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From the "Beats Me" Department
Kuro5hin has an interesting article today about Artificial Intelligence, or the lack thereof. (Warning -- I don't know or vouch for this site. Looks like there is some harsh language in the comments) There has been a very long-running debate in the computer science field about artificial intelligence, going back as far as I can remember. The author makes some good points, and those interested in AI should give it a read. But the question I have is "suppose you have written an artificial intelligence engine, let's call it a call-center psychiatrist, how would you go about knowing if it was working okay?
Easy enough, right? You call it up and tell it your problems. But aside from making judgments and offering opinions, just what would the output be? Conversation, maybe, but that's about it.
So how do you judge if a person (thing?) is making good conversation or not? Ask a hundred people? Decide for yourself? One of the first fake-AI programs, Eliza, was a program to make conversations with people. It worked so well that real psychiatrists thought it would be a great tool to use with their patients! And this program was written in --- 1966!
"In fact, such an impact did the program have that some psychiatrists saw it as a means of allowing the profession to deal with many more patients. There was talk about using Eliza as a front end with the most serious patients would be referred to a human psychiatrist. Despite Weizenbaum's insistence that the program did not understand the patient's problems, some in the profession still did not believe him."
Back in 2000, AOLiza was built to take the popular AOL Instant Messenger and "fake out" people into thinking they were having conversations with other people when in fact it was a computer.
As AI continues to mature, we have a weird question to ask ourselves. Instead of asking "What is intelligence?" perhaps a better question would be "Would we know it if we saw it?"
AI concerns me...probably because I have seen too many movies. I worry that we will create something that will grow beyond our control and come to control us instead. Yet, I can also see practical implications. Only the future will tell.