Cheerskep needs to recognize that robotic engineering has passed beyond the usual programming. The difference between robotic intelligence and human intelligence is getting tinier and tinier. After all, humans are just less efficient robots because they indulge in associative, metaphorical cognition to the extreme and thus may, scarcely may, be creative...or nuts. Robots can do the same a little, but we keep them from daydreaming too much, or falling in love, don't we? wc
________________________________ From: "[email protected]" <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Sunday, April 5, 2009 4:54:37 PM Subject: Re: Thinking machines and thinking Imago 16 writes: " the FT article also makes a point of explaining what, exactly Adam did -- produced a hypothesis, developed an experimental methodology, and carried out an experiment. So it is in fact a big deal." I myself would not credit the FT with "explaining what exactly" the robot did. For me, the most interesting suggestion about the robot's activity was that it "formed a hypothesis". I can vaguely conceive of a machine's "forming" a proposition in the vacuous sense of, say, grinding out an infinite number of statements in the terms and rules of mathematical logic, but the machine's being able to distinguish or "recognize" a non-vacuous hypothesis is harder since, initially, any statement at all can be considered as a hypothesis. Presumably the scientists would get the robot around that problem by programming it with an arbitrary operational decision-procedure for classifying a statement as a "hypothesis". But the more programmed the robot is, the less "independent" it feels, the more "mindlessly" mechanical it seems, the harder to credit with "discovery" or even with "knowledge". But, granted, those are just personal reactions to word usages. FT said: "Adam formed a hypothesis on the genetics of bakers' yeast and carried out experiments to test its predictions, without intervention from its makers at Aberystwyth University. The result was a series of bsimple but usefulb discoveries, confirmed by human scientists, about the gene coding for yeast enzymes." FT says the researchers also, "endowed Adam with a huge database of yeast biology, automated hardware to carry out experiments, supplies of yeast cells and lab chemicals, and powerful artificial intelligence software." >From this, I can't tell if, as Imago claims, the robot "developed an experimental methodology" or it simply proceeded according to instructions from its "powerful artificial intelligence software". That Adam mechanically detected and printed out genetic codes seems unexciting today. Go to any DNA lab and you will see technicians having lunch in the cafeteria while a machine back in the lab is mechanically doing such stuff. Consider a coin-sorting machine of the kind you'd find in any bank branch. To me it feels silly to credit it with "discovering new scientific knowledge". Imagine that astro-scientists are given a new uniquely powerful telescopic lens. They want to hitch it to machinery -- hardware and software -- that will keep it tracking the skies 24/7 to register and report hitherto "unseen" celestial objects. They call their new robot 'Bozo'. To build Bozo, the scientists "endow" the telescope with a huge database of info about the already "mapped" portion of the sky; they build automated hardware that will mechanically drive the telescope's eye across the sky, patch by patch; and they write software that will compare the new scope's picture of a given patch with all previous pics of that patch -- and flag anything new. (This is not unlike what the machinery at a medical lab does with your blood sample; the blood comes back with a "written" (machine-generated) report citing numbers outside a given range, etc.) >From the FT story, it's not obvious how Bozo is essentially different from Adam -- and neither of them, in this 21st century, seems anything more than what we'd expect coming up, given the technical developments of the past decades. In fact, such sky-scanning "robots" have already been at it for some time now. When FT says: "A laboratory robot called Adam has been hailed as the first machine in history to have discovered new scientific knowledge independently of its human creators," questions have to arise in the mind of any alert reader. If you read anything about the Hubble telescope, you will find it credited with many "discoveries". The FT piece tells us nothing that makes clear why Adam should be thought of as "independent of human creators" but the Hubble or the little floor-dusting "housekeeper" robots or even coin-sorting machines should not. I personally think maybe crediting ANY machine with "DISCOVERING" things may be a bit much. But this may be fuddy-duddy of me, motivated by the conviction that no machine ever gets a "Eureka!" feeling. I admit we probably could construct a stipulative definition that many of us would accept for the sake of discussion. But, as always, stipulation is not creation. Imago16 writes: "Perhaps you should have read the article, Cheerskep, before commenting on it." Many of us have been guilty of ad hominem jabs, Imago, and you and I both recognize the dismissive insinuation in that line for what it is. But we've been trying lately to cut down on such stuff. Please help us. Not only that, but your assumption is wrong: For what it's worth, I report that I did read the article before commenting. Go back and look at the article and my response, and note the difficulty with "discovery" and other problems was already there -- which it couldn't be without my reading the article. I still claim that Michael Brady's worry is misplaced, because no one will ever be able to write programs that will distinguish future, unprecedented arrangements -- of words, paint, musical notes, dance moves -- into those that will be aesthetically pleasing and those that won't. No one can do this for all of us any of the time, or for any of us all of the time. ************** Worried about job security? Check out the 5 safest jobs in a recession. (http://jobs.aol.com/gallery/growing-job-industries?ncid=emlcntuscare00000003 )
