for a computer to pass the Turing test, the person would not be able to tell whether it was, in fact, a computer or a person. So far, computers have been developed that can answer simple questions or rephrase statements, but no computer has even come close to passing the test.

I guess there are computer that have intelligence about equivalent to an ant, but getting to the point of a thinking, feeling, self aware computer or robot is not very likely. What may be possible someday is to integrate humans and robots-the old cyborg or cybernetic organism. They are learning more and more about how the brain works and may someday be able to do something like give us robotic bodies that our brains operate. There have been successes with training quadraplegics to manipulate a computer cursor just with thoughts, so who knows. We could actually evolve into cyborgs someday.

Quote from: "rotu"Have you ever heard of the Turing test?

Yes.  Although, I prefer the fictional Voight-Kampff test in Blade Runner.  

And hey, welcome to the board!  If you're too atheistic for the religious forum I think you'll fit in just fine here.

Cool topic. One i am very interested in.

The Turing test has been proven to be a very one-dimensional and unreliable gauge for intelligence. Read 'In the mind of the machine' by Kevin Warwick. A very interesting read. He proposes that 'intelligence' from a human perspective, is derived through emotional states. Almost all human decisions are based upon emotions. For us to achieve true AI, this will need to be emulated within a machine - something researchers are a lot closer to than people think.

A study was conducted recently (i forget, but will try to find out) where the parts of the brain in charge of distinguishing between objects was mapped out and transposed into program form. A test was then devised to see how well a computer could distinguish a variety of objects from random photos. It got a score of 85% correct in its first test. This program was able to pick out cars, trees, humans and a plethora of other objects from photos it had never seen before. It could also tell pictures which contained animals over pictures which didn't. The most astounding thing about this was, the fact that it had only been shown one example of what an 'animal' was. In this case, a lion. At some point down the line it used it's acquired knowledge to recognize a bird, even though it had never seen one before. This is proof that we are able to make programs complicated enough to not only learn but make informed guesses based upon previous experiences!!

We already have learning robots. Full autonomy is now a reality. All that needs to be done in the next decade is link various areas into one theme and things will start to move very fast indeed. Japan will be the first to do it. They have already started drafts for laws governing the creation of AI. Creating a blank AI template is probably a bad idea because all you'd need to do is show it something particularly nasty, ie, war and it would probably think rather harshly of us all. With the correct and proper guidance, a potentially self aware program would be nurtured to take on the same views and thoughts of the humans creating it. From this perspective, guiding an AI is a very exciting idea. The cataclysmic Hollywood version of events is strictly the realm of fiction, and will stay there, imo.

Because of the above, I think a self aware program is only 10 - 20 years away.

Give it 150 - 200 years and (if a world ending event hasn't already happened) i believe a fully symbiotic relationship between humans and machines will be commonplace.

Hooray for Asimov and his ilk!

What you say about human intelligence being a factor of emotions is very true. An example in the book I was reading is a robot doing grocery shopping and trying to decide between brands. What would it use for criteria? The fancy label? The price comparison? The nutrition table? Or would it's decision be based purely on computations? Would, or could it be faced with a situation in which a decision needed to be made, but both had exactly equal consequences? If so, would it do the very human thing of just picking one, or would it be frozen in indecision and maybe get run over by a train?

I don't know, but I think real digital intelligence is a long ways off. Maybe the 200 to 250 year estimate is reasonable, but I don't see it happening in any significant degree in 20-25 years. I could well be wrong, but I think we're approaching a wall in computing power since we're very close to going as small as we can with current technology. Maybe quantum computers, but I think those are still a ways off, too.

I'm not an AI expert, but I have had some direct experience with some of the people developing AI systems.  Back in the 1980's, I worked at a company where the Chief Technical Officer had direct connections with Marvin Minsky and the MIT AI Lab.  The CTO declared that "fifth generation computing" was going to be a core technology that the company would pour research money into.  The company spent millions of dollars on AI.  They gave people "knowledge engineer" titles.  They had flashy marketing videos and pamphlets featuring the CTO and Minsky promoting the future of computing.  The company developed an AI workstation with a special custom AI processor chip.  In the end, no significant revolution happened, millions of dollars were burned, and the "knowledge engineers" disappeared.  The CTO left, and today his biography makes no reference to the years of the embarrassing AI mess that he dragged the company through.

Back then, I was a junior engineer and worked with some senior engineers who were very much against the company's AI strategy.  Those senior engineers told me about all the flaws they saw with the AI developments, and how it was mostly marketing with little substance.  Fortunately, my group only shared office space with the AI engineers, and we were not working on AI directly.  All the negative predictions came true as the whole AI effort fell apart when it came time to deliver tangible results.  It left me with a skeptical view any lofty claims about AI.

Now more than 20 years later, I have yet to see any AI system that has impressed me.  Today's computers can store much larger databases and have much faster processors than 20 years ago, but what I have seen in AI systems have been variants on database queries and conditional structures that have been around almost as long as computer science has been studied.  I have seen nothing revolutionary, only scaled up versions of old concepts.

Sure, it is fun to fantasize about thinking machines, but it is important to look at the problem realistically.  I see too many cases where AI advocates jump to wild conclusions without even solving some of the basic problems of intelligence.  It's like the basic problems are too mundane for them, and they want thinking computers now.  I have been very skeptical of the recent writings of long time AI advocate, Ray Kurzweil, about "the singularity" since it blurs reality with science fiction, jumping to big conclusions without convincing me that the intermediate steps to "the singularity" are realistic.  To me, "the singularity" smells like "The Rapture" or Heaven.  They all have evidence to support wishful thinking, but the evidence is flawed.

I do believe that some of the huge knowledge repositories being developed will eventually be useful if an artificial intelligence is developed.  Even Google would be useful for an AI entity, just as Google is useful to humans.  Show me an artificial intelligence that is similar to the natural intelligence of an insect, and I'll will be impressed and feel that we are headed toward a higher AI.  Making a database and a bunch of if-then statements that act like somewhat like an insect doesn't impress me; that's more like a video game character.

I do hope that an impressive AI will be developed, but I feel that there will have to be some major revolutions in computer architecture and programming.  With today's architectures, we can barely make software that keeps running without crashing.

I'd just point out that grave robbery never would have happened if people hadn't been prevented by religious ideas backed up by the state's enforcement which made donating oneself to scientific study for money, and conducting that research, illegal.  Considering some bored people were willing to risk imprisonment and death to get those bodies, I can easily imagine that they would have been more than willing to pay a dying man some money for the right to do research.
There is, and really cannot be, any contradiction between ethics and progress.  What is right is right because it conforms to reality, the 'necessary evil' is a myth created by evil people in order to get us to accept their atrocities with passive resolution of its inevitability.  The notion that something could be wrong and produce right results entirely skews the reality of morality.

On another note, I think AI is awesome and I'm more than a bit transhumanist myself.  When people tell me about how god made our bodies I wonder why an omnipotent being was such a piss-poor engineer.

^^^ Interesting and enjoyable... Thanks!

That was interesting but I can't help but wonder what they will do with all those displaced workers. And will humans even want to take solutions to global warming if they don't even believe it exists? Time will tell and the question will be forgotten maybe.

Quote from: Arturo on March 06, 2017, 07:02:51 PM
That was interesting but I can't help but wonder what they will do with all those displaced workers. And will humans even want to take solutions to global warming if they don't even believe it exists? Time will tell and the question will be forgotten maybe.

Working backwards on that.

I feel the problem will become ever more demanding of an answer, unless serious sapathy sets in. Unfortunstely there are signs that apathy is currently getting a grip, workers are becoming shirkers because it is easier than fighting for a job,. Perhaps  we need another peasant uprising! "The workers are revolting!"

Glad you changed your handle, Arturo!

Even the Chinese have, politically st least so far, cottoned on to the idea that climate change and smog are enemies of the people. Which makes them brighter than Trump... new high rise buldings have to include solar cells or heat collectors on the roof and they may be stepping up electric car production. The latter is not so good for the West, China has most of the world's known neodymium reserves, the element essential in making very high efficiency electric motors. (Got a couple of pounds of, it in the form of various magnet shapes, myself.) Cheaper, though imported (so not for the Trumpian US) electric cars may be around when their home market is satisfied (or they need foreign currency).

Displaced workers is the more difficult question, could take fiur geberations to dort out. Provided catholics etc do not breed like rabbits and kids are willing to train for the sort of jobs robots and AI can't do. It probably took almost as many humans to provide the concept and programming for those cars as normal, but maybe with a slightly different skillset to that required ten years ago. Seemed to take less to glue them together though, but they will probably robotise that task later...

Maybe the politicians will eventually have to do the sci-fi scenario thing, force companies to employ humans in a rstion determined by their turnover or tax the ass off them to fund the unemployment benefits. However, unemploynent, as some here know (I do), does one's mental and emotional health no good at all.

Quote from: Gloucester on March 06, 2017, 07:55:23 PM

Quote from: Arturo on March 06, 2017, 07:02:51 PM
That was interesting but I can't help but wonder what they will do with all those displaced workers. And will humans even want to take solutions to global warming if they don't even believe it exists? Time will tell and the question will be forgotten maybe.

Working backwards on that.

I feel the problem will become ever more demanding of an answer, unless serious sapathy sets in. Unfortunstely there are signs that apathy is currently getting a grip, workers are becoming shirkers because it is easier than fighting for a job,. Perhaps  we need another peasant uprising! "The workers are revolting!"

Glad you changed your handle, Arturo!

Even the Chinese have, politically st least so far, cottoned on to the idea that climate change and smog are enemies of the people. Which makes them brighter than Trump... new high rise buldings have to include solar cells or heat collectors on the roof and they may be stepping up electric car production. Tge latter is nit so good for the West, Ciba has most of the world's known neodymium reserves, the element essential in making very high efficiency electric motors. (Got a couple of pounds of, it in the form of various magnet shapes, myself.) Cheaper, though imported (so not for the Trumpian US) electric cars may be around when their home market is satisfied (or they need foreign currency).

Displaced workers is the more difficult question, could take fiur geberations to dort out. Provided catholics etc do not breed like rabbits and kids are willing to train for the sort of jobs robots and AI can't do. It probably took almost as many humans to provide the concept and programming for those cars as normal, but maybe with a slightly different skillset to that required ten years ago. Seemed to take less to glue them together though, but they will probably robotise that task later...

Maybe the politicians will eventually have to do the sci-fi scenario thing, force companies to employ humans in a rstion determined by their turnover or tax the ass off them to fund the unemployment benefits. However, unemploynent, as some here know (I do), does one's mental and emotional health no good at all.

I mean, short of a fully automatized world of robots, I see a lot of employment problems in the future. I even saw a video from Japan where a computer program animated a body all on it's own. With full automation I see it more like a marxist / retirement environment where people only work on things that they like and robots provide everything we need.

Quote from: Arturo on March 06, 2017, 11:35:55 PM
I mean, short of a fully automatized world of robots, I see a lot of employment problems in the future. I even saw a video from Japan where a computer program animated a body all on it's own. With full automation I see it more like a marxist / retirement environment where people only work on things that they like and robots provide everything we need.

Where I worked they brought in some CNC machines. Everyone thought it would dumb down the jobs of the skilled turners and millers but . . .

It took those machines a fraction of the time it took a human to produce the same number of perfect doohickeys or widgets. So, did that mean only needing one man to supervise several machines, short time working or what? Nope, they retrained the machinists to programme their own machines. They spent part of their time at a computer setting the job up, organising the stock needed etc. Some machines had time and operator sharing so A was supervising his batch whilst B programmed his next one - optimum man and machine usage. Some staff were not able to do the new tasks but most of those were "lost" by retasking, retirement or resignation. There were some redundancies but voluntary ones got an enhanced package and help finding new jobs.

But, no doubt the capacity of such schemes will have a limit.

Quote from: Gloucester on March 07, 2017, 06:06:10 AM

Quote from: Arturo on March 06, 2017, 11:35:55 PM
I mean, short of a fully automatized world of robots, I see a lot of employment problems in the future. I even saw a video from Japan where a computer program animated a body all on it's own. With full automation I see it more like a marxist / retirement environment where people only work on things that they like and robots provide everything we need.

Where I worked they brought in some CNC machines. Everyone thought it would dumb down the jobs of the skilled turners and millers but . . .

It took those machines a fraction of the time it took a human to produce the same number of perfect doohickeys or widgets. So, did that mean only needing one man to supervise several machines, short time working or what? Nope, they retrained the machinists to programme their own machines. They spent part of their time at a computer setting the job up, organising the stock needed etc. Some machines had time and operator sharing so A was supervising his batch whilst B programmed his next one - optimum man and machine usage. Some staff were not able to do the new tasks but most of those were "lost" by retasking, retirement or resignation. There were some redundancies but voluntary ones got an enhanced package and help finding new jobs.

But, no doubt the capacity of such schemes will have a limit.

Yes and the human population is rapidly increasing at a higher and higher increment every year. We might end up giving robots the world and die off ourselves. But that's just my wild imagination running. But one thing we are not ready for is if these robots start to demand rights. We base our rights off of our understanding of suffering to avoid it. So if robots demand rights, what will they be? Will we even understand it?

In a BBC prog, "The Public Philosopher" the subject of trust in machines came up. One of the audience, a guy who had worked on the development of the fMRI system, said that he would trust an intelligent system - not quite am Ai yet - in disgnosis over a human.

I thought about that. As he said the machine can compare the symptoms with a library of symptoms accumulated over years and across the world. I can see that, in this world where a disease can fly across the world in 24 hours it could be good if symptoms in London could quickly be spotted as being similar to those in a case China.

This implies symptoms that can be "digitized" and which are put into a data store with international access.

From my own experience 7 GPs have missed cardiac symptoms merely because they assumed the least complex reason or were not familiar with them. Putting me on a hospital level ECG monitor might have compared my symptoms with its library and pointed out the most likely diagnosis, or at least that further investigation might be becessary.

Machibes are not infallible, they are only as good as their algorythms and their data base, but they are improving by the year - then they need confidebce in the humans using them to accept tge results.

Is this dumbing down the medical profession? To a degree this has happened already, once only doctors ran CT scanners and tge lije, now it is a nurse, alveit a soecislist nurse. That frees the doctor for the cleverer stuff. In the UK they are having trouble finding enough doctors and nurses, I think it woukd be good if they could find ways of getting the basics done faster.

Machines don't get tired at 3am in a busy ER and misread an ECG trace or miss the indications of blood results.

Friend wife is a fan of a TV series called Chicago Med.  There is a seasoned old staff member of the hospital who is a shrink. He is a lovable old dude. He has an apprentice female MD who is studying to become a psych doc. Between the two of them they are able to discern some patient problems that are not likely to be revealed by a machine. That is the human element of medicine. Emotions are part of the deal. As soon as we train some AI machine to understand and respond to the vagaries of human emotions, then we will not need Psych docs. Until that time we do need the humans.

Quote from: Icarus on March 12, 2017, 05:35:38 AM
Friend wife is a fan of a TV series called Chicago Med.  There is a seasoned old staff member of the hospital who is a shrink. He is a lovable old dude. He has an apprentice female MD who is studying to become a psych doc. Between the two of them they are able to discern some patient problems that are not likely to be revealed by a machine. That is the human element of medicine. Emotions are part of the deal. As soon as we train some AI machine to understand and respond to the vagaries of human emotions, then we will not need Psych docs. Until that time we do need the humans.

I should have been clearer that I was talking about physical disease that had symptoms that were "digitizable". That could jnclude things from temperature to scans. It could include the already practiced computerised question session. Typed responses are used but I am sure speech recognition will overtake that. If you dial 111, the non-emergency system in the UK, a non-healthcare professional operator asks you a string of standard questions with yes/no answers. This could be stage one, some questions are basic others relate to more serious conditions like meningitis or anaphylaxis. These are entered into a system that then determines the priority. Tick box technology. There are a limited number of such operators and you may have to wait 10 minutes or much more at busy times.

This is a kind of computer assisted non-expert human triage that an "expert" system could make faster and be just as efficient I think. Still a stage one diagnosis that you have to go through whatever kind of condition, mental or physical, you are calling about. Stage two is a nurse who decides whether a doctor should be brought into the loop or an ambulance sent.

There will always be conditions that require the human brain but for physically measurable symptoms a machine can make an early diagnosis and, in some cases, possibly a safer one.

Ultimately there will be the Star Wars type scanner. Most of that is available now but it requires a very large room full of kit, a very, very deep pocket and a whole team of operators and interpreters. But things like liquid and gas spectrometers are getting smaller and cheaper and ECG and EEG machines "smarter" every year. Many pathology processes are entirely machine run now, the developing concept of a "lab-on-a-chip" could make these available in the ER one day. Feed it all into a super-comp or a "Watson" like cloud computer system that can, at least, flag up the priority on a prima facie diagnosis.

At the moment defibrillators that a nember of the public can use without training can "diagnose" whether a cardiac shock is needed or not. This is a reasonably safe situation, the shock is uncomfortable to aware patients and may leave a minor burn but can save a life long before a medic can get there if needed.

Intel's (http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/analytics/artificial-intelligence/overview.html?cid=sem43700015621551538&intel_term=artificial+intelligence&gclid=Cj0KEQiAgJTGBRDLr5_az_Ouk44BEiQAIxaA4tOIbHsIzdw5c7rf2aA6797v8H047pIDJbZaZbBKRuEaAqgp8P8HAQ&gclsrc=aw.ds) slant on AI

QuoteHow Does Artificial Intelligence Impact Us?
Artificial intelligence promises to transform society on the scale of the industrial, technical, and digital revolutions before it. Machines that can sense, reason, and act will accelerate solutions to large-scale problems in myriad of fields, including science, finance, medicine and education, augmenting human capability and helping us to go further, farther, faster. Buoyed by Moore's Law and fed by a deluge of data, AI is at the heart of much of today's technical innovation.

Quote from: Arturo on March 07, 2017, 07:41:47 AM
Yes and the human population is rapidly increasing at a higher and higher increment every year.

Population is increasing, certainly. However the rate of growth has been dropping for some time now.

Quote(https://www.happyatheistforum.com/forum/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fi.imgur.com%2Fwu1UiRS.jpg&hash=a9ab7c867d442afae48fa0e4f8cca68c5534f589)

The world's population has grown exponentially in the last 100 years, but the rate of growth has declined drastically in recent decades and is expected to continue decreasing through the middle of the 21st century.

Quote from: Recusant on March 12, 2017, 11:23:35 AM

Quote from: Arturo on March 07, 2017, 07:41:47 AM
Yes and the human population is rapidly increasing at a higher and higher increment every year.

Population is increasing, certainly. However the rate of growth has been dropping for some time now.

Quote(https://www.happyatheistforum.com/forum/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fi.imgur.com%2Fwu1UiRS.jpg&hash=a9ab7c867d442afae48fa0e4f8cca68c5534f589)

The world's population has grown exponentially in the last 100 years, but the rate of growth has declined drastically in recent decades and is expected to continue decreasing through the middle of the 21st century.

Interesting difference there, Recusant.

Quote from: Recusant on March 12, 2017, 11:23:35 AM

Quote from: Arturo on March 07, 2017, 07:41:47 AM
Yes and the human population is rapidly increasing at a higher and higher increment every year.

Population is increasing, certainly. However the rate of growth has been dropping for some time now.

Quote(https://www.happyatheistforum.com/forum/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fi.imgur.com%2Fwu1UiRS.jpg&hash=a9ab7c867d442afae48fa0e4f8cca68c5534f589)

The world's population has grown exponentially in the last 100 years, but the rate of growth has declined drastically in recent decades and is expected to continue decreasing through the middle of the 21st century.

That's weird. I guess there are still more babies being made than their parents.

Quote from: Arturo on March 12, 2017, 08:29:10 PM

Quote from: Recusant on March 12, 2017, 11:23:35 AM

Quote from: Arturo on March 07, 2017, 07:41:47 AM
Yes and the human population is rapidly increasing at a higher and higher increment every year.

Population is increasing, certainly. However the rate of growth has been dropping for some time now.

Quote(https://www.happyatheistforum.com/forum/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fi.imgur.com%2Fwu1UiRS.jpg&hash=a9ab7c867d442afae48fa0e4f8cca68c5534f589)

The world's population has grown exponentially in the last 100 years, but the rate of growth has declined drastically in recent decades and is expected to continue decreasing through the middle of the 21st century.

That's weird. I guess there are still more babies being made than their parents.

Not so. We passed peak child in 2015. Technically humanity is now heading for extinction.

Quote from: Tank on March 17, 2017, 06:00:15 PM

Quote from: Arturo on March 12, 2017, 08:29:10 PM

Quote from: Recusant on March 12, 2017, 11:23:35 AM

Quote from: Arturo on March 07, 2017, 07:41:47 AM
Yes and the human population is rapidly increasing at a higher and higher increment every year.

Population is increasing, certainly. However the rate of growth has been dropping for some time now.

Quote(https://www.happyatheistforum.com/forum/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fi.imgur.com%2Fwu1UiRS.jpg&hash=a9ab7c867d442afae48fa0e4f8cca68c5534f589)

The world's population has grown exponentially in the last 100 years, but the rate of growth has declined drastically in recent decades and is expected to continue decreasing through the middle of the 21st century.

That's weird. I guess there are still more babies being made than their parents.

Not so. We passed peak child in 2015. Technically humanity is now heading for extinction.

I don't know what to think anymore. Everyone is saying something different!

Quote from: Arturo on March 17, 2017, 09:48:11 PM

I don't know what to think anymore. Everyone is saying something different!

If you extend that graph out into the future the blue line will peak and start going down.  To quote C3PO, "we're doomed!"

We have a long way to go in the population dropping before we have to start worrying about genetic diversity.

The human race was possibly down to 2000 individuals 150 000 yesrs ago.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/04/080424-humans-extinct.html

"... probably due to climate change ..."

That's pretty low diversity!

Quote from: Gloucester on March 17, 2017, 10:14:42 PM
The human race was possibly down to 2000 individuals 150 000 yesrs ago.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/04/080424-humans-extinct.html

"... probably due to climate change ..."

That's pretty low diversity!

By then we'll all be gene edited and optimised anyway. It's conceivable that in the next millennia gene optimisation for humans will be the norm not the exception. In 150,000 years we may not even be recognisable as humans.

There has been recent debate about "killer robots" (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-40995835) and, in a BBC Workd Service item about the management of the Korean DMZ there was a mention of the Samsung SGR-A1 gun (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samsung_SGR-A1) that can operate autonomously.

Despite my interest in how reality follows sc-fi I find this worrying. At the moment this is, hopefully, effectively a defence device in an area that all know is a no-go zone for people armed in any way. I remember a few years ago optical systems that could distinguish between a man carrying  a rifle and one carrying a broom.

The discrimination system has almost certainly improved since then and, potentially, this is an improvement over mine-fields, physical or optical "trip wires" and other non-discriminating systems. However it is still a worrying trend, especially when linked to the work on autonomous vehicles.

Are "Robot Wars" really on the edge of being a fact?

Later: rereading the Wiki article it seems the SGR-A1 may not be that discriminating if it only has IR detection. It does seem to have a "vision system" as well but is this "manual" only or backed up by an automated recognition system? Too secret to know.

Robot Wars or Robot Police. Which is scarier?

I think it should be an international agreement to never let a machine make a decision to kill a human. The debugging alone would be a nightmare.

Quote from: Davin on August 25, 2017, 03:12:57 PM
I think it should be an international agreement to never let a machine make a decision to kill a human. The debugging alone would be a nightmare.

A lot of "names" seem to be working on that, but getting some regimes to comply will probably be impossible. And if some regimes have it . . .

I bet the counterneasures people are working hard on this. And the counter-countermeasures people of course.

Quote from: Davin on August 25, 2017, 03:12:57 PM
I think it should be an international agreement to never let a machine make a decision to kill a human. The debugging alone would be a nightmare.

There has been talk about this and that a human must always be in the 'kill decision chain'. What these people fail to realise is that Close In Weapon Systems (CIWS) on ships are autonomous and have been for decades. Now these systems are primarily designed to take out missiles but could equally take out manned aircraft.

I agree with the prohibition of an AI having direct control of a kill scenario.

Not quite the positronic brain yet . . .

Seems that an African scientist has managed to integrate organic neurons into electronic sensors for explosives sensing.

QuoteIn new leap for AI: computer chips that can smell

http://en.prothom-alo.com/science-technology/news/157849/In-new-leap-for-AI-computer-chips-that-can-smell

They have been on about the "electronic nose"  for this purpose and as a diagnostic tool for many years, but those based on mass spectrometers are bulky and expensive. No idea yet as to the cost of this one but it seems to have garnered industrial interest. However, the concept of the neuronic-electronic link was one of the "dreams" of computer gurus before they switched to looking down the quantum tunnel.

Elon Musk is thinking about enhancing the brain with implanted computers - will this lead to the interface he needs? Not sure whether to be excited or worried, despite my enjoyment of such things in sci-fi

Just in case you wondered how neural networks work . . .

Dave: Please do me a favor. capture this video and let me send it by e mail to my most respected young friend  in Lithuania. PM me if you will  ....

Justinas is a brilliant young man who is living in a nation that is not doing well in the economic or political sense.  He is a classical guitarist with some notable skills. He holds a masters degree in Music and is a teacher of music in a school in his city. The pay scale for him and his peers is absurdly small, barely a subsistence wage. He is working his brain and his ass off to learn the IT game.  He has worked on the Python method and is now deep into the JAVA routines. 

Here is a young guy who is more than worthy of any help that we can give him.  I don't even know if this video would be useful. I am a total dumb ass about things of that sort. If it would be even mildly interesting to a dedicated student, then maybe he can use it.

Any of the rest of my HAF friends who are IT specialists are also invited to communicate with him with whatever encouragement and help that you might provide.  This is a good guy who is trying his damnedest to get himself into a more prosperous line of work than his present position.  He is also one of us as a non believer.

I met Justinas on another forum that is a lot of technical stuff about boats. He is a bright student of marine architecture that I have mentored for some time. That was some five or six years ago. He has visited me in the states on two occasions with a limited bit of my help to offset the expense of the trips.

Any help that any of you can contribute will be most appreciated by me and by him.  One other thing... he is very fluent in English and has some limited grasp of German, Polish, and Russian. He can also readily translate metric to Imperial dimensions in his head. He is Twenty seven years old, a bachelor who likes women but has not allowed his libido to overwhelm his common sense or decency, a tall and some would say handsome fellow who is worth whatever modest help we might give him....

I sincerely hope that I am not getting out of line with this request.  I may even get into trouble with him but I will take that risk.. He does have some gentlemanly pride.

Icarus, maybe it would be better to remove his e-mail address from the public forum and PM it instead, your friend might start to receive a bunch of unsolicited junk e-mail otherwise.

Or at the very least maybe substitute the @ for |at|, that way I believe the spambots won't pick up on it.

Thank you Silver. 

Done.

Icarus, can your friend access Youtube? The link is as below, you could send him that.

//youtu.be/fWnaiJgPIHA

But add hhtps: to that, I left that out to inhibit the new auto-embed system!

There are other Youtube videos, at various levels, if he enters "neural networks" into the sesrch line.

I don't currently have a Youtube downloader installed, had problems with it on my laptop and have not tried to find one for the Android tablet. Otherwise I would be very happy to help your friend if I could.

If he can't access Youtube let us know, I am sure someone will help.

Thank you Dave. He has access to Youtube without difficulty. I will transmit that reference.  He also has all sorts of spam filters, sorters, and blockers, some of which he developed himself. I don't even know if the item that you posted is useful to an aspiring learner. It looks like I'd want to access that sort of thing if I was a serious IT geek.  As for computer savvy, I am so ignorant that I can not find my ass with either hand.