An interesting post, but IMHO, it's irrationally exuberant in its lack
of appreciation for how insanely hard AI has been, as demonstrated
during the past 40 years of lots of very smart people making very slow
progress in the development of intelligent systems.
Mike Laub wrote:
> I think that we have already created artificial intelligence on the
> internet, we just need to give him/her a way of speaking. I would like
> to call this The first steps towards creating this artificial
> intelligence came from Google when they made the algorithm that
> promotes the best sites to the top of a search result.
IMHO, Google's algorithm has little in common with AI. If you look
into the founders of Google and the origins of their ranking
algorithm, you'll find that Brin and Page were Stanford grad students
working in data mining, and that their big idea is based on trivial
syntactic correlation between words, their locality in documents or
web pages, and the number of incoming web links, and not the
underpinnings of AI: causation, semantics, cognition.
Imagine building an intelligent framework does not recognize the
existence or value of cause and effect, does not comprehend any
subtleties of "meaning", and does employ any mechanisms of thought.
In the absence of these fundamental underpinnings of "intelligence"
(and many, many more), Google's inherent limitations reduce its
potential to build intelligent system into recognizing static patterns
of word forms that are "alike" and "popular".
For more on Google's ranking algorithm:
http://www-db.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Page_rank
http://www.iprcom.com/papers/pagerank/
> The thing that distinguishes human beings from animals is our ability
> to choose between two things, and Google does this when they put one
> website above another. If you agree with the book, Zen and the Art of
> Motorcycle maintenance, you understand that the quality is indefinable,
Actually, I think Pirsig *did* finally define quality, at least to
degree that was workable and productive. Otherwise, the rest of the
book's exploration of that concept would have led nowhere.
> but it is the most important thing in life.
An interesting assertion. Probably one that even Pirsig would
disagree with, especially after losing his son at a young age.
> For Google to see one page,
> and say that it is better than another, essentially has already created
> an artificial intelligence, we just need to find a better way for this
> algorithm with all of the data on the internet, to speak.
> I believe that we could understand the "collective soul" of the
> internet by using Google's page ranking system to make decisions.
> I think that discussion boards can be re-arranged in a way that, if
> they are combine an algorithm could promote advancements in AI.
I agree that Google's algorithm does possess the essential attribute
of decision theory -- it employs a value function that identifies one
alternative as being better than another. But it is unable even to
deal in more than a single decision -- no consequences of decisions,
no chain of consequence, no tactics or strategies. If that's AI, then
it's purely reflexive. It might be enough smarts to direct a
bacterium in its avoidance of pain and attraction to food, but little
else. Even subsumption architectures based on finite automata have
more utility than this (though not much).
But how might Google model memory? Learning? Planning? Perception?
If these are not representable in its architecture, Google will be
enormously self-limiting and unscalable in its pursuit of achieving
higher levels of intelligent behavior.
....
>
> Google already has the technology to allow for synonym search. Google
> could include in it's ranking all of the websites that say, "George
> bush is an idiot", "George bush is a moron", and so forth.
No. Google does not model semantics at all. It's equally as likely
to equate "Bush is a genius" with "Bush is a moron" unless the person
posing the question injects the necessary semantics himself by posing
leading questions, like:
match:
"Bush is a " $A
where $A is a FavorableAdjective
And an ontological lexicon has already been defined, such as:
FavorableAdjectives: nice, smart, clever, witty, genius
UnfavorableAdjectives: nasty, dumb, clueless, witless, moron
>
> Truth
> Of course you wouldn't promote this website as saying, "Come to Google,
> we have the truth" you would say, "This is the collective soul of the
> internet." These are the decisions the internet would make if it was a
> person.
Of course, the Internet is so full of untruths that at best Google
might hope to achieve accuracy, but never truth.
>
> Transparency
> To help maintain a transparent process, you should list the top 10
> pages that agree, with and disagree with, the idea.
"Top 10" by what criterion? Logically precise? Factually precise?
Politically correct? Clever? Polarizing? Amusing? Popular?
> An AI Game:
> I read "Agonistics: A Language Game" with great interest, because I
> have proposed a similar idea, however I have very little influence in
> the AI world, because I am just a recent graduate in electrical
> engineering and I work for the McDonalds Corporation designing the
> electrical part of their buildings, which very rarely exposes me to the
> world of AI.
> However, I think my proposal has merit. It, like "Agonistics: A
> Language Game" is designed to create a system where ideas can compete
> in a survival of the fittest-tournament. My proposal would also
> correlate the strength of an online character directly to the strength
> of an online idea, however I have some additional ideas.
> For instance there are a number of ways to tie different aspects of an
> idea to different aspects of an on-line character. For example, the
> number of people who vote on weather they agree or disagree could
> represent the strength of the online-character's attach. However the
> idea in my mind becomes very difficult to describe. I don't know if
> you have ever read "David's Sling" is very close. However many people
> would be able to participate at a time. I envision an idea at the top
> of a page with the online community brainstorming a list of reasons to
> agree or disagree with the idea. There would be no need to shorten
> these lists because the best ideas would go to the top.
Adversarial AI has been explored by a lot of folks, from robot wars to
"the language complexity game", to adversarial games of all kinds, to
numerous attempts to devise standard benchmarks for various AI
facilities like planning, reasoning, parsing, translation, and more,
much less the Turing Test itself.
Personally, I'm glad to see that interest in AI benchmarks seem to be
on the rise, since it's always been hard to know whether one computer
science theory or technique is superior to another until you build
systems based on the proposed fundamentals and then have them compete
head-to-head, or at least time their execution of a common suite of
problems. Benchmarks have been the mainstay of perhaps the best
example of success in CS -- computer architecture. In that case, the
SPEC benchmarks are used extensively to evaluate novel CPU and memory
system designs via simulation and modeling. I think similar benefits
may befall AI's use of practical performance feedback.
That said, you're not alone in your belief that the web may be the
origin of a "global mind" based on "web intelligence":
http://novaspivack.typepad.com/nova_spivacks_weblog/2004/06/minding_the_pla.html
http://www.goertzel.org/papers/webart.html
However, what what I've seen, only a Net Kook (tm) would suggest that
the web in its current state could create a self emergent hive mind.
If you have enough interest to explore AI further, I'd recommend
picking up a copy of Russell and Norvig's "AI: A Modern Approach":
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0137903952/qid=112469186...r=8-1/r
It's a tome, but it's phenomenally comprehensive. Once you memorize
this book, you'll be more than ready to begin your research on your
PhD dissertation in AI. Seriously.
For lighter/cheaper introductions to AI:
http://www.aaai.org/AITopics/html/overview.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_intelligence
Randy
--
Randy Crawford
http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~rand rand AT rice DOT edu
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