NationStates Jolt Archive

Some people deny that artificial intelligence exists. They say that any apparent examples of machines acting intelligently are just illusions. This makes me wonder if we replace a human with a machine, does that mean that the human we replaced wasn't doing anything intelligent? I don't see how we can avoid that conclusion.

As machines perform more and more tasks formally done by humans, does this mean that less and less human activity will have turned out to require intelligence? At the rate we're going I think we'll soon discover that humans were never intelligent in the first place.

If we don't stop the march of technology then the machines will overtake us and rule the world, with the monkies!!

If we don't stop the march of technology then the machines will overtake us and rule the world, with the monkies!!

The Monkee's albums are pretty devestating weapons.

Davy Jones qualifies as a WMD in his own right.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/e/ea/Dj3.jpg

Neither, actually. Cats, dolphins, dogs, horses, and certain primates (chimpanzees, ourangoutangs, and so on) are more intelligent than humans by a long shot, and as machines were created by humans, proportionally more intelligent than them as well.

Intelligence is defined in my Oxford dictionary as "1. a Intellect, understanding. b Quickness of understanding. 2. a Collection of information, esp. of military or political value. b People employed in this. c Information; news."

None of those definitions really suits for an answer for our question, with the exception of the first, but intelligence is generally recognized as active cognizance leading to a quickness of analysis and rationale. Machines have this on a simple level: information is fed to them, and they execute a certain action accordingly. But this does not make them intelligent. For instance, if you put a DVD into a CD player, chances are that your playing device isn't going to recognize the coding on the disk. If it does manage to play it anyway, it's not going to sound like music. This illustrates a point that machines such as this cannot make a conscious effort to see what the problem is and better themselves upon the challenge.

Some machines, on the other hand, have a greater capacity of "thought". Fuzzy logic, for example, is a term used to comprise machines taking data and "guesstimating" an action. Wikipedia explains this much better than I, so feast your eyes:

Degrees of truth are often confused with probabilities. However, they are conceptually distinct; fuzzy truth represents membership in vaguely defined sets, not likelihood of some event or condition. To illustrate the difference, consider this scenario: Bob is in a house with two adjacent rooms: the kitchen and the dining room. In many cases, Bob's status within the set of things "in the kitchen" is completely plain: he's either "in the kitchen" or "not in the kitchen". What about when Bob stands in the doorway? He may be considered "partially in the kitchen". Quantifying this partial state yields a fuzzy set membership. With only his little toe in the dining room, we might say Bob is 99% "in the kitchen" and 1% "in the dining room", for instance. No event (like a coin toss) will resolve Bob to being completely "in the kitchen" or "not in the kitchen", as long as he's standing in that doorway. Fuzzy sets are based on vague definitions of sets, not randomness.

But, once again, this means that machines utilising this set of parameters are merely machines which are more liberal in outcome. It certainly is a step closer to AI than we would have seen twenty years ago, but it's still in the works, and there's a possibilty that machines will be given true cognizance in the near future.

No. Don't be stupid. Next question!

Neither, actually. Cats, dolphins, dogs, horses, and certain primates (chimpanzees, ourangoutangs, and so on) are more intelligent than humans by a long shot, and as machines were created by humans, proportionally more intelligent than them as well.

Well I can't really argue with this. I mean my cat sits on me, but I never sit on my cat.

Baking Soda, you seem quite knowledgeable about this topic. If we assume machines aren't intelligent then if a spraypainter is replaced by a computer guided robot, would it be fair to say that the spray painter wasn't displaying intelligence while working?

Are machines self-aware? No? Then they are not intelligent by my standards. Machines are merely technology given too much respect.
This makes me wonder if we replace a human with a machine, does that mean that the human we replaced wasn't doing anything intelligent?
No, it means that the machine can do it more efficiently. I'd be totally cool with a machine posting letters and copying papper. That sucks and takes hours. I have better things to do and I welcome the change in the work environment. Not only will I be more effiecient and productive with my copy machine / printer, I can now enjoy work more by not doing tedios tasks.

It has absolutely nothing to do with intelligence.
Your forgetting that machines are merely technology - nothing more than an ax or a fishing hook. Back-hoes are not more intelligent than the people than run them.
No. Don't be stupid. Next question!
*nods*

Baking Soda, you seem quite knowledgeable about this topic. If we assume machines aren't intelligent then if a spraypainter is replaced by a computer guided robot, would it be fair to say that the spray painter wasn't displaying intelligence while working?
It depends. If the spraypainter was just applying a certain pattern to every car, then yes, it didn't involve much thinking. If he was doing it artistically, making each car a bit of a custom job, in a way aesthetically pleasing to him, then he was displaying intelligence.

Are machines self-aware? No? Then they are not intelligent by my standards. Machines are merely technology given too much respect.

Hmm, I think not being self aware is a benefit in many jobs.

I think many tasks people perform at work can't really be described as the result of intelligent behaviour. They seem to be more pattern recognition and response. But the big difference is that a human spray painter can drive a car or buy groceries while a spray painting robot cannot. However, neither driving nor buying groceries can be described as particularly intelligent. Vechiles that drive themselves have been developed.

So where humans seem to have the advantage over machines is not in intelligence as such, but in flexibility. We have excellent pattern recognition ability which we can apply across a vast range of areas. That is we can function unintelligently in more areas than a machine can.

It depends. If the spraypainter was just applying a certain pattern to every car, then yes, it didn't involve much thinking. If he was doing it artistically, making each car a bit of a custom job, in a way aesthetically pleasing to him, then he was displaying intelligence.

And currently, it would require a human intelligence to make the decisions about what customizing should be done, even if a machine is actually performing the work. It would be possible to program a computer with all the possible combinations of custom paint techniques, and give it a hierarchy of choices, if the car is four door, do plan A, if it has chrome bumpers, do plan A3, and so one. But unless the computer starts making decisions not based on programming, or designing new custom jobs, or doing it to please itself aesthetically, then it is still based on human intelligence.

Actually, my criteria for machine intelligence would probably be that the machine is, independently and conciously, creating art.

Actually, my criteria for machine intelligence would probably be that the machine is, independently and conciously, creating art.

But I don't think humans conciously create art in most cases.

ME: How did you come up with this?

PAINTER: I dunno!

No. Don't be stupid. Next question!
Mmhmm. [/thread]

Some people deny that artificial intelligence exists. They say that any apparent examples of machines acting intelligently are just illusions. This makes me wonder if we replace a human with a machine, does that mean that the human we replaced wasn't doing anything intelligent? I don't see how we can avoid that conclusion.

As machines perform more and more tasks formally done by humans, does this mean that less and less human activity will have turned out to require intelligence? At the rate we're going I think we'll soon discover that humans were never intelligent in the first place.

Machines aren't replacing people, they're replacing mechanical actions carried out by people. When I'm putting oranges in a box I'm not philosophising about the illusion of being, I'm moving my arms, not loving the oranges or organising a social orange organisation. Until machines are capable of unprogrammed actions, and that means outside of the bounds the code lines intended, meh thinks humans have nothing to worry about.
People that complain about losing their job to a machine are just sore because their skills have become obsolete, much like a traditional fisherman with factory ship fishing. It's the way technological progress goes, it never stops. Focus on what only humans do, and not mechanicist skills and there's no way a machine is going to obsolete you.

A machine displays as much intelligence as was put into code, stupid and incompetent programmer -> stupid inefficient machine; intelligent competent programmer -> efficient machine. Until machine can interactively change it's own code to suit it's environment and action requirements, it's going to be up to humans to make 'intelligent' machines.

Computers have no intelligence. They process by shuffling numbers to get results. Anyone whos done a philosophy course might have heard about the chinese room.

If I were to take chinese letters go to a Enligh/chinese book and reply in chinese while I give the illusion I speak chinese I really can't. Computers work in a process like that, but just more complicated.

I've had very few jobs in which a machine couldn't replace me and these jobs have included cooking, cleaning, modeling, and teaching. However, it would take hundreds of complex machines to handle even 90% of the tasks I have done at work. So while machines can pretty much do everything I did at work, no one machine or program can currently do more than one thing well. Human's advantage seem not to be in a specific job, but in the flexibility they are able to bring to it.

Oh, and often humans are still cheaper. If you want a robot car like the military is playing around with it'll cost a fortune. But computer costs always come down and there are fewer and fewer jobs they can't do. At the moment humans are Jacks of all trades and machines are masters of but one. If we want to say machines aren't intellgent but we are, I think we will have to define intelligence as flexibility and not mastery.

every programing language that has an if ... then statement or some equivelent can be tecnicly defined as "intelligent" in the sense that word is used in the phrase "machine intelligence".

does that equal sentience? no.
can it ever, in and of itself evolve into sentience? unlikely

can sentient awairness ever occupy a self programing mechanical artifact?
now that is the interesting question and i'd give it a very tenative possibly yes.

are humans sentient? yes
are our physical brains in some way equivelant to computers that we can build? yes, in as much as they preform essentialy the same functions, however radicly different they ways they go about doing so.

does our sentience arrise from this functioning of our brains?
many claim and believe that it does. i have my reservations and doubts about this, much as and for the same reasons as i do about the likelyhood of sufficiently complex artifacts themselves giving birth to it.

what i see, what makes sense to me, and i have no idea if or how this could be tested experimentaly, is that our awairness is a seperate thing, that comes from somewhere/thing else entirely.

that an awairness is an awairness is an awairness.
it is what our true selves are.
and not an artifact of the kind of machine intelligence of either mechanical artifacts or living organizms.
though perfectly capable of living in and occupying any sufficently complex living or mechanical organism, yet NOT a product of what it occupies at all.

thus our parents did NOT create us by giving birth to the bodies we occupy, only provided them for us TO occupy and walk arround in.

somewhere there are machines sufficient we could occupy them. not yet on this world though almost certainly on others, and in time, on our own.

likewise our physical species of the bodies we walk arround in is not the only that could support them either, even on our own world.

the main thing to consider here, that people too often forget when speculating on this subject, is that 'intelligence' and sentience (i.e. self awairness) are two very different and seperate things.

=^^=
.../\...

When you get right down the details, humans are just bio-mechanical machines, so on one hand, you are correct that human actions are not, exactly, intelligent. But this conclusion fails to encompass the rest of your argument. When a baby is born, you could say it is like a machine without programming, but instead of a programmer giving it lines of code to live, you allow the child to grow up and experience events, like touching something that's very hot. Eventually, the child will become more "intelligent," or as you say, capable of more tasks. Many children become smarter than their parents, but there are still things that parents may know that the children may not.

Machines developed because of humans. To say that replacing a human with a machine means that the task the human was performing did not require intelligence is a matter of opinion. I say replacing a human with a machine was a a show of higher intelligence. I'm an engineer, so usually I'm tasked with figuring out how to build the machine that is required to replace a human task. Some tasks are easy to build a machine for while others are extremely difficult. An example of a diffcult machine to build to automate a process is making knit hats for winter. The procress currently requires humans and machines because it is too complex for a machine to do all on its own. Does this mean that when a machine is finally built to accomplish this task that the humans who did it before were not intelligent?

Whats the difference between an absolutely accurate imitation and the real thing? If I build a human body by combining chemicals in interesting ways, is that body not human because it didn't originate in another humans body?

Heres a good guideline on the difference between intelligence and non-intelligence.

Cause-effect
becomes
Stimulus-reaction.

The procress currently requires humans and machines because it is too complex for a machine to do all on its own. Does this mean that when a machine is finally built to accomplish this task that the humans who did it before were not intelligent?

Let's assume the machine is not just automatically following a set of instructions, that it is taking in stimuli and then responding. If so, then it is doing what humans and animals do - Stimulus and response. If we insist that machines have no intelligence, then surely that would mean that humans aren't using intelligence when doing the same task, they are merely responding to stimuli. I however say that the machine does have a limited form of intelligence. Far inferior to humans who can perform millions of complex tasks, but still a form of intelligence. My goal was to show that those who insist that artificial intelligence of any sort doesn't exist must be wrong, unless of course they don't believe that humans require intelligence to perform similar tasks.

The difference implied in cause/effect and stimulus/response is choice. But it is questionable...

Let's assume the machine is not just automatically following a set of instructions, that it is taking in stimuli and then responding. If so, then it is doing what humans and animals do - Stimulus and response. If we insist that machines have no intelligence, then surely that would mean that humans aren't using intelligence when doing the same task, they are merely responding to stimuli. I however say that the machine does have a limited form of intelligence. Far inferior to humans who can perform millions of complex tasks, but still a form of intelligence. My goal was to show that those who insist that artificial intelligence of any sort doesn't exist must be wrong, unless of course they don't believe that humans require intelligence to perform similar tasks.


I fully agree that machines show a certain level of intelligence in certain cases. The problem is that artificial intelligence is usually meant to mean self-learning computers. I think your point is getting misinterpreted though.

I think your point is getting misinterpreted though.

Such is my lot in life. I suppose I could learn to communicate betterer but there are sometimes advantages to be gained from coming at things from odd angles.