Wednesday, December 10, 2014

Johnny Depp Rules the World

There's a movie, "Transcendence," in which Johnny Depp uploads his mind to a computer and ... comedy ensues.  I have not seen the movie but I'm interested to know how he would play such a role so there will be a report at some point.

Artificial Intelligence has been intriguing ever since the early days with ELIZA, software which did a low-level impersonation of a therapist.  No matter what you typed, she would ask for more information about it.  There is some appearance of intelligence but it's actually dumb as a rock.

It seems AI buzzes about again but it really hasn't changed so much.  There are astounding search algorithms that can rifle data twelve ways from Sunday and that's a component of intelligence but it has nothing to do with consciousness and it's the latter that scares the bejeebers out of you.

The biggest problem isn't understanding what you say as computers have been onto that for years but it took sixteen thousand computers for Google to get one to recognize an image of a cat.  (MNN:  Artificial intelligence: Friendly or frightening?)

Visualization isn't only the view of an objective reality as it's also the ability to do it in abstraction.  These are phenomenally complex processes and, as you can see from the Google Sixteen Thousand, even the most mundane things take a ludicrous amount of compute power.  That's a long time yet and likely its greatest importance will be in those photorealistic Japanese sex dolls.  We'll leave it to you to take that creepy thought as far as you like.

Where AI can easily apply right now is in social networks and with software not much more sophisticated than ELIZA.  I'd be very surprised if there are not artificial people on Facebook already.  I don't mean dummy accounts as likely there are tens of millions of those but rather accounts with what is a seemingly-responsive human.

The interactions on Facebook are very simple as there aren't many things it does.  Programming software to read it would not be difficult and the responses are simple as well.  For example, your software need only click a 'Like' button to seem to respond to someone else.  It would have to be more sophisticated than that but really it's just pushing ELIZA out all over again.  If I had any money, I'd bet people are doing this already.


(Ed:  OK, show me some Christmas in this!)

Hey, free paranoia!  That counts, right??

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