6 ms·

Artificial Flight and Other Myths

57 points by dmoney 17y ago

ugh 17y ago
Not even an Airbus A380 would pass the Tern Test. So I guess we don’t have Strong A.F. after all …
- rbanffy 17y ago
  Can you imagine what would it be to have an A380 flapping its wings?
  - RiderOfGiraffes 17y ago
    These results are old because they're from the time I had a tour through the aeronautical research laboratories in Melbourne, Australia. However, The wings of a boeing 727 flex about 8 inches in each direction in normal flight. In tests to destruction they were flexed repeatedly to nearly 8 feet in each direction before they showed any visible signs of distress, finally failing after 13 hours constant flexing at 8'4" in each direction. I'm not suggesting I wouldn't be terrified in a major storm, but I felt a lot safer in flight after that. Aircraft wings are amazingly flexible and robust.
    - rbanffy 17y ago
      I know planes have flexible wings, but there is a good reason nature's largest flying critter is no bigger than a toy plane. An ornithopter the size of an A380 would be... interesting.
jerf 17y ago
Amusing, but as a serious argument it critically fails in that "Strong AF" is measured by whether it fools a real bird into thinking it's a bird, and once you are "birdy" you can't be "more real than real", but in the real world everybody understands that passing a Turing Test is the beginning of AI, not the end. The Turing Test is a relatively unambiguous measurement of how successful the AI is, and it will progress from there. Yes, it's true that the Turing Test does force a bit of possibly-difficult humanity onto the resulting AI, but all that probably boils down to is some constant factor improvement on human intelligence (on some hypothetical measure where we can quantify intelligence along a single dimension), with the resulting slightly-superhuman-AI just "faking" being human. That would still win, and I have a hard time imagining some sort of weird result where we have radically superhuman AIs that just can't seem to convincingly fake being human.
- abstractbill 17y ago
  I have a hard time imagining some sort of weird result where we have radically superhuman AIs that just can't seem to convincingly fake being human. I have a hard time imagining it too, but I see no good reason why that couldn't happen (which was the whole point of the article I think - our current technology can easily make many different things that can fly, but we are still incapable of making something that really flies like a bird).
  - cookingrobot 17y ago
    Maybe it will be easier to build extremely intelligent, consistent, rational AI than to get the nuanced emotion and irrationality that regular people have.
    - barrkel 17y ago
      Thing is, nuanced emotion and irrationality is often actually rational - not in the sense that the human brain thought logically through the situation and decided rationally to act irrationally, but in the game theoretic sense of producing a superior outcome. For example, if you get angry you can lose control and do things you'd regret later (seemingly irrational). That forms a powerful argument to avoid angering someone, because you know that they might react badly even if it's not in their best interests. Thus, evolution can engineer in a defense against e.g. cheaters of various kinds, even when punishing any one cheater would be counter-productive for the one doing the punishing. (It strikes me now that there's an argument in here about banking, bailouts, the angry public and avoiding collapse of the economy, but I'm not going to pursue it.)
  - bmunro 17y ago
    which was the whole point of the article I think - our current technology can easily make many different things that can fly, but we are still incapable of making something that really flies like a bird I read it differently. The aim is to make something that can fly. But we, from our position as birds, don't accept flying as anything other than bird-like flying - with wings and feathers. Leaving the analogy, I think the article is saying that humans generally don't accept anything as artificial intelligence unless it exactly mimics a human, or is indistinguishable from a human. Thus the attempts to work out exactly how the brain (or wing) works and to replicate it. In reality, AI research has progressed considerably - visual recognition, autonomous navigation, question answering etc. But these are only 'gliding', and are only leading towards 'other flight-like phenomena' such as bat and insect flight. We don't accept them as parts of an artificial intelligence because we think (rightly or wrongly) that there is something more to intelligence than just a set of special algorithms and feed back loops.
ojbyrne 17y ago
Mildy apropos, I was talking to an aeronautical engineer this weekend, who dropped the phrase "You can make anything fly if you can make it go 200mph."
- philwelch 17y ago
  Evidently the speed constraint on very very fast cars doesn't come from making them go faster, it comes from making them not take off into flight.
  - tome 17y ago
    The two things are linked. If they take off into flight they can't go faster, because the wheels will no longer be in contact with the ground!
  - RiderOfGiraffes 17y ago
    Peter Dumbreck in the Mercedes, Le Mans, 1999 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ow3rxq7U1mA http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ow3rxq7U1mA at about 33 secs. Here's another: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8M3NQeDzedk http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8M3NQeDzedk Yes, when cars go fast enough, keeping them on the ground is one of the challenges.
teilo 17y ago
Ah, Dresden Codak. I dropped him from my RSS a long time ago. Nice to catch up with his latest work. He always makes me think.
mortenjorck 17y ago
This is in a similar vein to an earlier essay by the same author: http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/print/2181/ http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/print/2181/ In the aforelinked one, he skeptically critiques the idea of evolution into hominids from the perspective of a primate. It's an enjoyable read, if not exactly the soundest case for a Kurzweilian singularity.
daeken 17y ago
Silly article. Everyone knows you can't have strong AF without using ternary computers.
- Groxx 17y ago
  Oh wow, I just got that... The pain... xD
nomen 17y ago
Does this mock _Computer Power and Human Reason_?
Groxx 17y ago
We may build a functioning, flapping wing, but what if the essence of flight is deeper, hidden within the cells or elsewhere? Oh joy. One of these articles. And yes, I do think that sentence is indicative of the whole article, though it's more instantly-recognizable-as-stupid than most of it. The rest of the article takes a few seconds more. Well, I guess we won't be "really" flying any time soon. I like my enhanced-gliding just fine, thanks.
- Smirlouf 17y ago
  Strong A.F., as it is defined by researchers, is any artificial flier that is capable of passing the Tern Test (developed by A.F. pioneer Alan Tern), which involves convincing an average bird that the artificial flier is in fact a flying bird. The same goes for this one... Lovely :-)

57 points by dmoney 17y ago

ugh 17y ago

Not even an Airbus A380 would pass the Tern Test. So I guess we don’t have Strong A.F. after all …

rbanffy 17y ago
Can you imagine what would it be to have an A380 flapping its wings?
- RiderOfGiraffes 17y ago
  These results are old because they're from the time I had a tour through the aeronautical research laboratories in Melbourne, Australia. However, The wings of a boeing 727 flex about 8 inches in each direction in normal flight. In tests to destruction they were flexed repeatedly to nearly 8 feet in each direction before they showed any visible signs of distress, finally failing after 13 hours constant flexing at 8'4" in each direction. I'm not suggesting I wouldn't be terrified in a major storm, but I felt a lot safer in flight after that. Aircraft wings are amazingly flexible and robust.
  - rbanffy 17y ago
    I know planes have flexible wings, but there is a good reason nature's largest flying critter is no bigger than a toy plane. An ornithopter the size of an A380 would be... interesting.

jerf 17y ago

Amusing, but as a serious argument it critically fails in that "Strong AF" is measured by whether it fools a real bird into thinking it's a bird, and once you are "birdy" you can't be "more real than real", but in the real world everybody understands that passing a Turing Test is the beginning of AI, not the end. The Turing Test is a relatively unambiguous measurement of how successful the AI is, and it will progress from there. Yes, it's true that the Turing Test does force a bit of possibly-difficult humanity onto the resulting AI, but all that probably boils down to is some constant factor improvement on human intelligence (on some hypothetical measure where we can quantify intelligence along a single dimension), with the resulting slightly-superhuman-AI just "faking" being human. That would still win, and I have a hard time imagining some sort of weird result where we have radically superhuman AIs that just can't seem to convincingly fake being human.

abstractbill 17y ago
I have a hard time imagining some sort of weird result where we have radically superhuman AIs that just can't seem to convincingly fake being human. I have a hard time imagining it too, but I see no good reason why that couldn't happen (which was the whole point of the article I think - our current technology can easily make many different things that can fly, but we are still incapable of making something that really flies like a bird).
- cookingrobot 17y ago
  Maybe it will be easier to build extremely intelligent, consistent, rational AI than to get the nuanced emotion and irrationality that regular people have.
  - barrkel 17y ago
    Thing is, nuanced emotion and irrationality is often actually rational - not in the sense that the human brain thought logically through the situation and decided rationally to act irrationally, but in the game theoretic sense of producing a superior outcome. For example, if you get angry you can lose control and do things you'd regret later (seemingly irrational). That forms a powerful argument to avoid angering someone, because you know that they might react badly even if it's not in their best interests. Thus, evolution can engineer in a defense against e.g. cheaters of various kinds, even when punishing any one cheater would be counter-productive for the one doing the punishing. (It strikes me now that there's an argument in here about banking, bailouts, the angry public and avoiding collapse of the economy, but I'm not going to pursue it.)
- bmunro 17y ago
  which was the whole point of the article I think - our current technology can easily make many different things that can fly, but we are still incapable of making something that really flies like a bird I read it differently. The aim is to make something that can fly. But we, from our position as birds, don't accept flying as anything other than bird-like flying - with wings and feathers. Leaving the analogy, I think the article is saying that humans generally don't accept anything as artificial intelligence unless it exactly mimics a human, or is indistinguishable from a human. Thus the attempts to work out exactly how the brain (or wing) works and to replicate it. In reality, AI research has progressed considerably - visual recognition, autonomous navigation, question answering etc. But these are only 'gliding', and are only leading towards 'other flight-like phenomena' such as bat and insect flight. We don't accept them as parts of an artificial intelligence because we think (rightly or wrongly) that there is something more to intelligence than just a set of special algorithms and feed back loops.

ojbyrne 17y ago

Mildy apropos, I was talking to an aeronautical engineer this weekend, who dropped the phrase "You can make anything fly if you can make it go 200mph."

philwelch 17y ago
Evidently the speed constraint on very very fast cars doesn't come from making them go faster, it comes from making them not take off into flight.
- tome 17y ago
  The two things are linked. If they take off into flight they can't go faster, because the wheels will no longer be in contact with the ground!
- RiderOfGiraffes 17y ago
  Peter Dumbreck in the Mercedes, Le Mans, 1999 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ow3rxq7U1mA http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ow3rxq7U1mA at about 33 secs. Here's another: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8M3NQeDzedk http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8M3NQeDzedk Yes, when cars go fast enough, keeping them on the ground is one of the challenges.

teilo 17y ago

Ah, Dresden Codak. I dropped him from my RSS a long time ago. Nice to catch up with his latest work. He always makes me think.

mortenjorck 17y ago

This is in a similar vein to an earlier essay by the same author: http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/print/2181/ http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/print/2181/ In the aforelinked one, he skeptically critiques the idea of evolution into hominids from the perspective of a primate. It's an enjoyable read, if not exactly the soundest case for a Kurzweilian singularity.

daeken 17y ago

Silly article. Everyone knows you can't have strong AF without using ternary computers.

Groxx 17y ago
Oh wow, I just got that... The pain... xD

nomen 17y ago

Does this mock _Computer Power and Human Reason_?

Groxx 17y ago

We may build a functioning, flapping wing, but what if the essence of flight is deeper, hidden within the cells or elsewhere? Oh joy. One of these articles. And yes, I do think that sentence is indicative of the whole article, though it's more instantly-recognizable-as-stupid than most of it. The rest of the article takes a few seconds more. Well, I guess we won't be "really" flying any time soon. I like my enhanced-gliding just fine, thanks.

Smirlouf 17y ago
Strong A.F., as it is defined by researchers, is any artificial flier that is capable of passing the Tern Test (developed by A.F. pioneer Alan Tern), which involves convincing an average bird that the artificial flier is in fact a flying bird. The same goes for this one... Lovely :-)