OK, so IBM has pulled off another \u201cmachine-trounces-human brain\u201d stunt. Yes, I’m talking about Watson’s resounding triumph against two human trivia experts on Jeopardy this past week. This follows the \u201cDeep Blue\u201d chess matches back in 1996 and ’97, when an IBM chess-playing computer twice bet Gary Kasparov, arguably the best human chess player on the planet. (In 2003, Kasparov fought Deep Junior, a Deep Blue-inspired program able to run on a personal computer, to a tie). <\/p>\n
Those IBM programmers and hardware designers are darn good, obviously. However, I admire IBM’s marketing division even more. Watson was a huge advertisement for IBM’s ability to provide customized artificial intelligence to the business community (they could not compete with Dell and Apple on the household computing market, though). <\/p>\n
What Watson is: Watson is a prime example of customized artificial intelligence. Watson was built specifically for its role on Jeopardy. It uses neural net programming, a form of parallel logic processing that mimics the human brain’s pattern identification function. It was then tweeked up with certain \u201chard logic\u201d layers to enhance its specific abilities to decipher an English language question, and then \u201ctrained\u201d with many examples of questions and answers. It built up a probability record as to help distinguish the intended meanings of, for example, \u201ctime flies like an arrow\u201d versus \u201cfruit flies like a banana\u201d. It was linked to a huge memory of facts, beyond what any human brain could hold. So, Watson gained the capacity from its team of human creators to decipher a Jeopardy-like question, and then to select an answer from its huge library of facts. And of course, once a machine gains a human-like capacity, it can be expanded in scale well beyond what a human body can do (i.e., a machine can be made five times as big, take in five times as much energy, and thus have five times the human capacity to accomplish a goal; just as a tractor can out-pull or out-plow a stout workman in a farm field). <\/p>\n
What Watson is not: Watson is NOT a self-replicating being living amidst a society of other similar beings, in constant communication with those beings in a web of meta-networking and emergent ‘crowd wisdom’. Watson does not fend for itself every moment to survive, and form understandings with its neighbors to trade and cooperate. Watson is spoon fed its electricity and upkeep, and does not have to solve problems regarding its daily survival. Watson does not have nor require the generalized analysis capabilities that we and our low animal predecessors need to keep the species going in the various environments available on the planet Earth.<\/p>\n
But of course, this might yet happen. We might yet develop machines tasked to fend for themselves, machines that can affiliate with fellow machines and exchange information about and resources from the environment, that compete to reproduce based upon the best survival adaptations to their specific environment, and that have a mechanism to mutate their design and programming for trial-and-error selection via this competition process. What then? Will they evolve into super-humans? I.e., like us but bigger and faster and stronger and smarter, using better materials and advanced means of computing and communicating? And making use of better energy-generating and providing processes? Yea, maybe. At that point we have something to worry about.<\/p>\n
The bigger question, again not applicable to Watson, is whether the mysterious facility we call \u201cconsciousness\u201d would emerge in these autonomous, socialized beings. If so, perhaps they would understand what it is like to be us, what it is like to have feelings. Then maybe \u2013 just maybe \u2013 they could sympathize with what we go through. Perhaps they might then cut the human species a break, and keep us around on a \u201clittle brother and sister\u201d basis. If not though, if their inspiration and ultimate goal is some sort of logically devised notion of global optimality \u2013 then our species is cooked. <\/p>\n
For now, though, enjoy the IBM stunts. But enough stunts might eventually add up to \u201cartificial\u201d beings with self-survival and reproduction abilities, woven together into their own \u201cmeta\u201d (i.e. social) network. I’m not sure that I would want to be around when that happens.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
OK, so IBM has pulled off another \u201cmachine-trounces-human brain\u201d stunt. Yes, I’m talking about Watson’s resounding triumph against two human trivia experts on Jeopardy this past week. This follows the \u201cDeep Blue\u201d chess matches back in 1996 and ’97, when an IBM chess-playing computer twice bet Gary Kasparov, arguably the best human chess player on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,23],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1949"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1949"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1949\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1951,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1949\/revisions\/1951"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1949"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1949"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1949"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}