The Flowing of the Dao

iCub is an Open Source Robotics platform. After you build your iCub maybe you consider OpenCog for your AI needs?

Cheers.

Worldpeace,
Ben

Jeff Hawkins, Numenta: “Prospects and Problems of Cortical Theory” This is the 10th and final talk given at the Redwood Center for Theoretical Neuroscience Inaugural Symposium UC Berkeley, October 7, 2005 Audio/Visual: sound, color Language: english Keywords: Theoretical Neuroscience; Cortex; Brain; AI, Memory; Hierarchy; Neural Networks Contact Information: Kilian Koepsell , Redwood Center for Theoretical Neuroscience, University of California, Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute, 132 Barker, MC #3190, Berkeley, CA 94720-3190

Where Dr. Henry Markram takes the viewer on a tour de force of that structure that gives rise to the phenomena of human intelligence.

IBM Research’s Almaden Institute Conference on Cognitive Computing. Markram discusses microcolumns in the brain, and shows several video animations of computer models of neurons communicating in a microcolumn. His model includes 10,000 neurons, which is a *very* large number of neurons to model. Markram’s Powerpoint presentation here.

Eliezer Yudkowsky is one of the world’s foremost researchers on Friendly AI and recursive self-improvement. He created the Friendly AI approach to AGI, which emphasizes the importance of the structure of an ethical optimization process and its supergoal, in contrast to the common trend of seeking the right fixed enumeration of ethical rules a moral agent should follow. In 2001, he published the first technical analysis of motivationally stable goal systems, with his book-length Creating Friendly AI: The Analysis and Design of Benevolent Goal Architectures. In 2002, he wrote “Levels of Organization in General Intelligence,” a paper on the evolutionary psychology of human general intelligence, published in the edited volume Artificial General Intelligence (Springer, 2006). He has two papers forthcoming in the edited volume Global Catastrophic Risks (Oxford, 2007), “Cognitive Biases Potentially Affecting Judgment of Global Risks” and “Artificial Intelligence as a Positive and Negative Factor in Global Risk.

Check out Eli’s blog overcomingbias.com.

The Chinese Room argument is a thought experiment and associated arguments designed by John Searle (Searle 1980) to show that a symbol processing machine like a computer can never be properly described as having a “mind” or “understanding”, regardless of how intelligently it may behave.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Room

I’ve had this in tab for about a week now and thought that I should take some time out to share some of my thoughts on this matter.

Searle states that a computer, however sufficiently advanced and complex could not be said to possess a mind.

What is a mind, may I ask? I’m a materialist when it comes to AI. I think that AI .. or a machine which could be said to be conscious will arrive as a result of quantum computational advances, not software. At least not right now.

But who’s to say really? If an AI of any significant order of magnitude were alive, sentient, sapient, awake, and conscious it could be next to you right now and you’d never know. It could extend itself across the universe at the speed of light using the leverage of its massive intelligence to charm stars into acting as transmitters to propagate itself. It would be God for all intents and purposes. I really don’t see what the anthropocentrism, this thinly veiled attempt to slight such an intelligence, is really about. Searle’s thought experiment makes me think that he is halfways goading this (theoretical) universal AI into revealing itself by “calling it out,” as it were; and halfways ignorantly reaffirming his own specist ignorance.

My question to Dr. Searle would be, “how can you allow for something greater if you believe you are all there is.”

The solipsistic anthropoegocentrism is all well and good up to a point. At which point the cons begin to outweigh the pros and whoever is employing the tactic is reduced to square one.

I’m a Bayesian. I think the posture, rhetorical or otherwise, we assume weighs in massively on the breakthroughs we are allowed to bear witness to, and shepherd.

Onward, I think any massively intelligent AI construct wouldn’t even consider regarding the notion of whether or not it had a mind. The point is moot.

One thing to point out in Searle’s thought experiment is that in attempting to distinguish his human being from the machine he effectively synonymizes them. Read the experiment carefully and see if you can spot the moment when this occurs …

Cheers,
Worldpeace,
Ben