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Machines are smart, but can they think about thinking?

20 Mar

Computers can play chess, Jeopardy and now they can do crossword puzzles. In a competition last weekend with 600 of the country’s top puzzlers, a machine named Dr. Fill came in 141.

The term “artificial intelligence” is usually associated with computers that do such things. I have my doubts. I suspect smart humans are simply slipping their own knowledge into code which then exits a box that does not think. When IBM’s Big Blue was losing at chess, a small army of programmers quickly updated the code.

That’s almost like cheating at cards.

I believe a box is capable of thinking, but before it can someone will have to unlock a secret … uncover a currently unknown approach that will allow a human process to be trans-synthesized by something nonhuman. When this happens, machine intelligence really won’t be artificial. The will have to change the term.

In AI there is debate over whether a machine designed to think should do so like a person or like a machine. The former, once popular, is losing out to the latter. It’s because the former didn’t work very well.

I say it has got to be both. Consider this:

A human – me, for example – is asked a question. The question is: “How many rhymes are in the song Moonlight in Vermont?” The human, me, chooses not to answer immediately but to think: Why such a silly, out-of-context question?

Would the machine do that? Doubtful.

After mulling it over, I would agree with myself that the person asking the question did not do so to delight in telling me that my answer of eight is wrong and instead the correct answer is 10. There would be no satisfaction in that. No, the questioner wants me to say eight and then find joy in telling me the answer is either really high – say 500 – or really low – say one. Maybe it is zero.

In other words, I would use my intelligence to determine that “How many rhymes are in the song Moonlight in Vermont?” is a trick question. Does a computer know what a trick question is?

Only if it can think like a human.

Of course, it doesn’t have to think at all if it has access to every song ever written. All it has to do then is get the song and count. That is not AI.

So what is AI?

And how many rhymes really ARE in Moonlight in Vermont?
http://youtu.be/Tg7aC5-hv78

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The end of privacy

11 Feb

 

Digital technology brings the world to you and you to the world.

It tracks and records you, follows you around, knows where you have been, what you like, who your friends are. It can predict what you are likely to do.

There is a story circulating that a person with good credit was denied a mortgage because his friends in the digital world were un-creditworthy. You know, birds of a feather.

True? Don’t know. But certainly possible.

Now it seems people with information to protect are taking great steps to secure it when they go abroad. The New York Times this morning describes the precautions taken by a China expert at the Brookings Institute when he travels to that country. The account says such measures are now commonplace for government and business officials.

“He leaves his cellphone and laptop at home and instead brings ‘loaner’ devices, which he erases before he leaves the United States and wipes clean the minute he returns. In China, he disables Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, never lets his phone out of his sight and, in meetings, not only turns off his phone but also removes the battery, for fear his microphone could be turned on remotely. He connects to the Internet only through an encrypted, password-protected channel, and copies and pastes his password from a USB thumb drive. He never types in a password directly, because, he said, “the Chinese are very good at installing key-logging software on your laptop.”

At home, the average person’s privacy is compromised for marketing purposes. Someone wants to sell you something. It’s not a pleasant idea, but most can live with it. If it ever becomes political and used as a repressive tool of government, we’ll have quite a lot to worry about over a simple game of Angry Birds.

Am I’m being naïve by saying “if it ever ….”?

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When technology kills art

29 Jan

"The Artist"

Chaplin

I never thought much about how technology can create art forms until I saw Laurie Anderson perform. I never thought much about how technology can destroy art forms until I saw “The Artist.”

In the movie, a popular star of the silent screen refuses to make talking pictures. He does so for artistic reasons. His protests aside, the studio and public really don’t want him anymore.

He’s out of work; out of a career; out of a life.

Laurie Anderson

The film’s main character is endearing, but vain and maybe not even a real artist. He is certainly not Chaplin, a historically great performer who for a time also refused to make talkies.

The old and new film mediums required such different skills. The new forced actors to give up almost everything. How could Chaplin, such a master, abandon everything he knew simply because someone invented a new machine? How does a person at the utter and absolute top of his craft retire an art form that not only made him rich and famous but defined him to the world?

It’s nearly impossible.

More important, how is it that the art consuming public allows a great art form to be retired?

Things Chaplin did are still being done by mimes and clowns and dancers and comedians. But they are not being done in such a concentrated fashion and they are not being delivered to such a mass audience.

I find this sad, as I found “The Artist” sad.

Still, the work of tech-art pioneers like Laurie Anderson makes me feel good, which is at least some compensation.

Invariably, if you give an artist a new form of expression, he or she will use it to create something so exciting that people will turn away from the past.

Ancient technologists, in pre-historic times, learned to make paint-like materials and then decorated caves with them. Since then, and perhaps even before, technology and art have been forever linked.

No one can really fault that. In a way, it’s life affirming.

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Manufacturing: Ain’t what it used to be

25 Jan

When we think of manufacturing, we think of jobs. Unfortunately, that notion is outdated. Thomas Friedman, in his New York Times column today, repeats a joke about modern textile mills. Here’s the joke:

The average mill has only two employees, a man and a dog. The man is there to feed the dog, and the dog is there to keep the man away from the machines.

But even without many jobs, America should still seek to lead in manufacturing. On a sort-of bright note, we probably have more manufacturing than most people realize. Here is an interesting tidbit:

A Chinese company called Wanxiang Group controls dozens of factories in the U.S. that serve the auto and mining industries in Indonesia, western China and – hard to believe – North Korea.

We’re not out of it yet.

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Free speech and blogs

8 Jan

Author Lori Andrews

A cynic might say that blogging is something you do if you want to get fired from your day job. More and more, opinions from blogs are being used by employers to dismiss employees. And more and more, the courts are dealing with these cases, trying to determine the bounds and limits of free digital speech.

In the Currents section of today’s Sunday Inquirer, this topic is discussed by Lori Andrews, author of “I Know Who You Are and I Saw What You Did: Social Networks and the Death of Privacy.” Ms. Andrews will be lecturing Thursday night at the National Constitution Center n Philadelphia (call for reservations at 215-409-6700).

Read her piece here.

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