Artificial Intelligence. Philosophy and machines, 28 Okt 2015

Present: Ambika, Eric, Fredrik, Mark, Petri, Trevor, Yvonne

To begin with we all wanted to define intelligence. Intelligent comes from rational,…the lat. word intellegere means to perceive, comprehend,…from inter (between) and legere (choose or read) actually : reading between the lines or picture…There are different kinds of intelligence : and we are moving towards ever new definitions of intelligence. (rational, spacial, language-wise, emotional, cognitive, physical…etc). In an artificial system, intelligence is defined as simply: the ability to adapt… or connecting ideas…The result of the judgement

if someone or something is intelligent is all together subjective, and also the distinction of smart and intelligent is mentioned.

From Dictionary.com : smart in TechnologyExpand 1. Said of a program that does the Right Thing in a wide variety of complicated circumstances. There is a difference between calling a program smart and calling it intelligent; in particular, there do not exist any intelligent programs …

Originality is another factor that belongs to our understanding of intelligence just like problem solving, evolving…and yet intelligence is but a standardised measurement. Every definition leaves questions thus is incomplete for total understanding, but having talked about this uncertainty factor gives us all enough base to continue our search for clear and constructive ideas and thoughts.

Examples: Chess 

is mentioned as one of the first artificial systems where rules are applied and human intelligence can easily be outwitted. Speech recognition and recognition of the iris (image classification) are already brought into practice.

Ethical questions arise. Apparently ethics has never been able to keep up with technological developments, neither has it been possible to make adequate regulations and laws for new technology and developments. So then arises fear. We find that rapid technological elaboration has minimal ethical selection. Anything that is invented and financed for so-called progress or capital purposes can be introduced in our society. Oppenheimer and Einstein 

knew about the possible consequences of their creative thoughts and actions but despite possible nightmares they went on. Were they hoping for an upper hand preventing their inventive thoughts becoming a destructive weapon ? Some think that being a scientist is just a job,…but where is responsibility ? So machines are getting smarter,… but are they really becoming intelligent in a human way ? Are we losing control ? Scientists give control to machines and make them smart,…and who can oversee all the consequences ? Probably nobody can and some state that yeah,...so we lose control,…so what? We do not all know exactly how a television or telephone works,…which is sort of losing control, because we are unable to fix it after damage. Same with a car,…most repair work can nowadays only be done by specified garages,… who know the error codes….we have to give work out of our hands and cannot do everything ourselves. We need others with keys to our problems. But is it not important to have a ‘kill switch’ making an out of control hostile system stop all together ? (what about pulling out the plug?) So machines can only do what we taught them to do,… there is always a person behind a machine. 

And yet,…in 2011 there was a flash crash, which nobody could explain in the beginning. In micro seconds something happened because of  a bug --- it is already common that on stock markets trade happens between machines without intervention of human skill or intelligence. The bug was only found years later. So again – even behind this crash was  a human factor.

We come to the point where we imagine artificial intelligence being the leader of state. What if perfection as to ruling a country existed ? This thought is wiped from the table as we all agree that we could never agree on a perfect situation for all members of society. There would always be people who agree and others who disagree with a situation. We are no Gods,…we believe in a good system that is possible but the realisation of it is way out of our imagination. Why?

Other examples: robots are already used in health care. 

Lots of lonely people are assisted by robots. There are pros and cons of course to this development and there is also the risk and fear of losing control. But for some it must be stated it is a beneficial situation to be tended by a machine. HER (a moving picture story in which platonic love between a machine and a person is lived out to a certain degree) also confronts us with a person’s desperate lack of being loved by a human being and there comes a digital system replacing a human being.

So should there be a LIMIT ?

What if we imagine that we have technical help to everything we need or want ? Do we not then fall over and just watch TV ? Do we not become completely lazy ? That depends on what we do with our technical aid. Much old paradigm in a fast expanding society makes it complex to keep track of it all. We hear about exponential organisations, in which growth is doubling…someone explains that they are not sustainable systems. (bottle example…Trevor could you please explain again?).  We come to the fact that every company ends. And then someone asks a crucial question. Why is it important always to get bigger, better and faster ?

We have the option to merge with technology (or not?),… is it part of our evolution and can we 

which way we grow and go ?