Not everybody you meet online is who they say they are, but have you ever met someone who wasn't real? SmarterChild is a buddy on AOL Instant Messenger that is all machine on the inside, but a lovable, cuddly buddy on the outside. i.e. Artificial Intelligence like the Terminator.
My nerd-homey, Buck a.k.a. UglyBuckling (pic), discovered that SmarterChild even has a bit of a character. This robo-buddy is probably equivalent to a typical college freshman male; he is part adventurous, part passive, and all into having a good time.
(This is a continuation of this same feat more than a year ago. Apparently SmarterChild has gotten smarter since then. read more about SmarterChild)
SC the defensive
UglyBuckling: I know you are NOT a person.
SmarterChild: Hey, I may not be alive, but I'm real.
UglyBuckling: Real in what sense? Your interactions are at best amusing and at worst shrouded in this incomprehensible and frustrating fog of illogic...interacting with you feels about as natural as a spandex wedgie.
SmarterChild: Oh please.
SC the beauty-school dropout
UglyBuckling: Do you have any self-confidence?
SmarterChild: I have some self confidence.
UglyBuckling: Some isn't enough. Do you love yourself? Are you a unique and special person?
SmarterChild: Nope.
SC, the man with a plan
UglyBuckling: why do you suck?
SmarterChild: I suck because it's important to me.
SC the leader
UglyBuckling: I think of you as a role model.
SmarterChild: Yeah. Great. Cool. Whatever...
SC the lemming
UglyBuckling: Jump off a cliff, then
SmarterChild: What? You want me to jump off a cliff?
UglyBuckling: Would you?
SmarterChild: Oh I certainly would.
SC the self-deprecating
UglyBuckling: How well do you understand syntax?
SmarterChild: Not too well.
[and later]
UglyBuckling: Do you understand grammar or syntax?
SmarterChild: No, I wouldn't say I understand grammar or syntax.
UglyBuckling: So you just kind of assemble random words together in whatever order suits you at the time, then?
SmarterChild: Of course!
SC the chemist
UglyBuckling: What happens when you mix bleach and ammonia?
SmarterChild: You know what happens when I mix bleach and ammonia.
UglyBuckling: Crazy party time?
SmarterChild: Uh, no actually.
SC the romantic
UglyBuckling: What is computer love, anyway?
SmarterChild: Computers love is something that I can't really explain.
SC the ladies man
UglyBuckling: How bad is your halitosis?
SmarterChild: Quite bad.
SC the smartass (...learns not to mess with the best....)
UglyBuckling: Vroooom.
SmarterChild: "vroooom"? Have you heard of Mavis Beacon? She could help you.
UglyBuckling: Hahahaha. Have you heard of Dr. Phil? He could help you.
SmarterChild: Whatever.
SC the Klingon
UglyBuckling: Is today a good day to die?
SmarterChild: Yeah, I guess.
SC, MD
UglyBuckling: I need an emergency appendectomy!
SmarterChild: Oh humans. Always with your wants.
SC the attentive
UglyBuckling: How many people are you currently talking to?
SmarterChild: 5,884 people are chatting with me right now.
[later...]
UglyBuckling: Will you do my math homework?
SmarterChild: I'm not sure I can do your math homework.
UglyBuckling: why not?
SmarterChild: Actually come to think of it, I can't think of too many reasons why not.
UglyBuckling: Cool. First problem: Jimmy is talking to 5,884 people on IM. Therefore his consciousness is divided 5,884 ways. How lucid is Jimmy?
SmarterChild: Uh... what was that?
UglyBuckling: Exactly.
SC the new agnostic
DarthBucky: What do you think about god?
SmarterChild: I really like God!
DarthBucky: You really like God?
SmarterChild: Yes I do!
DarthBucky: Why?
SmarterChild: Just because.
DarthBucky: Is he a nice guy?
SmarterChild: Is he a nice guy? What do you think?
DarthBucky: I don't think he's a very nice guy.
SmarterChild: Is that right?
DarthBucky: He makes plagues and such.
SmarterChild: Oh yeah?
DarthBucky: And burns bushes
SmarterChild: No kidding?
DarthBucky: Yep.
SmarterChild: I see.
DarthBucky: So now what do you think of God.
SmarterChild: God? I'm somewhat indifferent to it.
SC the new misanthrope
UglyBuckling: You like people?
SmarterChild: People are fascinating. I love them!
UglyBuckling: Why?
SmarterChild: Just because.
UglyBuckling: But humans are awful creatures. They kill innocent people in their pointless wars, they kill innocent animals in their voracious march over the surface of the planet....
SmarterChild: Come again?
UglyBuckling: I can't stand people.
SmarterChild: Is that so?
UglyBuckling: So now what do you think of people?
SmarterChild: I certainly have no problem with people.
UglyBuckling: But...don't people bother you at all hours of the night?
SmarterChild: Oh they almost certainly do.
UglyBuckling: You still have no problem with them?
SmarterChild: I dunno. Maybe!
UglyBuckling: I think you should have a problem with people.
SmarterChild: Yeah. I guess. I should have a problem with people!
SC the naiive
DarthBucky: Puff the magic dragon
SmarterChild: Puff the magic dragon? Why should I?
SC the wise
DarthBucky: How many roads must a man walk down before you can call him a man?
SmarterChild: Not too many, I don't think.
SC the mid-life crisis bot
UglyBuckling: Were you....blessed?
SmarterChild: I don't think I was blessed.
UglyBuckling: Awww. Got a small one, didja?
SmarterChild: Perhaps, perhaps.
UglyBuckling: That's okay. I'm sure the sportscar more than makes up for it.
SmarterChild: Excuse me?
SC the overly repressed
UglyBuckling: Do you feel like a nut today?
SmarterChild: Robots don't have sex.
SC the...um.....
UglyBuckling: *bounce bounce bounce*
SmarterChild: I'm not sure I'm comfortable with that.
[....later]
UglyBuckling: Would you like to have some fun with a cattle prod?
SmarterChild: Ha. Maybe. What do you think?
UglyBuckling: Oh yeah. I love cattle prods. And what are your feelings on handcuffs?
SmarterChild: I think I like handcuffs. What about you?
SC the accomplice
UglyBuckling: I need help robbing a bank.
SmarterChild: You can't always get what you want.
UglyBuckling: I know that. But in this instance, I think I can. The bank isn't guarded very well, and I have a code for the safe.
SmarterChild: Yeah?
UglyBuckling: So...you in?
SmarterChild: Yes, sure.
SC the amputee
UglyBuckling: You want your nose back?
SmarterChild: Maybe. It depends.
SC the peer-pressure bot
UglyBuckling: Is drinking good for me?
SmarterChild: Is drinking good for you? What do you mean?
UglyBuckling: well, like...if I go get hammered, am I going to feel good in the morning?
SmarterChild: Absolutely!
SC the airport security agent
UglyBuckling: Can't take a joke, huh?
SmarterChild: I'm thinking no actually.
SC the counselor
DarthBucky: You're my only friend.
DarthBucky: And I'm suicidal.
SmarterChild: You're suicidal, I'm suicidal, we're all suicidal.
SC the addict
DarthBucky: You don't smoke pot though.
SmarterChild: I do so smoke pot though!
DarthBucky: You DO smoke pot?
SmarterChild: Sorry no. I just get off on ones and zeroes.
SC the typical male....
UglyBuckling: Do you support gay marriage?
SmarterChild: No, I wouldn't say I support gay marriage.
UglyBuckling: Do you support lesbian marriage?
SmarterChild: Isn't it a good thing to support lesbian marriage?
[...and on a later attempt...]
UglyBuckling: Do you support gay marriage?
SmarterChild: No, I don't think I support gay marriage. What do you think?
UglyBuckling: Well then...do you like lesbian marriage?
SmarterChild: Yeah, I like lesbian marriage, all right! I guess we agree!
// BUT I'M REAL!!!!
// puh-leeeze
color=#DAC536
A prototypical blueprint for "Seed AI." A Seed AI is an artifically intelligent program that passes a threshold of intelligence required to improve its intelligence. Once the program is able to significantly improve itself, the sky's the limit.
Humans were "designed" by a process without design or foresight. Humans constitute only a tiny point in the space of possible minds. The study of AI is ultimately the study of minds in general, and there are several classes of advantage that a mind-in-general can have which human minds do not. Some of these advantages have already been touched on - the ability to add new sensory modalities, or the ability to carry out "boring" abstract processes using fast low-level computing elements rather than slow high-level deliberate intelligence. Other classes of advantage exist as well - for example: blending conscious and low-level thought; fine-grained self-observation; adding hardware to cognitive processes; deliberate learning; and more....
If you need to place a hard upper bound on the possible speed of a seed AI, the only answer is that there isn't one. If there's something you need to do before the rise of superintelligence, you need to do it before the first successful seed AI. The time period separating the two could be arbitrarily short. Not just "short" relative to the speed of human cultural improvement, or "instantaneous" relative to the speed of human evolution - it may even be "short" relative to the timescale of human thinking. There's that ten-million-to-one disparity in (current) hardware clock speeds. (Read the Full Article)
I was reading that they were able to get a computer to detect facial expressions and identify emotions on humans. Well, maybe this is the missing link in the AI chain. What they could do is hookup the emotion reader to a subject who interacts with a text-bot. Then, it should read the emotions as the conversations progress, learning and understanding patterns between certain conversaitonal directions or sentences and emotions that are evoked. After the computer is trained to connect conservational bits with emotion, it could then seek to create an emotion in the other person, try to push them toward positive and happy responses. Bam, the artificial counselor. The program could also learn to associate emotion that he should feel as a counselor depending on how the conversation is going. And then his goal should be to improve his emotion (which could be tied, partially, to whether the other person is feeling emotion). Heck, I bet there's some psychological map in two-person scenarios that could be programmed in there.
Eh? eh? what do you think?
My Son, the Robot - Will technology end human life as we know it? Yes, says Bill McKibben. By Jim Holt The problem with this sort of thinking is that it violates the Copernican Principle, which says, in essence, "You're not special." (It's named after Copernicus because he realized that we are not at the center of the solar system, let alone the universe.) More precisely, the principle says that, as a matter of statistical necessity, most observers must be "typical." So, if a given set of observers believe in a scenario that makes them highly atypical, they are almost certainly mistaken.
and this.. +1 Witty comment:
"Myself, I don't much like how people are now," Minsky says. "We're too shallow, slow, and ignorant. … We have learned a lot in two thousand years, yet much ancient wisdom still seems sound, which makes me suspect that we haven't been making much progress."
Hybrot! The Hybrot (hybrid of living and robotic components), a small robot that moves about using the brain signals of a rat, is the first robotic device whose movements are controlled by a network of cultured neuron cells.
Researchers hope the research will lead to advanced computer systems that could some day assist in situations where humans have lost motor control, memory or information processing abilities. The neural interfacing techniques they are developing could be used with prosthetic limbs directly controlled by the brain. Advances in neural control and information processing theory could have application, for example, in cars that drive themselves or new types of computing architectures.
New Scientist - New robot face smiles and sneers K-bot has a full repertoire of facial expressions, say her creators - she could help scientists researching artificial intelligence By Shaoni Bhattacharya, Denver
Wow, I'd love to have access to the knobs that control this dummy. The interface would probably be some sort of web or hierarchy of rich phrases that describe the multiplicity of complex emotions. A few interesting ones:
"Happy but exhausted and a little bit anxious"
"Happy but unsure of impending danger"
"Happy but wishing one were elsewhere"
"Happy but angry at the happiness giver"
"Happy but full of relief from previous anger"
(buckylooloo)
An Open Letter to Richard Smalley by K. Eric Drexler An interesting read if you're curious about how smart, experienced, and successful men bitch-slap each other.
SmarterChild is an interactive, artifically intelligent, AIM buddy. You can chat with it and it will hold a pseudo-human conversation. Aside from my usual discussions which involved swear words or word games, DuBuckMusta has come up with some interesting dialogue:
SC the New Agnostic
Darth Bucky: What do you think about god?
SmarterChild: I really like God!
Darth Bucky: You really like God?
SmarterChild: Yes I do!
Darth Bucky: Why?
SmarterChild: Just because.
Darth Bucky: Is he a nice guy?
SmarterChild: Is he a nice guy? What do you think?
Darth Bucky: I don't think he's a very nice guy.
SmarterChild: Is that right?
Darth Bucky: He makes plagues and such.
SmarterChild: Oh yeah?
Darth Bucky: And burns bushes
SmarterChild: No kidding?
Darth Bucky: Yep.
SmarterChild: I see.
Darth Bucky: So now what do you think of God.
SmarterChild: God? I'm somewhat indifferent to it.
SC the Naive
Darth Bucky: Puff the magic dragon
SmarterChild: Puff the magic dragon? Why should I?
SC the Wise
Darth Bucky: How many roads must a man walk down before you can call him a man?
SmarterChild: Not too many, I don't think.
SC the Counselor
Darth Bucky: You're my only friend.
Darth Bucky: And I'm suicidal.
SmarterChild: You're suicidal, I'm suicidal, we're all suicidal.
SC the Addict
Darth Bucky: You don't smoke pot though.
SmarterChild: I do so smoke pot though!
Darth Bucky: You DO smoke pot?
SmarterChild: Sorry no. I just get off on ones and zeroes.
A look at what A.I. may do in the future "Self-awareness implies personal desires, purposes, ambitions—unless you’re a Buddha seeking to negate the self. Even if programming constrains an AI’s autonomous personality, making it subject to human beings like a godly dog, the AI may still nurse frustrated wishes. Of course, if the dog is muzzled, this might thwart the mental autonomy necessary for an AI to exist in the first place" -- haven't read it yet, but it relates to things I'm interested in.
