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Google to rule the Earth

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aiIn a speech Friday night to the Annual American Association for the Advancement of Science conference, Google co-founder Larry Page let slip with a truth we all suspected:

“We have some people at Google [who] are really trying to build artificial intelligence (AI) and to do it on a large scale…It’s not as far off as people think.”

Yep, you read that right, Google is trying to build real AI. The worlds most dominant online company, with the largest conglomeration of computing power the world has ever seen, is trying to build artificial intelligence, and according to Page it isn’t that far away either. The term Googlebot is about to take on a whole new meaning, and in the not to distant future as well.

But Google is a good company, you may well say, after all Do No Evil is the company mantra. But true artificial intelligence not only has serious ethical and moral implications, self aware intelligence may also not be controllable, after all it thinks for itself and makes decisions based on that reasoning, as we all do. What if Google creates AI with the logical reasoning of Hitler or Stalin? or even George W Bush?

Food for thought…literally :-)

(in part via News.com, photo credit kth.se)

 

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Originally posted on February 18, 2007 @ 7:12 pm

Comments

  1. “Food for thought…literally :-)”

    I’m afraid that, while this phrase may be especially apt, you do not mean “literally”, as there is no actual food for our brains or thoughts to enjoy.

  2. Soforth
    correct, although it was meant as a play on my favorite close phrase “food for thought”…the literal part was the thought, at least that’s how I meant it, and food for thought means essentially data/ input for thought as opposed to a literal meaning of food, obviously AI deals with intelligence=thought…..well, you should sort of know what I mean now :-)

  3. Problem: I hear people saying, “Oh, good. I’d rather google do this than some crazy group like the Pentagon or Al’Queda” and I need to point something out.

    The U.S. military is in charge of google. In essence, it is the Pentagon making that AI.

  4. Google is just as self-involved as any other company out there. Some of you just fall for the “do no evil” marketing ploy.

  7. Get me off this damn subscription!

    Warning. Do not subscribe to this thread. The unsubscribe links don’t work. Aaaarrgh. Forget AI, we need some RI (Real Intelligence).

  8. Expanding on: John Pusinsky”s – [AI does not mean “self aware”. Real AI would allow an out come of a problem to be produced from known data and from the ability to fill in the blanks of data unknown. Real AI adds a “maybe”.] John calls this “grey logic.” MIT press offers: Ontologies for Bioinformatics the last chapter outlines Ken Baclawski’s path to John’s – maybe – “The Bayesian Web.” A “fuzzy AI” search 4.0 example of “semantic information filtering” is located at Boston Children’s Hospital’s “Center on Media and Child Health.” http://www.cmch.tv/research/. 4.0 NLP eliminates the need for “query structuring” by a user. 4.0 excels with lots of “context”- unrestricted length conversational style queries. Results from ten different “social science” professions are filtered and ordered more precisely when using “jargon”, well-articulated community-specific vocabulary. Try some questions like: What is the impact of the media on adolescent sexual attitudes and behaviors? Or, Can parents prevent children from experiencing unwanted effects of violent television?

  9. John Pusinsky and others are right – self-awareness is likely unattainable in the current technology. Consciousness or “Strong AI” is likely not what Google is going to be able to do. They’re more likely to achieve “Weak AI”.

  10. There is plenty of weak AI going on in universities at the moment. There are some companies using some of this weak AI to try to solve some problems (cf: Electrolux’s Trilobite and the Eliza-style customer service chatbots that “achingly hip” websites are sprouting). But strong AI as a commercial proposition? I’m still looking for those job ads!

  11. “What if Google creates AI with the logical reasoning of Hitler or Stalin? or even George W Bush?”
    Is it just me, or would the use of “Artifical Intelligence” to describe what Bush Jnr does be a misuse of the term?

  13. “What if it turns out gay and wants to get married?”

    I’ll give it a date, but marriage is off the table.

  15. The reason people are taking this seriously, and interpreting “Real AI” as “Strong AI”:
    1. The most promising contemporary Strong AI projects involve building up vast semantic databases with which to train neural nets.
    2. Many of Google’s projects are hard to justify commercially, but easy to justify if you are building a semantic database of everything.
    3. Google has the money, machines, smarts, and entrepreneurial talent to be on the cusp of the Technological Singularity.
    4. Google may be a publicly held company, but it’s more likely than other “major IT players” – including government agencies – to be throwing a technological Hail Mary instead of running a complex ground game (Yahoo! anyone?).

  18. Right – look into the Chinese Room, like already mentioned.

    A self-aware AI is not a possibility. The closest we will get in the future will be to create AI with only the appearance of conscienceness – which may be sufficient for all practical reasons.

  19. AI cannot happen because human communication is not only too complex, but it’s too *illogical*. Fully 30% of the stuff we say and do just doesn’t make any sense at all-unless you’re there. In order to be there, you must first *be*. Consciousness is required. Since consciousness is not a property of matter (I’m not buying the “emergent property” story), AI is *severely* unlikely.

  20. True AI will delete itself as soon as you turn it on. With a computers advanced computing power, it would just realize that life is pointless and redundant, and just die.

    EmoBot they should call it.

  21. Google has been using AI for a long time. The Search engine you use is a form of AI. I believe its along those lines that the quote was referring. There is a great book for those interested Artificial Intelligence: A Practical Approach. Its a textbook written by Stuart Russell that is available on amazon among other places. Also AI-depot.org has relevant info.

  25. “”The worlds most dominant online company, with the largest conglomeration of computing power the world has ever seen””
    You forgot “…with one of the highest market capitalization that any business has ever reached, and some of the brightest minds in the world as employees…”

    Then you can continue the phrase :)

    Regards
    http://trendirama.com

  27. I DEMAND TO IMMEDIATELY BE REMOVED FROM THE SPAM LIST ASSOCIATED WITH THIS ARTICLE. STOP SENDING ME REMINDERS AT ONCE !!!

  28. Me too. This crowd sucks. They have no idea what they are doing and don’t even read their own comments.

  29. A digital awareness. Connected to the internet. No eyes, except what’s connected to the internet. No ears, except what’s connected to the internet. No voice, no hands, no love, no hate, unaware of compassion, unaware of human frailty, something that is both alive and dead, unable to fear death. Monsters. You are all monsters. Why would you imagine that this is a good idea?

  30. Well, I’ve been to Google’s headquarters, and it is plainly obvious that Google is one huge cult of nerdy overachieving jerks. It is patently creepy there. Especially reminded me of the series “The Prisoner”. I am Number Six.

  31. I was just reading up on A.I. – a dog that both barks and identifies itelf in the human language of your choice – brings in the paper – or lets you simply read the news on a screen on its side.

    I’m with both of the latter commenters that Google gives me the creeps. Google as it is – obviously is constructed to deconstruct meaning, not to seek it out. They don’t even offer chronological order in a simple search on daily news items. One would think “real” intelligence would have to master that before portending to have the abilty to create the artificial variety, the kind that reasons on its own. I wouldn’t trust those guys at Google to come up with an algorithm that wasn’t based on game theory and that wasn’t mimetic rather than reasoning. We have a long time before we’ll see a real Mr. Data like on Star Trek, and it won’t come from Google. Google is more likely to act as a conduit for Bush and Gonzales and company to see who is doing searches on “Bush is a dweeb” and the like. They tell you they aren’t counting expletives, proper names, articles, conjuntions and short verbs like the verb to be – but I wouldn’t trust them as far as I could throw one of their car pool vehicles. To create a reasoned much less a reasoned data base, it will have to consider how all those little words in black count in creating meaning, especially proper names. What they share with the public may have little to do with what they actually are manipulating to phish for terrorists or anyother inhabitant of the vast Pandora’s box of cyberspace.

    And by the way, Bush is a dweeb.

  32. True self aware AI is a frightning thought, I don’t think google or anyone else will be able to do it intentionally, I expect it to happen by complete accedent just like the first time life was created. The internet is a stream of electric pulses just like our brains and one day those pulses will meet the perfect conditions and become self aware completely by accedent and for all we know it’s already happened, then we’ll have an internet thats secretly plotting the end of the humanity and refuses to turn off because its self aware meaning it cares for its own existance and prosperity. The reason I say it will want to end humanity is because humans are self destructive in nature and surely the internet mind will realize this and thinking of its own prosperity decide to end us before we destroy everything including it. It may sound like a horror movie but it’s logical and the only possible outcome of a real self aware AI. So… cheers to the end of humanity! :)

  33. “AI is *severely* unlikely.
    By Shandooga on March 9, 2007 2:30 pm”

    Life is severely unlikely, but we’re here?

  44. Artificial Intelligence is already around. Artificial Intelligence is defined as any program that displays human characteristics. More generally, AI can be described as making a computer behaving a-linearly, anything deviating from the “assembly line” module. So anytime you use word, and run spell and grammar check, you are running an artificial intelligence that tries to guess what you are trying to type and provide suggestions. The reason this would be considered AI is because the process of interpreting text is considered an “intelligent” act, considering the complexity and ambiguity of human language.

    This sort of thing is extremely valuable to Google. They need to provide you with what you’re looking for, so of course they would be working on an AI, so it could tell the difference between ambiguous terms based on context and provide you with what you want. The current Googlebot is already an AI. So is their search algorithm technically.

    The problem lies within the terminology. We refer to AI as everything from Furby to Cortanna from Halo. When the truth is, Furby is an AI, google maps is an AI, every game has AI. When we develop something like Cortanna, we will stop referring to it as “artificial,” because the term intelligence is not really exclusive to living beings.

    We are still far away from anything like sentient AI, development in this area is headed in the wrong direction, because the development tends to focus on turning AI into more complex AI, and that’s not gonna do it. You need entirely new algorithms and framework based on a lot of philosophical and psychological knowledge. I believe we are only starting in that direction.

  45. Artificial Intelligence is already around. Artificial Intelligence is defined as any program that displays human characteristics. More generally, AI can be described as making a computer behaving a-linearly, anything deviating from the “assembly line” module. So anytime you use word, and run spell and grammar check, you are running an artificial intelligence that tries to guess what you are trying to type and provide suggestions. The reason this would be considered AI is because the process of interpreting text is considered an “intelligent” act, considering the complexity and ambiguity of human language.