Fourth-year AI Philosophy Discussions

[spudtater]

The lecture today was replaced by a more tutorial-style thing; we were given questions about a book we'd just read, and asked to write answers and then discuss to the class. The book was Vehicles by Braitenburg, a classic of the Behaviour-based field of AI. He designs little wheeled robots, then makes them more and more complex, trying to get them to display animal-like behaviours at each stage.

Now, the question we were asked was 'can these robots be said to be intelligent?' Almost immediately student #1 pointed out that the robots were designed to think using neural nets^[0]. Since neural nets currently don't scale very well, the student stated with confidence that the robot simply couldn't be built.

Next, student #2 stated that intelligence requires that you know stuff, and that "obviously, robots can't actually know anything." Excuse me? Obviously? I of course couldn't resist having a go at him, and had to be physically restrained from bashing his tiny head in with a plastic binder.^[1]

A rather more philosophically knowledgable student asked him what would happen if you simply made an exact replica of a specific human's brain out of artificial components; would this not think? So student #3, seated next to student #2, states that you'd just get a pile of "useless junk". He couldn't give any reason for this. I have a strong feeling that he was using Religious Reasoning^[2].

The tutor got the discussion back on track, and student #4 states that it doesn't matter anyway. Even if the theory was sound, the robot would be "a mile long". In any case, it would be too big, slow, awkward, whatever.

Now, my point here is not to say "look at all the stupid people". There are stupid people everywhere; they can be recognised by their tendancy to disagree with me. What I wanted to point out was the amount of pessimism and close-mindedness that four years of AI seems to cause in people. I remember philosophy discussions in first year, where students were expecting robots to exhibit human-like intelligence Real Soon Now, and excitedly talking about possibilities and new technologies.^[3] See, it was fine when we were the students, and we trusted The Experts (lecturers, PhD students, etc.) to build stuff. Now that we're supposed to be the experts, we see all the problems in front of us. Everybody's seen a good few technologies, and how much work it takes to make them do even the simplest things. Suddenly they seem to have given up hope. "I can't do this, therefore it can't be done."

Where did the sense of romance go? The science fiction vision? The big picture?

Hmmmm... on second thoughts, maybe it's just the nine-o'clock lecture effect.   8^)

[0] Neural nets: electronic circuits designed to resemble organic brains; lots of switches called 'perceptrons' are wired up to each other in a web-like structure, and signals are passed through them. These were very popular in the seventies... less so now, but a significant number of people are still working on them.

[1] Not really. What I actually did was patiently explain that knowledge is just an internal representation and that robots can be proven to have these, and ask him what the difference was between electrical signals in an organic matrix and in an electronic circuit. He refused to answer the question, preferring to stubbornly state that 'only animals can actually think.'

[2] I.e. blind faith and ignorance. Oh, alright, I'll give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that he merely did not wish to stray into religion from a secular debate. But really, if you have religious objections, either raise them and be prepared to discuss them^[2a], or stay silent.

[2a] I could have taken him on his own ground. *Smug expression*

[3] Even the christians (and other soullists) I spoke to were nodding and saying "that's intriguing..."; willing to give the benefit of the doubt.

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And now for something slightly different. It annoys me enough that the cafe in KB centre has been bought out by a Soulless Corporation(R) and renamed "The Spot" (with 400% more annoying slogans). But what really gets up my nose is that for the benefit of our health, they've decided to replace the sachets of salt with this 'Lo-Salt' shite (I think it's got Potassium Chloride, or something of that nature, in it as well as Sodium Chloride.) Now, in order for food to taste right, you've got to put on about three times as much Lo-Salt as you would normal salt. And since Lo-Salt is approximately a third Sodium Chloride... well, you see where I'm going. It's no healthier, and it's got extra foul-tasting crap in there that I don't want or need. Thank you for your concern about my health, but GIVE ME MY FUCKING SALT!

Anyway, I threw a polite British wobbly, and the guy at the till managed to find some sachets of real salt somewhere in the back of a cupboard. I went away clutching my precious prize in a gleeful manner. I think he got the picture. Just in case, I 'filled out' the feedback form by writing REAL SALT on it, taking up the entire page, and deposited it in the box for them to read. Because subtlety gets you nowhere these days.