[Lex Computer & Tech Group/LCTG] AI

Thu Feb 20 18:47:52 PST 2020

Arthur C. Clark, both an eminent scientist and science fiction writer, said “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic"

Imagine if you went to the year 1900 with a cellphone.  Or a cruise missile.  For us, today, to assume that the artificial intelligence of the future cannot exceed what man can do today ignores what man has seen in the last 100 years.  Despite last week’s talk, you don’t need the equivalent number of synapses in a human brain to do what a human does.  And at the present time we have no idea what creativity is (scientifically) so we don’t know whether it can be build.  Why can’t a machine be curious?  And I suspect that a person with an IQ of 60 has the same number of synapses as we do; it is what one does with them.

John

John Rudy

781-861-0402

781-718-8334 (cell)

20 Heritage Drive

Lexington, MA  02420

From: Robert Primak <bobprimak at yahoo.com> 
Sent: Thursday, February 20, 2020 9:34 PM
To: Lex Computer Group <lctg at lists.toku.us>; jjrudy1 at comcast.net
Subject: Re: [Lex Computer & Tech Group/LCTG] AI

Very meaty stuff, from everyone. There are two things I was particularly intrigued by:

1) George  Gamota's article raises the thorny question (also raised by other

members of our Group): When is Artificial Intelligence really intelligent? How do we measure machine intelligence? 

2) Does machine intelligence have to be comparable with human (or animal) intelligence? Is the same concept equally applicable when we are dealing with machines as when we are evaluating biological systems, like ourselves? Are the same survival and social value principles even applicable at all when we are evaluating machine intelligence?

And to Dick's article about causality: This is only one of many areas in which how the connections are made influences what we perceive as intelligence. Being able to classify objects is one facet of intelligence. But being able to make meaningful connections among classes of objects is still beyond what machine intelligence can do without guidance from human experts. 

Due to the fact that machines are not able (yet) to come up with novel, original programming code, such guidance may be needed forever. A self-healing program is a far cry from a self-invented program. As Microsoft Windows users have found out many times, our current machines don't even have the ability to do meaningful self-debugging! (To be fair, this is also the case with open source software.) 

I would also like to note that some of our Group members seem to think that Artificial General Intelligence (mimicking human intelligence in a programmed machine) is the only "real" artificial intelligence. The article offered by George

definitely takes a different view. AI and AGI are very different areas of research. 

-- Bob Primak

On Wednesday, February 19, 2020, 03:17:52 PM EST, jjrudy1 at comcast.net <mailto:jjrudy1 at comcast.net>  <jjrudy1 at comcast.net <mailto:jjrudy1 at comcast.net> > wrote: 

At today’s meeting the question arose about what, exactly, is Artificial Intelligence.  This article from Scientific American, though about 3 years old, does a nice job of explanation

http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/Am_I_Human.pdf

John Rudy

781-861-0402

781-718-8334 (cell)

20 Heritage Drive

Lexington, MA  02420

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