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In my student days, I bought a book for one single reason - its title: "Machines who think".
Considering how long ago that is, I am not holding my breath while waiting for the self-aware machines.
If you really want to loose your sleep over such issues: Pick up some of the SciFi novels by James P. Hogan, such as "The two faces of tomorrow" or "Realtime interrupt". "Two faces" is from my student days as well ("Realtime" is more recent), but Hogan had the top AI experts at C-M and MIT review his manuscripts: Even today they hold water, seen from a professional perspective. Obviously, we have extended our understanding since the books were written, but the knowledge on which the books are built is essentially still "correct". Both books are higly recommended.
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MikeTheFid wrote: It seems like we are in a moment similar to the one just after the Manhattan Project produced the first nuclear bombs
And that's the difference. We had nuclear bombs.
AI? Give me a break. Show me something that actually can be described as artificial intelligence --
something that can perceive the world, contemplate an action, and have the means to interact with the physical world to implement that action. And implement it in a way poses a threat to anything (but you won't get past the first condition.)
What, are all those self-driving cars going to suddenly join Lyft and go on strike?
Even the tragic Boeing crashes are not an AI running amok but a poorly programmed expert system. As in, some intelligence on the plane didn't suddenly say, "hey, let's go kill some people."
There is no AI. There is no "Intelligence" - sure, we have extremely limited systems that can learn and adapt, that require huge training sets that result in a complex weighted network. You call that thinking? You call that intelligence? A worm is smarter.
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Learning to code with python is like learning to swim with those little arm floaties. It gives you undeserved confidence and will eventually drown you. - DangerBunny
Artificial intelligence is the only remedy for natural stupidity. - CDP1802
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Marc Clifton wrote: There is no AI.
Exactly. The majority of people on earth do not understand this.
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If I'm reading this I'm asking me: Is there intelligence at all? 
It does not solve my Problem, but it answers my question
modified 19-Jan-21 21:04pm.
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Slacker007 wrote: The majority of people on earth do not understand this.
Sadly, the majority of people on earth lack the intelligence to understand this. How ironic.
Latest Article - A 4-Stack rPI Cluster with WiFi-Ethernet Bridging
Learning to code with python is like learning to swim with those little arm floaties. It gives you undeserved confidence and will eventually drown you. - DangerBunny
Artificial intelligence is the only remedy for natural stupidity. - CDP1802
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The thing a lot of people forget is that we are machines ourselves. We're (very complex) multi-celled organisms, that at some point got our "singularity" and became self-aware.
At some point, that will happen to the very advanced AI, whether we like/believe it or not. And I have a feeling it's not going to be pretty.
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Computers only do EXACTLY what they are told to do. So, no, there is no threat unless a programmer programs it to make poor choices.
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Everyone is born right handed. Only the strongest overcome it.
Fight for left-handed rights and hand equality.
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But that's not true for neural networks. They aren't programmed, they are trained, and they aren't nearly as deterministic as coded programs. They are working on fuzzy logic the same as we do, and they can make mistakes like we do.
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Dean Roddey wrote: , they are trained
It still comes down to what the programmer has made possible. A computer can never think or reason like a human. It's still if else statements at its simplest.
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Everyone is born right handed. Only the strongest overcome it.
Fight for left-handed rights and hand equality.
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again, most people in the world do not understand the point you just made.
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But it's not. You should bone up on DNNs a bit more. There is zero problem domain knowledge coded into a DNN. It's just a set of level driven nodes just as our brain's neurons are. There can be problem domain aware code around a DNN do other parts of the job, but the DNN is NOT just doing something it was programmed to do.
It doesn't matter if you consider it intelligent or not. The fact is it will take in lots of information and which generate a choice not based on being told what choices to make and not based on any inputs it has ever seen before. And, like a human, it can make mistakes similar to how we make them, not off/on right/wrong mistakes but fuzzy mistakes.
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Dean Roddey wrote: You should bone up on DNNs a bit more
I actually intend to. At the end of the days, it's just 0's and 1's based on what some programmer made possible.
Dean Roddey wrote: but the DNN is NOT just doing something it was programmed to do.
I get that. But it CAN'T do anything that the code won't allow.
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Everyone is born right handed. Only the strongest overcome it.
Fight for left-handed rights and hand equality.
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The codes doesn't ALLOW anything. That's sort of the point of DNNs. They aren't programs in the sense that most programs are. They are more like meta-programs. The program is just the pipes through which the data flows. The decisions are not made by those pipes, it's made by how the data flowing through those pipes interact with each other, which is why it can deal with information it's never seen before.
That's a fundamental difference.
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Dean Roddey wrote: why it can deal with information it's never seen before
Because some programmer wrote code to do that. It's just code. It can't think. It's not alive.
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Everyone is born right handed. Only the strongest overcome it.
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It doesn't matter if it's alive or really 'thinks' by your or my definition of what that means. The fact is that it can make decisions much more in the way that we do than like a software program does. They aren't anything alike really.
That means it can be used for things that regular software programs cannot hope to do. And those things it can do very well are things that are potentially very dangerous to us, because human nature will insure that we use them thusly.
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All I hear is a lot of general theory from you. I have to disagree with you.
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Everyone is born right handed. Only the strongest overcome it.
Fight for left-handed rights and hand equality.
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OK, the earth is flat, if that's what you want to hear.
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That's a little extreme. I disagree with you. That's OK.
Social Media - A platform that makes it easier for the crazies to find each other.
Everyone is born right handed. Only the strongest overcome it.
Fight for left-handed rights and hand equality.
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So, here's a good example of why you are mistaken. I challenge you to write a program that can recognize any picture of a banana with high accuracy. You will find that that is very difficult. And, when you are done, you will have a program that only recognizes bananas. If you need to recognize something else, like stock manipulation patterns, you will have write a different program that will also be very difficult.
DNNs don't have to be changed to do different jobs like that. That's a fundamental difference. The same algorithm can recognize a banana or find patterns in financial transactions or understand written characters or recognize sounds in spoken words, without any changes.
That's because it's not a program of if/elses that you write. It's a program that accepts data, lets that data interfere with itself in ways that creates a pattern that gives a confidence level that the input represents this or that. It's nothing like a bunch of if/else statements making hard coded decisions. Nowhere in there is any code written related to 'is this a banana?' at all.
It doesn't make any difference whether it's 'alive' or 'intelligent' at all in terms of the practical impact that's already having on our lives and the vastly larger impact it will have in the future.
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Thought I'd interject to say the question of sentience has been a matter of some debate in the philosophy circles i run in, in large part because of AI being on the horizon.
I think reasonable people can disagree, as there are certain grounding assumptions we all have to deal with here in terms of the question of what makes us human, what it even means to think, or engage in say, philosophy?
As for me I'd suggest that anything that is a convincing enough illusion of The Real Thing(TM) (whatever that happens to be) is as good as the real thing for any meaningful intent and purpose.
For example, for all I know, we don't have free will either. It might be possible to develop a way to plot my next thought or move. Maybe I'm a calculation in a simulation. But it doesn't matter. Because I have the illusion of will, and it's a compelling enough illusion that it may as well be (to me) the real thing.
So I'd suggest here, that at a certain threshold, we might accept that a computer "thinks" as any other sentient being might, or even as a human might.
I don't know if that can be done in silicon reasonably, but I'm entertaining a hypothetical here, if you'll humor me that.
When I was growin' up, I was the smartest kid I knew. Maybe that was just because I didn't know that many kids. All I know is now I feel the opposite.
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codewitch honey crisis wrote: Maybe I'm a calculation in a simulation.
The Matrix has you...
M.D.V. 
If something has a solution... Why do we have to worry about?. If it has no solution... For what reason do we have to worry about?
Help me to understand what I'm saying, and I'll explain it better to you
Rating helpful answers is nice, but saying thanks can be even nicer.
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ZurdoDev wrote: it's just 0's and 1's based on what some programmer made possible.
Well, actually real neurons are more analog than digital and emulated neurons should copy that behavior. 
I have lived with several Zen masters - all of them were cats.
His last invention was an evil Lasagna. It didn't kill anyone, and it actually tasted pretty good.
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And they do of course. The nodes in a DNN calculate a level, usually something like -1 to 1. If they were binary you'd need gigantic numbers of them to achieve the same thing. Like real neurons where the strength of an electrical signal is enough to trigger a chemical emission across the synapse or not, these calculate a level that sort of represents the same thing.
Ultimately it's closer to interferometry than a traditional 'decision graph' type of program. It doesn't make decisions, it creates patterns, and via training it's known that a given pattern represents a particular confidence in a particular result.
And of course DNNs can become the inputs to other DNNs. So it's not one huge neural network, and you probably wouldn't want that even if you could do it. It can be a hierarchy where many DNNs are reporting likelihoods of many different conditions and those are feeding into higher level DNNs that are trained to recognize patterns in those conditions and confidences.
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ZurdoDev wrote: It still comes down to what the programmer has made possible. A computer can never think or reason like a human. It's still if else statements at its simplest.
No. The programer wrote an emulation of a neural network, no more. Whatever the capabilites of the neural network may be, they are totally separate from the emulation or the hardware. You can argue that the topology of the network is all wrong, the number of neurons to low or that the learning method is not adequate. The emulation is a normal deterministic algorithm and may fall short of your expectations in many ways, but you are mistaken when you carry these properties over to the simulated network.
Just look at the currently best version of a neural network we have up to now. A unique copy of it is right between your ears. These neurons are real living cells which work on biochemical basis, no emulation needed here. In many ways these neurons are similar to little transistors or surpass them, because transistors can't strengthen, weaken or wire up new connections at all. The basic layout of this network has been shaped by the namegiver of the evolutionary algorithm. From then on it was on its own. nobody programmed it, not even the genetic code that was it#s blueprint. The human genome does not encode enough information to contain a fresh OS installation. And nobody trained it. It started to train itself by processing inputs even before you were born.
I have lived with several Zen masters - all of them were cats.
His last invention was an evil Lasagna. It didn't kill anyone, and it actually tasted pretty good.
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CodeWraith wrote: living
Keyword.
Social Media - A platform that makes it easier for the crazies to find each other.
Everyone is born right handed. Only the strongest overcome it.
Fight for left-handed rights and hand equality.
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