Ed: Fixed

I should note that I am a retired school principal.

As a researcher in pattern recognition I’m intrigued by the idea of collaborating with someone who is dedicated to designing the system’s training procedures — they can be as critical to good performance as the algorithm’s themselves

Wow, and I’m the disrespectful one in this exchange? I detailed some of my objections with as much detail as seemed reasonable and your response was to basically demean them as stuck in the past and discard the entire AI community along just for good measure, then say that it’s “cute” when I ask for something more than vague PR about shifting paradigms.

And you should really check out the links I provided.

All right, three Wikipedia entries with vocabulary definitions and three summarizing Asimov’s wonderful body of literary work (growing up reading his novels I have nothing but admiration for the man and his writing), two books on Amazon, and one actually interesting project teaching robots how to respond to an audience using the very same neural networks I described in some detail and you decried as being “too linear and reductionist” to process the input from said audience. Which link is the one that’s supposed to at least point me in the right direction?

Also, if you think I’m going to give trade secrets away because you demand them, you are out of your mind.

Ah so it’s a trade secret. So what exactly are you here to do then? You can’t tell us what you do in anything more than general terms or risk violating an NDA. You can’t tell us how you do it because again, NDA. After both parts all we’ll know is that there’s a company in Silicon Valley that hired a therapist to analyze it’s AI prototypes and that AI thinking like a human with be great for the reason you’ll outline and that’s it.

Now, funny thing is that a lot of companies will publish white papers that show their general ideas on a particular topic. Symantec won’t tell you exactly how it catches viruses and spyware, but it will tell you that it targets suspicious actions such as unauthorized access to the web or modifying deep folder structures, or trying to hide itself in a system folder with an awfully similar file name to a critical system file like rundll32.exe on Windows. That’s what I was talking about, not spilling out your source code.

Certainly it’s your right to ignore my comments, but as far as I see it, I asked some questions, pressed for detail when I felt they were sidestepped, and when I pushed one more time, I was met with derision and an author who promised to ignore me with a huff and a puff. How other readers see this is, of course, up to them…

And you should really check out the links I provided.

Also, if you think I’m going to give trade secrets away because you demand them, you are out of your mind.

With that said, some of this will be discussed in the next part (which I already mentioned).

Obfuscation and condescension an argument do not make. Certainly I don’t know everything about computing and AI, but telling me “new ways exist! new ways exist!” without telling me what those new ways are is highly suspect. As for the product, when will it be ready? Will I have to pay for it to see if it works? Is there published academic literature on which it’s based?

Sometimes in order to make progress, we need to take some creative risks—dream the unthinkable and attempt the impossible—and sometimes, it just might work out. In order to break new ground, old ‘rules’ must be broken, and sometimes paradigms need to be shifted or redefined. That doesn’t mean it’s impossible, it just means it’s new.

Yes, yes, I know, I know. We must spread our wings and fly, dream the dream, live the life, size the day, the night, and bathe in the fountain of discovery while twisting paradigms into a cheese pretzel, or whatever.

But seriously, paper? Working website? Product demo videos? Open source APIs? Wikipedia entry? Anything? If my thinking is so linear and limited, give me something new to learn.

Regarding the baby, it was an analogy, not meant to be taken literally. Again, inflexible, too-literal thinking hindered your imagination, and the message was lost in the medium.

Sometimes in order to make progress, we need to take some creative risks—dream the unthinkable and attempt the impossible—and sometimes, it just might work out. In order to break new ground, old ‘rules’ must be broken, and sometimes paradigms need to be shifted or redefined. That doesn’t mean it’s impossible, it just means it’s new. That’s the nature of creativity.

Beg your pardon? What kind of model of AI am I supposed to use? After all, it’s code running bits and bytes unless you hooked up a living brain to computers and rely on it for pattern and object recognition. And even then there’s a spark of what’s known was “vitalism” in this statement.

The AI algorithms we work on are radically different than the ones you are used to seeing, so your resistance is a typical response.

Hmm… I wonder where I heard this refrain before from Silicon Valley. Oh yeah, all the time. Please do tell me what kind of algorithms you use that are so radically different from the state of the art neural networks deployed today for virtually every system meant to learn, from cognitive computer chips to advanced robotics. I’m serious. I’d like to see a paper on the subject.

But in all honesty, many people in the field of psychology itself don’t fully understand the human learning process or get it right, so I’m not surprised that the entire community of AI researchers don’t, either.

A computer is not a human. To expect that you can make it behave like one is simply not a realistic goal. You have to program it to have attachments, emotions, goals, motivations, and so on. On top of that, they don’t work like humans which became very clear after several decades of attempts to build computers to think more like we do. To declare that the entire AI community working on creating mathematical models of cognition for more than half a century is wrong and your company has somehow found the magic key to machine learning, so much so that it needs a behavioral therapist to treat it like a human, is suspect to say the least.

Then again, maybe you have found something huge. I’ll hold my final judgement until part two but again, the secretive revolutionary algorithms that are apparently way over the head of the entire AI community are not a good underpinning for your argument. You’re basically saying that you can rebut all my counterpoints with whatever you have in a mystery box, but you can’t open the mystery box and let me look inside.

… regarding the baby knowing how to cry, etc.. that’s why I mentioned the genetic code that acts as the set of instructions on how to behave/react in response to stimuli.

Behavior is not a function of the genetic code. Brain development is governed by many complex biological factors and DNA is just one player in an entire symphony of chemical signals and environmental pressures. You do not have a “cry” gene or gene combination. You have a brain that wired itself to respond this way because of a certain common sequence of chemical signals during development.

There is an article on the major difference.

http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/39669/

Computers use “memory” that can store either data or programs. Brains do not. There is no “program” in a nervous system, there is only “hardware”, but that hardware can self-modify on a sub-second time scale. I think that looking at genetics as something that “programs” a brain is not a good way of looking at it.

Genes code for processes which in response to the environment generate a phenotype.

Humans are social animals. Humans need to relate and socialize with other humans. A very large part of “growing up” is learning how to do that. To relate to another human, you need to be able to understand their thinking the way that they understand themselves. Many people cannot do this, even when both people are neurologically typical. Constricting your thinking to only computer-like thinking modes is to be unable to communicate.

I suggest that people read the references. I think that Monica Anderson does have a good approach, I think it doesn’t go quite far enough. I think that in addition to “robot psychology” that strong AI will need (metaphorically) “robot physiology” and also (metaphorically) “robot nitric oxide” (my own favorite signaling molecule in physiology).