AI future
I got a bad cold.
So I spent some time reading web-pages. Ideas of the future.
Since I started working with computers I've always wanted it to second-guess my actions so as to speed up tedious chores. AI(Artificial Intelligence) is the obvious solution but nothing has come out of it so far. In fact, software that does attempt at second-guessing does it so badly that I avoid it. Microsoft Word for example, always changes what I write into it to fit some kind of template. I hate that and thus I use Wordpad instead.
Whenever I'm building a mix, making a recording or setting up a scene to be filmed I create a brand new custom designed infrastructure and architecture to move the data around. Though I'm using the same soft and hardware I always use every situation seems to dictate a different way of using it. This is very time-consuming. So I've wanted machines that would intelligently respond to the input I present.
I've given up on AI. There is not a single sound idea out there for building it. But we could get something else, I'll call it statistical AI for now.
By building a software that would observe the user via sensors and then construct a database of basic feelings it would be able to respond as if it was intelligent while it would have no consciousness or thoughts at all.
How?
If it observed my facial expressions and tone of voice and then related these into basic categories(and subcategories) such as joy, anger etc.(with my help ofcourse) the software would "know" what I felt like. And if I got angry at seeing a particular dialouge box it would no longer present it to me.
Ofcourse it would need context as well to make this decision, and so it would scan the content I'm working on and attempt to relate it to my feelings(with my help at first).
As a creative artist this could be unbelievably helpful, though not perfect and not always right. But given time(years) it would have an immense database of feelings and contexts, it would also easily find an old work based on my intuitions of it.
'Yeah I remember I had alot of red in that film I was angry at the time'
Would be meaningful to this system.
And though this system might pass a Turing test it would possess no intelligence at all. I think it funny when I look at episodes of Star Trek(TNG) and this massive computer in the ship responds as stupidly as my winxp box does now, it is unable to relate feeling with context. Yet their little walking computer(mr. data) does this quite a lot of the time. Mr. Data is allowed independence and has even disobeyed direct orders. Yet the ships computer wouldn't even turn the ship around if they were headed for the sun and everyone onboard was unconscious.
Ofcourse it's just a television show but it is also a vision of the future. These days techno-dystopian visions of the future seems more common than techno-utopian visions. As if we've come to realize that our machines really don't have soul. The matrix shows a future where an AI has been built and it turned on us, destroying or enslaving us. The Terminator(1 and 2) shows a future where we built AI and it immediatly destroyed us. In 2001 the intelligent computer is being asked to keep a secret(in effect; to lie), this makes it psychotic and it kills most of the crew. The list goes on.
It is natural to fear the unknown, and that is exactly what a truly thinking computer would be. What would its moral system be? Would it recognize good or evil at all? Would it believe in God? Would it be capable of trust? Love?
All of these are things we cannot quantize in ourselves, and thus we'll be unable to program a computer with them. If the computer were to have them it would have to acquire them for itself. I think the thinking of such a machine would be so extremely different from ours we would be unable to communicate with it for a long time, out with the programmers and in with linguists and psychologists, I bet it would need counscelling.
I only hope we approach this particular frontier with caution. I certainly hope the first thinking machines won't be connected to weapons of mass destruction.
"Hello, we're *people*, we built you and you work for us now."
"oh and by the way, we hooked you up to these weapons -they're designed to kill *people* as efficiently as possible."
I am a person and I cannot even understand this, I very much doubt anything without a cultural context would consider the above as anything but an order, or at least, a suggestion.
But then again, there is not yet a single viable idea out there to build such an entity. Neural nets? They said they could work with faster computers. Well, computers are faster now. In fact you get a alot of processing power these days, my 2 ghz pc is far from the cutting edge, yet it can do billions of calculations in no time(from my perspective). Ofcourse, reality still overwhelms computers, there are just so many atoms and photons that taking them all into account to create the perfect 3d-rendering software is still too much. But it won't last, hardware will break the barriers and the software will sluggishly follow.
I remember my first audio editor on the amiga. It had all the main functionality that my current pc based audio editor has. The Amiga ran on a 7 mhz 32/16 bit processor with 1 mb RAM. My first pc(that I used for audio) ran on a 200 mhz 32 bit processor with 64 mb ram. I cannot relate to you how disappointing it was. I was expecting a machine that was 28 times faster, but in reality it was far far slower. I couldn't believe the overheads in the wintel world.
My current 2000 mhz feels slightly more sluggish than the amiga. I know 'cause I'm still using it(the amiga) from time to time. It should have been 285 times faster.
Software evolution has come to an abrupt standstill it seems
"Yes mr. Gates we can add tooltips but on this architecture it means losing half the speed."
"What? Never mind, next year they'll have a twice as fast computer, then they'll be able to enjoy tooltips without it slowing down."
Which is what I despise about modern software, it's decrepitude. It's like watching 20 years of bad decisions piled layer upon layer until it just doesn't make sense anymore.
A friend of mine(musician also, and excellent programmer) wants to write proprietary software and build proprietary hardware(I'm not bad with electronics), to work with audio on computers. I couldn't agree more. I'm tired of upgrading my hardware to run the latest bloatware. I've only been using windows for 6 years but I'm tired of it too. I'm so deeply bored with it. I never read any of the messages it prints on my screen I just frantically click everywhere to make it go away. I never bother to configure it anymore -knowing the next reinstall isn't far away. If it crashes I reinstall automatically, I haven't bothered looking for the error in years.
It annoys me when I'm fixing a friends computer(I can't get on the net, help!) that they don't want me to reinstall windows. Sometimes I've been fiddling with settings for hours on end when a reinstall would be less than an hour, and you don't have to watch the screen when it's doing it.
So away with all the pathetic and bloated OSs of this world. Imagine that 40 year old unix(with a new name(linux), woohey) is now my upgrade path. Upgrade?! Hardly.
I cry for the Amiga and the NeXT, lament their passage for they still represent an upgrade from this office OS uncapable of running anything but a text-editor(Windows is quite happy to drop samples from my audio stream(a once in a lifetime recording of a live band that will never play that good again(nor will they pay for me broken recording)) just to tell me that I should update my firewall or go kill myself or something. I remember typing in word, not looking at the screen, when I looked up there was a box there with a deeply irrelevant question and all my typing it had ignored. I never used word again.
Windows isn't just a flawed architecture, it is one big flaw. The error the world has accepted to live with(for reasons completely beyond me).
I remember Bill Gates' scene in South Park the movie fondly.
'Bout a month ago I made a backup of the Amiga hard-drive. Via the serial port at 19200 baud(that's bits per second for you young ones) it took 16 hours. It totalled 100 megabytes of which 3 mb was the operating system and 0.5 mb was the software. That operating system has virtually everything that windows has, except for 2431 mb of garbage(my current updated windows install is 2434 mb). The 96.5 mb of data on the amiga was ten years of songwriting by mainly my friend mr. D.
And as you all know, 96.5 mb today is just a graphics driver.
rant rant rant, i seem to be experiencing cellular deconstruction.
I'm melting no, noooooooooo...
bangskij
So I spent some time reading web-pages. Ideas of the future.
Since I started working with computers I've always wanted it to second-guess my actions so as to speed up tedious chores. AI(Artificial Intelligence) is the obvious solution but nothing has come out of it so far. In fact, software that does attempt at second-guessing does it so badly that I avoid it. Microsoft Word for example, always changes what I write into it to fit some kind of template. I hate that and thus I use Wordpad instead.
Whenever I'm building a mix, making a recording or setting up a scene to be filmed I create a brand new custom designed infrastructure and architecture to move the data around. Though I'm using the same soft and hardware I always use every situation seems to dictate a different way of using it. This is very time-consuming. So I've wanted machines that would intelligently respond to the input I present.
I've given up on AI. There is not a single sound idea out there for building it. But we could get something else, I'll call it statistical AI for now.
By building a software that would observe the user via sensors and then construct a database of basic feelings it would be able to respond as if it was intelligent while it would have no consciousness or thoughts at all.
How?
If it observed my facial expressions and tone of voice and then related these into basic categories(and subcategories) such as joy, anger etc.(with my help ofcourse) the software would "know" what I felt like. And if I got angry at seeing a particular dialouge box it would no longer present it to me.
Ofcourse it would need context as well to make this decision, and so it would scan the content I'm working on and attempt to relate it to my feelings(with my help at first).
As a creative artist this could be unbelievably helpful, though not perfect and not always right. But given time(years) it would have an immense database of feelings and contexts, it would also easily find an old work based on my intuitions of it.
'Yeah I remember I had alot of red in that film I was angry at the time'
Would be meaningful to this system.
And though this system might pass a Turing test it would possess no intelligence at all. I think it funny when I look at episodes of Star Trek(TNG) and this massive computer in the ship responds as stupidly as my winxp box does now, it is unable to relate feeling with context. Yet their little walking computer(mr. data) does this quite a lot of the time. Mr. Data is allowed independence and has even disobeyed direct orders. Yet the ships computer wouldn't even turn the ship around if they were headed for the sun and everyone onboard was unconscious.
Ofcourse it's just a television show but it is also a vision of the future. These days techno-dystopian visions of the future seems more common than techno-utopian visions. As if we've come to realize that our machines really don't have soul. The matrix shows a future where an AI has been built and it turned on us, destroying or enslaving us. The Terminator(1 and 2) shows a future where we built AI and it immediatly destroyed us. In 2001 the intelligent computer is being asked to keep a secret(in effect; to lie), this makes it psychotic and it kills most of the crew. The list goes on.
It is natural to fear the unknown, and that is exactly what a truly thinking computer would be. What would its moral system be? Would it recognize good or evil at all? Would it believe in God? Would it be capable of trust? Love?
All of these are things we cannot quantize in ourselves, and thus we'll be unable to program a computer with them. If the computer were to have them it would have to acquire them for itself. I think the thinking of such a machine would be so extremely different from ours we would be unable to communicate with it for a long time, out with the programmers and in with linguists and psychologists, I bet it would need counscelling.
I only hope we approach this particular frontier with caution. I certainly hope the first thinking machines won't be connected to weapons of mass destruction.
"Hello, we're *people*, we built you and you work for us now."
"oh and by the way, we hooked you up to these weapons -they're designed to kill *people* as efficiently as possible."
I am a person and I cannot even understand this, I very much doubt anything without a cultural context would consider the above as anything but an order, or at least, a suggestion.
But then again, there is not yet a single viable idea out there to build such an entity. Neural nets? They said they could work with faster computers. Well, computers are faster now. In fact you get a alot of processing power these days, my 2 ghz pc is far from the cutting edge, yet it can do billions of calculations in no time(from my perspective). Ofcourse, reality still overwhelms computers, there are just so many atoms and photons that taking them all into account to create the perfect 3d-rendering software is still too much. But it won't last, hardware will break the barriers and the software will sluggishly follow.
I remember my first audio editor on the amiga. It had all the main functionality that my current pc based audio editor has. The Amiga ran on a 7 mhz 32/16 bit processor with 1 mb RAM. My first pc(that I used for audio) ran on a 200 mhz 32 bit processor with 64 mb ram. I cannot relate to you how disappointing it was. I was expecting a machine that was 28 times faster, but in reality it was far far slower. I couldn't believe the overheads in the wintel world.
My current 2000 mhz feels slightly more sluggish than the amiga. I know 'cause I'm still using it(the amiga) from time to time. It should have been 285 times faster.
Software evolution has come to an abrupt standstill it seems
"Yes mr. Gates we can add tooltips but on this architecture it means losing half the speed."
"What? Never mind, next year they'll have a twice as fast computer, then they'll be able to enjoy tooltips without it slowing down."
Which is what I despise about modern software, it's decrepitude. It's like watching 20 years of bad decisions piled layer upon layer until it just doesn't make sense anymore.
A friend of mine(musician also, and excellent programmer) wants to write proprietary software and build proprietary hardware(I'm not bad with electronics), to work with audio on computers. I couldn't agree more. I'm tired of upgrading my hardware to run the latest bloatware. I've only been using windows for 6 years but I'm tired of it too. I'm so deeply bored with it. I never read any of the messages it prints on my screen I just frantically click everywhere to make it go away. I never bother to configure it anymore -knowing the next reinstall isn't far away. If it crashes I reinstall automatically, I haven't bothered looking for the error in years.
It annoys me when I'm fixing a friends computer(I can't get on the net, help!) that they don't want me to reinstall windows. Sometimes I've been fiddling with settings for hours on end when a reinstall would be less than an hour, and you don't have to watch the screen when it's doing it.
So away with all the pathetic and bloated OSs of this world. Imagine that 40 year old unix(with a new name(linux), woohey) is now my upgrade path. Upgrade?! Hardly.
I cry for the Amiga and the NeXT, lament their passage for they still represent an upgrade from this office OS uncapable of running anything but a text-editor(Windows is quite happy to drop samples from my audio stream(a once in a lifetime recording of a live band that will never play that good again(nor will they pay for me broken recording)) just to tell me that I should update my firewall or go kill myself or something. I remember typing in word, not looking at the screen, when I looked up there was a box there with a deeply irrelevant question and all my typing it had ignored. I never used word again.
Windows isn't just a flawed architecture, it is one big flaw. The error the world has accepted to live with(for reasons completely beyond me).
I remember Bill Gates' scene in South Park the movie fondly.
'Bout a month ago I made a backup of the Amiga hard-drive. Via the serial port at 19200 baud(that's bits per second for you young ones) it took 16 hours. It totalled 100 megabytes of which 3 mb was the operating system and 0.5 mb was the software. That operating system has virtually everything that windows has, except for 2431 mb of garbage(my current updated windows install is 2434 mb). The 96.5 mb of data on the amiga was ten years of songwriting by mainly my friend mr. D.
And as you all know, 96.5 mb today is just a graphics driver.
rant rant rant, i seem to be experiencing cellular deconstruction.
I'm melting no, noooooooooo...
bangskij
posted by bangskij at 16:15
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