AI problems
Animals have a uniform, closed architecture. The human brain is an open platform; people get by using a wide variety of
techniques called "professions". The flexibility has its drawbacks. We aren't tuned for any particular profession, and
apparently that's why everybody develops some sort of profession-related problems. Proctologists reportedly turn rude as time
goes by. Rock stars live fast, but die young. Hunters in the African deserts get to chase antelopes for a couple of days.
Antelopes run much faster, so you would never try to chase one; but the hunter knows better โ compared to him, the animal lacks
stamina, and will get tired, and then he can kill it. But sometimes the hunter has the misfortune of chasing a particularly
strong antelope, in which case he still won't be able to get close enough at the end of the second day. But having wasted all
that energy, he now certainly has to refuel, so he settles for a nearby half-rotten corpse. The effect of that sort of meal on
his digestive system is one problem that comes with his profession.
Programmers develop their own problems. Today, we'll talk about AI problems some of us are having. As you probably already
know, but my trademark thoroughness still obliges me to say, AI stands for "Artificial Intelligence" and comes in two flavors,
"deterministic" (like minmax) and "statistical" (like SVM). The combined efforts of various researches lead to an important
breakthrough in this field, known to meteorologists as "the
AI winter". This is the season when you can't get any VC money if you mention AI anywhere in your business plan. During this
season, an alternate term was invented for AI, "Machine Learning". I think that the money/no money distinction between "ML" and
"AI" isn't the only one, and that in other contexts, AI=deterministic and ML=statistical, but I don't care. In real systems, you
do both. Lots of things labeled as "AI" work and are useful in practical contexts. Others are crap. It's always like that, but
this isn't what I came to talk about today. By "AI problems", I didn't mean the problems that people face which require the
application of methods associated with the term "AI". I meant "problems" in the psychiatric sense.
A certain kind of reader will wonder whether I have the necessary qualifications to deal with a psychiatric issue so
advanced. My credentials are humble, but I do work on hairy computer vision applications. The general problem computer vision
deals with (identify, classify and track "objects" in real-world scenes) is considered "AI
complete" by some, and I tend to agree. I don't actually work on the AI bits โ the algorithms are born a level and a half
above me; I'm working on the hardware & software that's supposed to run them fast. I did get to see how fairly successful AI
stacks up, with different people approaching it differently. Some readers of the credential-sensitive kind will conclude that I
still have no right to tackle the deep philosophical bullshit underlying Artificial Intelligence, and others will decide
otherwise. Anyway, off we go.
The AI problems make a vast area; we'll only talk about a few major ones. First of all, we'll deal with my favorite issue,
which is of course The Psychophysical Problem. There are folks out there who actually think they believe that their
mind is software, and that consciousness can be defined as a certain structural property of information processing machines.
They don't really believe it, as the ground-breaking yosefk's Mind Expansion Experiment can easily demonstrate. I'll
introduce that simple yet powerful experiment in a moment, but first, I want to pay a tribute to the best movie of the previous
century, which, among other notable achievements, provided the most comprehensive treatment of the psychophysical problem in the
popular culture. That motion picture is of course The Terminator, part I and, to an extent, part II. World-class drama.
Remarkable acting (especially in part I โ there are a couple of facial expressions conveying aggressive, hopeless, cowardly and
impatient stupidity previously unheard of). Loads of fun.
Back to our topic, the movie features a digital computer with an impressive set of peripheral devices, capable of passing the
Turing test. The system is based on Atari hardware,
as this
guy has figured out from the assembly listings cleverly edited into the sequences depicting the black-and-red "perspective"
of the machine. According to the mind-is-software AI weenies, the device from the movie has Real Consciousness. The fascinating
question whether this is in fact the case is extensively discussed in the witty dialogs throughout theย film. "I sense injuries",
says the Atari-powered gadget. "This information could be called pain". Pain. The key to our elusive subject. I'm
telling you, these people know their stuff.
The mind-is-software approach is based on two assumptions: the Church-Turing
thesis and the feelings-are-information axiom. In my trademark orderly fashion, I'll treat the first assumption second and
the second assumption first. To show the invalidity of the feelings-are-information assumption, we'll use yosefk's Mind
Expansion Experiment. It has two versions: the right-handed and the left-handed, and it goes like this. If you're right-handed,
put a needle in your right hand and start pushing it into your left arm. If you're left-handed, put a needle in your left hand
and start pushing it into your right arm. While you're engaged in this entertaining activity, consider the question: "Is this
information? How many bits would it take to represent?" Most people will reach enlightenment long before
they'll cause themselves irreversible damage. Critics have pointed out that the method can cause die-hard AI weenies to actually
injure themselves; the question whether this is a bug or a feature is still a subject of a hot debate in the scientific
community. Anyway, we do process something that isn't exactly information, because it fucking hurts; I hope we're done
with this issue now.
Some people don't believe the first of the two above-mentioned assumptions, namely, the Church-Turing thesis. Most
of these people aren't programmers; they simply lack the experience needed to equate "thinking" and "doing". But once you
actually try to implement decision-making as opposed to making the decision yourself, your perspective changes. You usually come
to think that in order to decide, you need to move stuff around according to some procedure, which isn't very different from the
method of people doing manual labor at low-tech construction sites. Thinking is working; that's why "computational power" is
called "power". I've only heard one programmer go "...but maybe there's a different way of thinking from the one based
on logic". I couldn't think of any, except from the way based on psychoactive chemicals, maybe. "A different way of
thinking". To me, it's like arguing that you can eat without food or kick ass without an ass, and I bet you feel the same way,
so let's not waste time on that.
Next problem: some people actually think that a machine will pass the Turing test sooner or later. I wouldn't count on that
one. Physicists claim that a bullet can fly out of one's body with the wound closing and healing in the process, because
observations indicate that you can get shot and wounded, and if a process is physically possible, that same process
reversed in time is also physically possible. It's just that the probability of the reverse process is low. Very low. Not
messing with the kind of people who can shoot you is a safer bet than counting on this reversibility business. Similarly, the
Church-Turing claims that if a person can do it, a universal computing device can emulate it. It's just the feasibility of this
simulation that's the problem. One good way to go about it would be to simulate a human brain in a chip hooked to enough
peripherals to walk and talk and then let it develop in the normal human environment (breastfeeding, playing with other kids,
love & marriage, that kind of thing). The brain simulation should of course be precise enough, and the other kids should be
good kids and not behave as dirty racists when our Turing machine drives into their sand pit. If the experiment is conducted in
this clean and unbiased way, we have a good chance to have our pet machine pass the Turing test by the time the other kids will
be struggling with their IQ tests and other human-oriented benchmarks.
Seriously, the human language is so damn human that it hardly means anything to you if you are a Turing-complete
alien. To truly understand even the simplest concepts, such as "eat shit" or "fuck off and die", you need to have first-hand
experience of operating a human body with all of its elaborate hardware. This doesn't invalidate the Church-Turing thesis in the
slightest, but it does mean that automatic translation between languages will always look like automatic translation. Because
the human that can interpret the original that way clearly lives inside a box with flashing lights, a reset button and
a ventilator. For similar reasons, a translation by a poorly educated person will always look like a translation by a poorly
educated person. I know all about it, because in Israel, there's a million ex-Russians, so they hire people to put Russian
subtitles into movies on some channels. Unfortunately, they don't seem to have any prerequisites for the job, which means that I
get to read a lot of Russian translations by morons. Loads of fun. These people equipped with their natural
intelligence barely pass the Turing test, if you ask me, so I keep my hopes low on Turing-test-passing AI.
Moving on to our next problem, we meet the people who think that we actually need AI. We don't. Not if it means "a
system that is supposed to scale so that it could pass the Turing test". And this is the only thing AI means as far as I'm
concerned here. We already have "artificial intelligence" that isn't at all like our natural intelligence, but still beats our
best representatives in chess, finds web pages, navigates by GPS and maps and so on. Computers already work. So the only thing
we don't have is artificial intelligence that simulates our own. And this is as tremendously useless as it is infeasible.
Natural intelligence as we know it is a property of a person. Who needs an artificial person? If you want to have a
relationship, there's 6G of featherless two-leg Turing machines to pick from. If you want a kid to raise, you can make one in a
fairly reliable and well-known way. We don't build machines in order to raise them and love them; we build them to get work
done.
If the thing is even remotely close to "intelligent", you can no longer issue commands; you must explain
yourself and ask for something and then it will misunderstand you. Normal for a person, pretty shitty for a
machine. Humans have the sacred right to make mistakes. Machines should be working as designed. And animals are free to mark
their territory using their old-fashioned defecation-oriented methodology. That's the way I want my world to look like. Maybe
you think that we'll be able to give precise commands to intelligent machines. Your typical AI weenie will disagree; I'll
mention just one high-profile AI weenie, Douglas Hofstadter of Gรถdel,
Escher, Bach. Real-life attempts at "smart" systems also indicate that with intelligence, commands aren't. The reported
atrocities of the DWIM rival those of such
precise a command as "rm .* -rf", which is supposed to remove the dot files in the current directory, but really removes more
than that.
Finally, many people think that AIish work is Scientific and Glamorous. They feel that working on AI will get them closer to
The Essence of The Mind. I think that 40 years ago, parsing had that vibe. Regular, Context-Free, automatic parser generation,
neat stuff, look, we actually know how language works! Yeah, right.
You can build a beautiful AI app, and take your experience with you to the next AI app, but you won't build a Mind that you
can then run on the new problem and have it solved. If you succeed, you will have built a software system solving your
particular problem. Software is always like that. A customers database front-end isn't a geographical database front-end.
Similarly, face recognition software isn't vehicle detection software. Some people feel that mere mortal programmers are biting
bits, some obscure boring bits on their way to obsolescence, while AI hackers are hacking the Universe itself. The truth is that
AI work is specialized to the obscure constraints of each project to a greater extent than work in most other areas of
programming. If you won't take my word for it, listen to David Chapman from the MIT AI Lab. "Unlike most
other programmers, AI programmers rarely can borrow code from each other." By the way, he mentions my example, machine vision,
as an exception, but most likely, he refers to lower-level code. And why can't we borrow code? "This is partly because AI
programs rarely really work." The page is a great read; I recommend to point and click.
As I've promised, this wasn't about AI; it was about AI-related bullshit. And as I've already mentioned, lots of working
stuff is spelled with "AI" in it. I've been even thinking about reading an AI book lately to refresh some things and learn some
new ones. And then lots of AI-related work is in Lisp. They have taste, you can't take that away.
A note from the nitpicking department:
It was actually 6502 assembly code, which at the time was the CPU of
several computers, most notably Apple II, Commodore 64 and my personal
favorite: Atari 800XL.
You should probably watch Blade Runner (I strongly advise against the
"director's cut") โ where you have a whole police force for dealing with
(read: terminating) rogue wetware androids (the in-movie term is
"replicants").
I had a bad feeling about this; CPUs never have cute names like
"Atari", there's always a numeric tail in that name, and in some notable
cases, like the case in point, there's actually no alphabetic head...
Sloppy. Well, I'll comfort myself with the thought that "Atari-based
gadget" has a better sound to it than "6502-based gadget".
I should definitely watch everything combining high class drama with
in-depth treatment of the psychophysical problem. That always stirs my
faith in the human race. And my faith in the human race is definitely
something I like stirred.
"Physicists claim that a bullet can fly out of oneโs body with the
wound closing and healing in the process, because observations indicate
that you can get shot and wounded, and if a process is physically
possible, that same process reversed in time is also physically
possible."
Are you so sure about that? Wouldn't that break the 2nd Law of
Thermodynamics?
Of course it would, but that law is statistical. For example, a
gambler who keeps gambling and winning breaks the law of "The House
Always Wins", and in fact none of us will live to see that, but it's
physically possible. Particles around me can combine to form an exact
copy of me without breaking physical laws, it's just extremely unlikely.
So is a Turing-test-passing AI :)
so really what one can come away from this with is that we have
nothing better to do than to write programs to do it for us?
I don't know how this is related to any of the above, but, um, I'd
say that we have better things to do than things programs can do for
us.
I have a warm spot in my heart to the "replacing ourselves with
machines is insane" attitude, of which Vonnegut was one prominent
proponent. However, I think this world view is fatally misguided and
brain-damaging.
Perhaps you've seen a machine in the throes of trying to write
copious numbers of error messages to a log because of a hardware fault.
That's pain. Does the machine know that it's in pain? Perhaps, if
there's some monitoring software with a rule that says "When the VMM is
thrashing, the disks and CPU are pegged, and the hardware error log is
increasing by more than 1000 entries per second, email/page/beep loudly
for an admin to fix the problem". Human pain is information meant for
the lowest parts of our brains, and they take over from the rational
parts and try to get away from the carnivorous predator or the forest
fire that evolution taught them to deal with.
@Ben: I disagree, twice: (1) pain is not just information โ try it
and you'll see that you can't brush off the psychophysical problem that
easily, and (2) pain is not just there "for the lowest parts of our
brain" โ it's a pervasive feedback mechanism without which we're almost
completely blind despite having seemingly impressive reasoning
faculties.
why
pain is information
and feeling,born of pain are information
if you turn off the pain center of human,he will not feel it.
lobotomy?
learn the brain(not that i know it)
If you strangle a human, he will not feel pain after some time,
either. Nor will a computer process information if you short-circuit it.
The ability to break something fully or partially provides no exhaustive
explanation of its nature.
And you cannot implement "pervasive feedback mechanisms" in software?
Take the behaviorist approach: what do exactly feelings do which cannot
be implemented in a machine? Heightened heart pulse? Sweating hands? A
motivation to run? A motivation to kiss? Which?
These aren't feelings, these are behaviors โ which is OK from a
behaviorist perspective I guess, but not from the simplest of human
perspectives which kinda focuses on feelings very much.
If you strip feelings from their causes and effects, what does
remain? It all leads to the old philosophical question of whether
perfect imitation is the thing or not, current frontline is the
p-zombie, which IMHO is just pure nonsense.
AI is more about understanding how the mind works. Copying an entire
human is mostly uninteresting, but copying some of the capabilities of
the brain is not. Feelings, for example, are not too interesting, they
are just our gene's regulating mechanism to control the computing we do.
But the fact that we are capable of building mental models from
unrelated previous experience in a short time and from a small amount of
data is really fascinating and mysterious.
And AI is about power, too. A machine just somewhat 'smarter'
(whatever it means) than Neumann or Einstein or Perelman can do things
which cannot be done by anybody else, probably ever. And that will have
an impact, just like these people had.
Feelings are perhaps not too interesting if you're programming a
computer or commenting on an article, but very interesting if you drop a
brick on your foot.
Not all of life is confined to logic, mathematics, philosophy,
physics, technology, thinking and talking.
I agree on that, but AI is not aiming to reproduce the entire human
life. It is aiming to reproduce a thing which can experience the entire
human life. The two is not the same.
You are mixing explanation levels here. Denying strong AI because of
feelings does not work. It is like trying to prove a mathematical
theorem with a poem.
Well, you're mixing two different claims here. I didn't deny strong
AI because of feelings โ I agree it would make a problematic argument โ
but because of its implausibility. There's a bet over this one, Kapor vs
Kurzweil โ we'll see how that works out.
(Although arguably strong AI is as much or more about poetry than
math or science โ Turing used the ability to write sonnets and then
explain why they're written thus and not otherwise as an example of what
it means to be intelligent; but there is no need to argue over small
details here โ it's like arguing over the fine points of what communism
means, totally unnecessary when making the claim that we won't see a
society where each gets according to his needs and gives according to
his abilities in the next 50 years.)
There is something between human like AI and current AI research,
that we don't currently do, that would be useful.
We can't currently make a computer that looks after itself, there is
always a human root or admin somewhere that is supposed to be looking
after the computer. Someone updating the software, installing new stuff
and removing malware. We get things like botnets because that assumption
is not true.
This is very different from what people traditionally think AI is
about. But it is a useful trait of evolved creatures that we are missing
from computers. Animals manage to improve their skills without a super
user. We haven't really explored how we might make a computer look after
itself and what the limitations are. Autonomic Computing is the closest
but it is generally oriented towards maintaining a known system
state.
I think a key non-technical reason to keep things the way they are,
with a human in the loop, is to make sure that things evolve in
accordance to the changing perceived purposes of humans rather than the
changing perceived purposes of machines.
I agree that we will want to keep humans in the loop, as it were, but
I think there are ways of doing that while not assuming that humans will
be able pick the things to change or to understand all the changes made.
But a human should be able to evaluate the resulting changes.
So having humans as more CEOs of computers rather than as engineers.
Or another way to think about it, if we understand how the brain works
there is no reason that we have to duplicate it in its entirety. We
could make the bits that don't deal with goals (such as the sensory
systems) and use humans to provide the goal orientation information
(probably slowly to start with due to lack of bandwidth, but with the
potential for more integration as we improve our ability to integrate
with brains). I suppose exo-brain add ons is what I am thinking of.
I think the key non-technical reason no one is pushing for this is
because it is hard, and everyone in computing can make sufficient money
with the status quo.
Economically, the fact that the status quo is profitable to existing
vendors does nothing to stop a new vendor from pushing this and then
eating into their market share.
As to CEOs of computers โ let's say that it works badly enough with
humans (a rogue employee can do a whole lot of damage to his employer;
for that matter, a CEO is himself an employee of the shareholders and
not infrequently wipes them out for his own gain).
I meant under the status quo, new vendors/researchers can find new
markets for extensions of the existing computing/AI paradigm and be
vastly profitable a lot more easily than they can pushing something
speculative like self-upgrading computers.
Indeed CEOs of computers will go wrong, the question is would it be
worse than the current botnet/phishing identity theft stuff we have by
assuming that computers have engineers to look after them.
As we don't know how they will work it is hard to say.
i am study sybca
I don't get the pain argument. As far as I ever thought of pain, it
really was only a signal to indicate damage, and to limit activity that
worsens damage. What more are you implying pain is? Your explanations
(comment 8, etc) are vague.
@JeramieH: it's not a logical or a scientific argument. I'm just
saying that pain is a feeling โ that there's a fundamental
difference between an SMS telling you "damage detected, limit your
current activity" and actual pain; that the message can be represented
and studied as a mathematical object, but pain can not be; and that
everybody understands this at the gut feeling level โ that pain is not a
number though an image file is, which is why I use pain as an example
and not, say, eyesight.
Some people dismiss feelings as "illusion" on the basis of, for
instance, our ability to drug ourselves into a state where pain is not
felt. I think it's about the same as saying that life does not exist
because you can club someone to death โ and in fact that's a view some
people subscribe to (that there's no fundamental difference between a
living human, his dead body and a pile of dirt).
It's fine as far as logic is concerned โ feelings are impossible to
objectively observe and formalize and thus do not create a problem for
any sort of logical argument, being outside its realm. I think one's
worldview shouldn't be restricted to things accessible to logic simply
because only a tiny minority of things are, but it's of course a
subjective position.
However, there are exactly zero people who actually subscribe to the
life-and-death-are-the-same worldview as evidenced by their actions.
Even psychopaths tend to inflict pain on the living and do not derive
equal pleasure from "hurting machines".
good
I think Qualia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia) is a word you
would like to check out.
Qualia I know about. But what is bfrs? Brominated flame
retardants?
bfrs is now sort of like xkcd, meaningless. It was the first handle I
could think of when Hacker News asked for one. At that time, it stood
for Ben-Franklin:Richard-Saunders (Franklin's pen name). Ben Franklin
(for reasons now forgotten) is the mascot of my passport photo web app
(http://freepassportphoto.dyndns.org/).
Some comments on stuff I found interesting in your post:
"...I want to pay a tribute to the best movie of the previous
century, which, among other notable achievements, provided the most
comprehensive treatment of the psychophysical problem in the popular
culture. That motion picture is of course The Terminator, part I and, to
an extent, part II."
People called me crazy for expressing the same opinion. I lost count
of how many times I watched Terminator โ part I. Its what got me
interested in AI. Couple of years back, it got knocked off from the top
position by Carl Sagan's 1997 "Contact". When I was a kid, the strange
code listings seemed impressive, now I know that such low level atari
assembly code would never surface to the top level. If at all any code
did come to the top level, it would be lisp. Unfortunately lisp, as
Larry Wall put it, "has all the visual appeal of oatmeal with fingernail
clippings mixed in", unlike the orderly and imposing looking
assembly.
โโโ-
"...To pass the Turing test, a machine needs to have first-hand
experience of operating a human body with all of its elaborate
hardware."
This is well appreciated by AI "weenies" today. For example see
Philip Greenspun and Ellen Spertus' male-female Turing test (http://philip.greenspun.com/software/watson).
โโโ-
"...Moving on to our next problem, we meet the people who think that
we actually need AI. We donโt. Not if it means โa system that is
supposed to scale so that it could pass the Turing testโ. And this is
the only thing AI means as far as Iโm concerned here...So the only thing
we donโt have is artificial intelligence that simulates our own. And
this is as tremendously useless as it is infeasible. Natural
intelligence as we know it is a property of a person. Who needs an
artificial person?...If you want a kid to raise, you can make one in a
fairly reliable and well-known way."
It looks like you are overlooking the possibility of an "intelligence
explosion". A frequent oversight that prompted I. J. Good (one of
Turing's colleagues at Bletchey Park) to write his famous essay:
"Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine"
(http://web.archive.org/web/20010527181244/http://www.aeiveos.com/~bradbury/Authors/Computing/Good-IJ/SCtFUM.html#6_CellAssembliesAndSubassemblies)
"...highly intelligent people can overlook the intelligence-explosion.
They say that there is no point in building a machine with the
intelligence of a man, since it is easier to construct human brains by
the usual method...Let an ultra-intelligent machine be defined as a
machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man
however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these
intellectual activities, an ultra-intelligent machine could design even
better machines; there would then unquestionably be an "intelligence
explosion," and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus
the first ultra-intelligent machine is the last invention that man need
ever make."
โโโ-
Your irreverance gave me the lulz. Calling the formidable
T-800/Arnold "Atari-powered-gadget", and AI heavyweights, Hofstadter and
Kurzweil as AI weenies, I find very funny! Thanks for the lulz.
I also like Phil Greenspun's angle on AI there; he isn't what I'd
call an AI weenie โ he's very sensible about the whole thing.
Regarding intelligence explosion: I can believe it in a limited
context โ where you have a machine (program) living in a formal universe
(of theorems or 3D models or whatever) and this machine gets better and
better in its domain. I don't believe this sort of thing will lead to a
Turing-test-passing AI, for reasons that I mostly discussed above.
philg, ofcourse, is no AI weenie. Some of his best satire is directed
towards AI (http://philip.greenspun.com/humor/ai.text). What I
should have added is that, philg being popular, people are aware of the
man-woman Turing test etc.
Today's AI heavyweights, Hawkins, Kurzweil, Ng, Norvig, Thrun et al.,
don't consider the goal of AI to be to build a machine that can pass as
a human. Instead the goal is to replicate the capabilities displayed by
the cortex. The core idea goes by various names, "Mountcastle's
hypothesis" being a popular one.
By the way, I found your blog while trying to decide if I should
write my new project (a streaming X11 screen grabber) in C++. I started
with x11vnc code, which is pure C89, and kept thinking to myself, "what
a pain C is, must define variables at the beginning of scope, can't
write type-agnostic functions, no OOP enabled abstraction facilities,
etc. etc." However, I know C++ only in a half-assed way (like most
people?), and if I did choose it, there was a steep learning curve to
contend with. I think your FQA has scared me enough to stay the hell
away from C++. As you put it, "an itch here or a scratch there is much
preferable to having your legs blown off!". My decision, hopefully for
the better, is to stick with my usual Python/C combo.
Hope it works out well to you... IMO the good reason to use C++ is if
there are great libraries in it doing what you want and the interfaces
are too big to wrap.
I would recommend a couple pounds of Daniel Dennett, that should be
able to start your healing process...
This is awesome. Really. I didn't immediately attempt the YKMEE but I
did laugh out loud after parsing the word 'damage'. I tend to hastily
duck and declare that pain is an event, which solves nothingโ the
problem simply becomes "is an event information?" My favorite answer,
for the next thirty seconds, is "Snow".
Well, keep not attempting it; it's not nearly as enjoyable when
attempted.
Great article. I guess I'm considered an AI researcher, but I agree
that it's pointless to consider the philosophical problems associated
with "strong AI." To me, AI is about getting machines to solve harder
problems.
About Terminator: I've always found it weird that the Terminator has
textual information overlayed on its camera feed like a HUD (HUMAN
CASUALTIES: 0.0). This means that its computer takes machine readable
data, renders it as images of text, integrates it with the camera data,
then uses OCD to translate it back into machine readable data. Maybe
this is the Terminator's version of the internal dialogues going on in
our heads.
I guess the assembly listings and HUMAN CASUALTIES is how they
communicate to the audience "it's a robot".
I agree with some stuff you say. But I don't agree that AI is
useless. Indeed, you almost admit it would be very nice to have, when
you talk about translation. Can you seriously deny that having machine
translation is very useful? Sure, you may say we will never get it, but
that doesn't make it useless.
Well, now people are writing AI which can write AI, True AI soon
:)
Great writing on the topic. Insightful and humane. Thank you for
spending the time and effort to write this piece.
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