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Why people think computers can't
- cma 16y agoSome of the OCR mistakes were humorous in light of the content.
- username3 16y agoCan Computers Think? debate graph, http://debategraph.org/Stream.aspx?nID=75 http://debategraph.org/Stream.aspx?nID=75
- milesf 16y agoI believe computers will one day be able to think, but certainly not using Von Neumann architecture.
- fleitz 16y agoWhy do you feel that the key to thinking is the separation of program memory from data memory? Or is there another characteristic of Von Neumann architecture that I'm not thinking of? If thinking can be done with a universal turning machine then it would work on a Von Neumann architecture machine as VN arch is a class of UTM.
- zephjc 16y agoMilesf might be implying that he thinks a different type of hardware might be necessary to have true cognitive abilities, e.g. Quantum computing or something taking advantage of quantum effects as described by Roger Penrose et al. (I don't buy that requirement, personally)
- fleitz 16y agoI think that we'll just end up gluing neurons onto transistors for the near future. With the latest research they have rat brains flying flight sims. The primary stumbling block is going to be the ethics committee or finding an animal that has a large brain that ethics committees aren't particularly fond of. Or networking the brains of rats together to form a much larger neural net that interfaces to ethernet. Think EC2 with a rat brain on each server. Or conversely a network interface for the human brain. I do think it's possible to think with a UTM but I don't think that discovering that ability is going to be economical compared to fusing transistors to neurons.
- pavel_lishin 16y agoSo, how at what ratio of biology-to-technology does something seize being a thinking person, and start being a thinking computer? Clearly, a few rat cells hooked up to big processors are a thinking machine. But someone with an electronic implant in their brain that prevents seizures is a thinking person. But at which point do we say, "you're a robot, beep boop"?
- apsurd 16y agoyou want "cease" (to stop/end), rather than "seize" (to take hold/control of). no offense or anything, I am just assuming you are a non-native english speaker (by your name)
- pavel_lishin 16y agoOops! Well, you're right - my first language was Russian - but at this point English is my primary language. I'd attribute that mistake less to my heritage, but rather to all the wine I drank last night :P
- fleitz 16y agoPrecisely at the same ratio of new boards to old boards when the Ship of Theseus stops being the Ship of Theseus. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus
- sprout 16y agoI tend to hold with Anne Foerst, who was the theologian working on the ethical side of the MIT robotics project back in the 90's. http://www.cs.sbu.edu/afoerst/ http://www.cs.sbu.edu/afoerst/ If it is relatable and seems to have human-like consciousness, we have to treat it like any other human, because consciousness is an empirically meaningless term.
- snikolov 16y agoI agree. I also don't think one can get very far in that respect without first understanding the computational principles and mechanisms by which the brain can perform ordinary tasks that are extremely difficult for computers (e.g. vision). A purely computational account of how the brain manages to do what it does can allow for useful abstractions that can be applied to other kinds of "implementations" of intelligence. Without looking at the brain, I think it would be incredibly difficult to tease out form first principles the fundamentals of what intelligence really is and how it arises.
- dasil003 16y agoSo why is genius so rare, if each has almost all it takes? Simple statistical distribution. Compared to monkeys we are all geniuses. Compared to a hypothetical super-intelligent alien race we are all as children. Individuals on average could easily be much more creative or much less; it's all relative. The fact that we recognize and elevate genius within our ranks is just an emergent psychology of being a sentient species.
- loewenskind 16y agoPersonally I think environment plays a huge roll in this as well. If you grow up in an environment that constantly enforces that learning/growing/etc. are pointless, most people will eventually stop trying. Your environment also has a lot to do with forming your "id" [1]. I personally believe that if you could go back in time, take this same person and put them in a different environment they would be recognizable only in appearance. I think most people are capable of being so much more than they are. [1] pg has an article that talks about "id". Your environment will often influence how much you allow to become part of your "id" and what to do when various parts of your "id" are impugned.
- extension 16y agoIf you don't take for granted the enormous complexity of leading even the most mundane of human lives, then it's easy to see where all that genius is being used. Throw a monkey into the fray of human society and see how well it does for itself. Let's see it climb the corporate ladder, raise a family, or tell a joke properly. Not surprisingly, those humans that are recognized for applying their genius in remarkable ways tend to be in serious neglect of one or the other aspect of their everyday lives.
- justsee 16y agoThe article doesn't really do a good job of explaining the real problem, which is understanding what consciousness is, as a requirement for a thinking 'being'. Obviously Penrose's book 'The Emperor's New Mind' came out some time after this post by Minsky, but as one reviewer summarises: "The Emperor's "new clothes," of course, were no clothes. The Emperor's "New Mind," we then suspect, is nothing of the sort as well. That computers as presently constructed cannot possibly duplicate the workings of the brain is argued by Penrose in these terms: that all digital computers now operate according to algorithms, rules which the computer follows step by step. However, there are plenty of things in mathematics that cannot be calculated algorithmically. We can discover them and know them to be true, but clearly we are using some devices of calculation ("insight") that are not algorithmic and that are so far not well understood -- certainly not well enough understood to have computers do them instead. This simple argument is devastating. " http://www.friesian.com/penrose.htm http://www.friesian.com/penrose.htm
- snikolov 16y agoI believe Minsky is arguing that because these "devices of calculation" are not well understood, you cannot conclude that there is anything special about them that puts them beyond the reach of any computational (algorithmic) processes. I think he's right. There's been a lot of progress in understanding information processing in the brain (especially the neocortex) since Minsky wrote this, and I really believe someday soon, notions such as "insight" that we, in our ignorance of how they work, reserve exclusively for humans, won't be such a big mystery anymore.
- justsee 16y agoThat is exactly what Penrose demonstrates in his book - within mathematics there are things that cannot be calculated algorithmically. Which is also why the above summary makes the point that this simple argument is devastating (for proponents of Strong AI). A summary of his position can be found on his Wikipedia page: "He claims that the present computer is unable to have intelligence because it is an algorithmically deterministic system. He argues against the viewpoint that the rational processes of the mind are completely algorithmic and can thus be duplicated by a sufficiently complex computer. This contrasts with supporters of strong artificial intelligence, who contend that thought can be simulated algorithmically. He bases this on claims that consciousness transcends formal logic because things such as the insolubility of the halting problem and Gödel's incompleteness theorem prevent an algorithmically based system of logic from reproducing such traits of human intelligence as mathematical insight." I searched for some decent refutations by Minsky, and was disappointed to only find this: http://kuoi.com/~kamikaze/doc/minsky.html http://kuoi.com/~kamikaze/doc/minsky.html "Thus Roger Penrose's book [1] tries to show, in chapter after chapter, that human thought cannot be based on any known scientific principle." Disclaimer: I'm not a student of AI, and only realised just now that Penrose and Minsky represent the two opposing schools of thought on AI!
- earth 16y agoI don't think computers can think, thinking is only a human perception and most of it is useless. Being creative to direct an orchestra that other humans may like is pointless to survival. Too think I think you need to have a purpose, If I were to give humans a naive purpose I would say to find the meaning of life through survival and attaining great knowledge. I believe a machine will be able to do this better eventually if not soon. All it needs is problem solving and to start with a set of resources that its allowed to use.
- naner 16y agoI posted something tangential to this topic, but none of you philistines upvoted it. Bam! There it is. --> http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1526734 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1526734
- rabidsnail 16y agoThinking is defined as the thing that separates humans from nonhumans. Computers aren't humans. Therefore, even if computers can perform every task that humans can perform, what the computer is doing is, by definition, not thinking. Also, the question of whether X can think is completely without value.
- thingie 16y agoSo maybe the computers will be humans. Was there any thinking involved in writing your comment? I think that anyone would say yes. But if you were a computer (and why you couldn't be just a computer, nothing less than autopsy can convince me), then you'd have to say no. That's strange, and would make word think completely useless.
- wlievens 16y agoIt's hard to give a more circular argument than that.
- _delirium 16y agoIt's more or less the standard cynical joke in AI circles, though--- computers aren't intelligent, so when AI succeeds at something, it isn't AI anymore, and moves to some other field instead, so AI never has successes. :)
- ugh 16y agoAh, yeah. The perils of taking definitions too seriously.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- krakensden 16y agoIf you assume that our brains are completely physical objects (no soul), then you should be able to model them with a computer, like all other physical objects, and create a thinking computer. Just because we have an incomplete understanding now doesn't mean we always will, or that it's impossible to have a complete (or reasonably complete) understanding. Or there's the idea of a non-physical, impossible to model soul. I don't see much data to support that conclusion though, it seems the equivalent of cosmic ether to me.
- ars 16y agoThose are not the only options. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mind http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mind and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor%27s_New_Mind http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor%27s_New_Mind
- RodgerTheGreat 16y agoBoth of those arguments in no way counter the notion that the brain, as a physical device, can be simulated mechanically- they merely suggest that a simulation would have to be more fine-grained than neuroscience currently accepts. This is much like arguing that since Go has a massively larger game tree than Chess, writing a program to play Go as well as a human is impossible. Intractable? Maybe. Impossible? Clearly not. It's also worth quoting the second-to-last sentence of the second article you posted: "The book's thesis is considered erroneous by experts in the fields of philosophy, computer science, and robotics."
- benpbenp 16y agoIt's not that there are "data" to support the idea, but there is the fact that consciousness is unobservable. That is weird and different from all other physical phenomena, wouldn't you say?
- Tichy 16y agoOf course something that does not really exist is unobservable. Consciousness is just an illusion.
- ars 16y ago> I don't believe that there's much difference between ordinary thought and highly creative thought. And I do. This quote says it perfectly: In science, as well as in other fields of human endeavor, there are two kinds of geniuses: the “ordinary” and the “magicians.” An ordinary genius is a fellow that you and I would be just as good as, if we were only many times better. There is no mystery as to how his mind works. Once we understand what he has done, we feel certain that we, too, could have done it. It is different with the magicians. They are, to use mathematical jargon, in the orthogonal complement of where we are and the working of their minds is for all intents and purposes incomprehensible. Even after we understand what they have done, the process by which they have done it is completely dark. They seldom, if ever, have students because they cannot be emulated and it must be terribly frustrating for a brilliant young mind to cope with the mysterious ways in which the magician’s mind works. Richard Feynman is a magician of the highest caliber. Hans Bethe, whom [Freeman] Dyson considers to be his teacher, is an “ordinary genius,” (Quoted from Enigmas of Chance: An Autobiography, by Mark Kac. Harper and Row. 1985. p. xxv.)
- andreyf 16y agoWhat a load of horseradish. Feynman was adored by his students, and was often quite introspective about how he goes about solving problems.
- rohitarondekar 16y agoI think you need to read this http://www.amazon.com/Surely-Feynman-Adventures-Curious-Character/dp/0393316041 http://www.amazon.com/Surely-Feynman-Adventures-Curious-Char...
- newhouseb 16y agoThis seems to conflate consciousness with creativity, which are not the same thing. Computers can be creative combinatorically with evolutionary algorithms provided you can provide a fitness test.
- wlievens 16y agoBut that just moves the creativity bit into designing the fitness function, does it not? (I do agree with your sentiment though; just pointing out the obvious hole)
- ithkuil 16y agoIt depends on what are you measuring. Let's say that your job is to solve some problem and want to use a genetic algorithm to solve it. You probably have to build a model, a simplified version of the reality, and find out a fitness function which makes sense in that model, which is fast to calculate etc. Probably you have to be clever, you have to somehow have an intuition of what matters and what doesn't. That is, you have to know when your cow is too spherical. This task requires intelligence, and I'm sure that creativity will certainly help making a leap forward, especially if the problem is not well known in advance, or you benefit from solving it in a completely different way. But, this doesn't mean that each fitness function that will solve the problem, given enough time, will require creativity, or even intelligence! Natural selection provided really ingenious solutions to a huge set of problems of any kind. The fact that we are discussing this very fact is an astonishing achievement of that very fitness function which is natural selection. But nobody designed this fitness function, and so long we are interpreting the word "creativity" meaning "created by a mind", no creativity was required to design this "fitness function" or any of the products of that "genetic algorithm". Of course, one could argue that "creativity" the very act of "creating" things, even without creators, even just emerging properties of a complex system (like natural selection). Well, redefining creativity that way is certainly not wrong, but I don't think normally people think about creativity in those terms, but as an intrinsic characteristics of minds (and perhaps also human mind only, to most people, but that's another topic)