On Monday, 8 July 2013 at 09:02:44 UTC, Tommi wrote:
On Sunday, 7 July 2013 at 20:35:49 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
On 7/7/2013 8:38 AM, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
All Siri does is recognize a set of stock patterns, just
like Eliza. Step out of that, even slightly, and it reverts
to a default, again, just like Eliza.
Of course, Siri had a much larger set of patterns it
recognized, but with a bit of experimentation you
quickly figure out what those stock patterns are.
There's nothing resembling human understanding there.
But that applies to humans, too - they just have a much
larger set of patterns they recognize.
I don't buy that. Humans don't process data like computers do.
Humans don't and _can't_ process data like computers do, but
computers _can_ process data like humans do.
Human brain does it's computation in a highly parallel manner,
but signals run much slower than they do in computers. What
human brain does is a very specific process, optimized for
survival on planet Earth.
But computers are generic computation devices. They can model
any computational processes, including the ones that human
brain uses (at least once we get some more cores in our
computers).
Disclaimer: I'm basically just paraphrasing stuff I read from
"The Singularity Is Near" and "How to Create a Mind".
The human mind being so particularly powerful at some tasks is a
product of both it's architecture *and* it's training. The
importance of physical learning in artificial intelligence is
getting some good recognition these days.
For me, the most interesting question in all of this is "What is
intelligence?". While that might seem the preserve of
philosophers, I believe that computers have the ability to (and
already do) demonstrate new and diverse types of intelligence,
entirely unlike human intelligence but nonetheless highly
effective.
