Saturday, February 6, 2010

i prefer the phrase "prolonging publishing" rather than "procrastinating posting"

In standard style of attempting to write this, I’ve prolonged long enough to actually be more than half a day late. I apologize for letting my team down, and I’ve got a boatload of excuses, some of which include a rave, a dance, working late overnight, and the death of a family friend’s young son. And the Super Bowl tomorrow (which I won’t be watching).

So one thing that I would like to bring up first and foremost about the article I chose, which was titled “Artificial Intelligence and Psychoanalysis”, was that it was published in a journal called Daedalus which as we all know bears the name of a Greek mythological character who was known for being extremely crafty and cunning (look him up on Wikipedia like I did…). The only reason I bring this up is because Daedalus was the one who warned Icarus to not go too close to the sun lest the wax on his wings melt. This is sort of a private joke with me and myself and my blog readers that has to do with the dangers of when technology…goes…too… far.

But moving on to the actual text rather than just the title of the academic journal, look to page 251, she brings up the juicy stuff: a perceptron, “A pattern recognition machine designed in the late 1950’s and a good first example of emergent AI.” This machine reportedly, when asked to identify a triangle only needed to be told whether or not this or that was a triangle, and it would eventually learn what not a triangle was, and what it was. As it also states on page 251, “Perceptrons are not programmed, but learn from the consequences of their actions.”

This is referred to as “anti-Lovelace” technology because there was some famous dude scientist named Lovelace that said computers couldn’t act biologically and couldn’t learn, but this shows that computers can potentially evolve into more complex machines than they were originally designed for. Similar to human brains, computers may eventually be able to withstand certain traumas that injure, but do not completely destroy all functions. At current, often a computer will not function at all when it is damaged, meaning it will not adapt to the damages it acquires and continue operating, but rather quit operating completely.

2 comments:

JM said...

Actually, your "famous dude scientist" was Ada Lovelace, a woman, widely held to be the first actual computer programmer (regardless of gender). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_Lovelace

Brent Rust said...

There has been a decent amount of discussion about learning programs and what their capabilities are. I guess we can look to the Terminator movies (as well as others) to give us our answer. Technology really doesn't have much of an end in site. Someone also brought up that we are living with Star Trek technology. All that's missing is warp speed and teleportation. Or is it? I know from my daughters experience, that the brain can remap itself. It's neurons are multi level redundant. Once human engineering and programming build that into physical ships, I assume it's possible. More so as they look into biological materials to build computer based hardware (software?). The future sits upon us and it's heavy.