Machine Intelligence

Most folks laugh at this phrase, everybody has had fun with their backwards printer and rebellious cellphone. Working daily with the facepalm worthy exploits of folks I’ve come to laugh at the notion of human intelligence as well, but that’s another story.

Even now work is going on to create synthetic brains, devising simple heuristic rules which can guide the creation of artificial neural networks. New hardware and software is being created right now to facilitate the growth of true intelligence from a machine, and that makes me excited.

It’s worth noting the differences here between artificial intelligence and machine intelligence, there’s a big gap. Artificial intelligence can only respond to stimuli that it has specificially been created to work with, an example is bots in videogames. A bot can act like a player, and even though you can tell them apart from humans they still react in what would be considered a lifelike way within the simulated situation in which they exist, but without special markers built into those game worlds the bots cease functioning correctly and begin to act erratically. Machine intelligence works by creating models from available data and building scenarios within it’s neural network, allowing it to come to decisions that the original designers of it’s heuristic software may not have anticipated; taking my example above, the intelligence would learn the rules of the game through observation not through intentional prompts. There are different methods to achieve this but their goal is the same, to create a thinking model.

Isaac Asimov famously wrote about devices built with such an intelligence in I, Robot (and later Cory Doctorow took his ideas and ran with them in his I, Robot and more playful I, Row Boat) defining three rules which should govern the behaviour of a machine intelligence. The question is though, should we artificially restrain what thoughts a synthetic mind can entertain? Does the simple act of rationalising and coming to decisions based on available input constitute sentience?

It’s more a question for the philosophy students out there, me; I’m looking forward to the Turing Test being beaten and robot equality movements. It’s all a long way off, but we’re a clever bunch, eh? In the mean time watch this video and be enlightened:

Thanks to Andrew C. Hoyer for the aweome photo and having the ‘nads to Creative Commons licence it!

Tags: computers, futurism, geek, robots, video