the-acclivity-blog

Monday, July 31, 2006

IS PHILOSOPHY THAT NECESSARY??

i've written an article which argues whether philosophy is necessary for understanding and imitating human intelligence .here's the article

"Every great physical theory starts as a heresy and ends as a dogma".
Although AI can't be justified as a physical theory but i wonder whether its fate will be the same as cited above by the incisive remark.It's been decades since the advent of the "IDEA" that we can mimic our own intelligence and now it has been shaped into a full researched field of cognitive sciences.
The most intriguiging part of this science is the fact that the absolute is absent here,and the degree of relativity takes a spiral path.Take the term most commonly used "artificial intelligence".even the term intelligence is ambiguous.And it is this relative misery which leads me to think whether we are on war with biology? and if yes can we ever win at this rate?? I answer this question in the affirmative and i believe we are already on a winning spree.How?? Let me explain .
"TURING TEST" cited to be the ultimate goal of AI researchers for decades is loosing its importance now,well at least symbolically!! I go along with the breed of modern AI researchers who believe that the turing test doesn't provide for a justifiable goal of AI because it is suggested conversely that the turing test needlessly costraints machine intelligence to fit a human mould.Perhaps machine intelligence is somewhat radically different from human intelligence and trying to evaluate it in human terms is a fundamental mistake.If you still don't get what i mean ,then have it more detailed!
During the turing test when it was seen that the interrogator could ask "any" question in order to differentiate between the computer and the human, it was seen that the interrogator often asks for some lengthy calculation which definitely the computer could solve and the human could be prone to mistakes,so again researchers had the problem of making computers take decisions as to when they should provide the "wrong answer" just to fool the interrogator. But isn't it crazy??
Firstly we device machines having great computational speed, accuracy and diligence and then we challenge those very machines to behave in a human like manner and make mistakes??? well to err is human; to compile ....digital.Do we really wish a machine would do mathematics as slowly and inaccurately as a human??
On one hand we have developed technologies which can transfer electric signals around 10'000times faster than those done by the neurons.It's been proven that the retina tranfers electric signals to the brain at the same rate at which two computers transfer data between them and the recent developments regarding 'neuro chips'which could easily prove how far we have come and what all we have achieved but when it comes to application we again stumble and fall.It's then, when i think whether the imitation is futile. I don't mean we should stop exploring and experimenting but i believe instead of programming machines do superficial imitation of human intelligence, the whole field of the AI should be broken down into 'snippets of AI' and specific problem domains to be identified. Fields like psychology and philosophy should be done away with. I know i'll be termed as somewhat 'audacious' for this line but i strongly believe that these two fields are not concerned with human intelligence at all, as they are concerned more with individual perception and belief rather than logic.Studies have proven that culture is just as important in creating humans as humans are creating culture, and if we try to take everything in account, we fail miserabely. As a great rationalist Hissels said that, 'INTELLIGENCE IS NOT KNOWING WHAT IS TRUE, BUT RATHER KNOWING HOW TO COPE IN A WORLD THAT WAS CONSTANTLY CHANGING AND EVOLVING'.
Being interested in AI i am not condemning the work being done but i beleive that it is still in its primitive stage and any jump without thinking of the consequences could be fatal to the work and morale of the researchers.
There is an extremely different theme specified in the book i am reading which says that "intelligence is reflected by the collective behaviours of large numbers of very simple interacting ,semi-autonomous individuals or agents.Whether we take these agents to be neural cells ,individual members of a species,or a single person in a society,their interactions produce intelligence".
So,rather than wasting time ,money and effort in making machines produce pieces of poetry or to rank faces on a baeuty scale, the problem of building intelligent machines should be approached from the view point of mathematics,with the belief of logical reasoning as paradigmatic of intelligence itself.Who knows one day, we might be able to create machines which are able to think and take decisions based on pure logic without any emotional bondages to hamper their logical decision and then we can actually surpass our intelligence and create our own "artificial being".

3 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Hi...Came across this article on my friends blog. Extremely well written. I dont know whether you are planning on publishing it or submitting it to a journal/magazine, but if there is no restriction on the wordcount, you'd want to expand it. Include references, they'll lend more credibility to the manuscript (and I aint' questioning you or your sources here in any way :-) ). And despite the incapability of the following word to sum something worthy of a more descriptive prose, I'd have to say, its "nice." :-)

4:18 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Hmm... I am the "friend" that Mixed Reality mentioned through which he stumbled upon your article.

I had originally only skimmed through your article, and at first it seemed too "technical" and outside of area of knowledge for me to comment on it intelligently.

However, prompted by my friends compliment's to your article, I decided to take a close look. I find your article to be, frankly, rubbish and misguided. The premises of the article are exactly reversed in its knowledge hierarchy. There are no empiricist nor rationalistic arguments being made. All I noticed were blank assertions based on imagined and optimistic expectations--which are fine by themselves--but are sorely insufficient in order to make any coherent and convincing argument.

I suggest more tightly and rigorously grounding your assertions and premises to reality and the possibilities therein. That should drastically improve the believability of your article.

Regards and Bests,
Ergo

11:46 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

He He

6:15 AM  

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