Artificial Intelligence: What makes us “us”?
Questions Part
Going through Slashdot article about AI “buzz” going on right now, that people started showing interest in this subject again, and Stanford University opened his lab again for the researches related on this subject, on person, in the comments, asked this question, which was running in my head all day long. Who are we? Why we can have feelings, and make decisions? There were too many questions.
After reading the book of Ivan Bratko concerning Logical Programming and Prolog environment, and its concepts, most of the questions were simply eliminated, because of two reasons.
First one is the post of Lana about IQ and the way of human thinking: why some people see the things differently, and give completely different answers on tricky questions?
And the second reason was more less rhetorical question: Why we can answer only on “what” and “how” questions via programming? Further explanation can be assume completely unscientific due to the lack of my knowledge, but I believe, that at some points, the scientists, sometimes, forget about “usual way of thinking” - they get used to sophisticated questions, and always look for some kind of trick in the context of the task. I’ll try to give my vision of this problematic issue, with no complains to be right!
How do children think?
I’ll try to answer those questions step-by-step providing you with small examples. We know that, we don’t know who we are! That’s the fact. There are a lot of version of our origin. Some of them are typically scientific, others are religious. Both theories can’t proved, thus we don’t have to take them in account trying to answer those questions. Why do people react differently? In my opinion, a lot of things depend on our childhood experience.
If you remember a movie “Rain man” with Dastin Hoffman and Tom Cruse, you realize why the character of Hoffman was afraid of hot water, which was the actual cause of his later psychological disease - it cause harm for his young brother. Hence, hot water was assumed to be harmful.
A child appears in this world with no actual knowledge of behavior, but with a drastic will of learning and coping the things around him. At the beginning he’s got only reflexes, which help him to live, later on he starts to distinguish right and wrong. Discovering a world through our environment, and sopping everything around us, we become “us”, humans who base our way of thinking according to the tasks we handle in daily life.
Maybe, Steven Spelberg was right when he made a movie “A.I.” and his main character was a child: innocent and with no basic understandings of what is wrong and right. He knew only row data, which was input in his brain, but he couldn’t analyze it in real-life environment. Later on he gained this knowledge.
“Why” questions, and “why” suggestions
Surfing around different programming paradigms, I’ve witnessed few things, very basic ones. Most of the programming languages can answer only on “what” and “how” questions: declarative and imperative programming languages. These are common issues of programming environment, due to the fact that a program should accept an information and output an useful data for the user. This is a typical imperative procedure of programming: the applications make us work less. Definitely, declarative programs can give us some useful outputs according to the logical statement used inside of the program, a simple case: “If it’s Friday today, then tomorrow is a day-off”. Few declarative statement, but no questions “why?”. The program is not designed for that, while it’s what our brain is born with! Hunger of knowledge. The search of what is true or false, and the proofs of that. At the logical aspect, it can lead to infinite loops - the program will look for the “truth” infinitely. But, people, don’t forget that up to the certain level, accept some things as obsolete truth, and we don’t doubts about it. Why? Because we measure all “for” and “against” of the thing and take our choice according to the results. Sounds a bit statistical in my opinion. If you think that we also bring some senses at this point, so you can come back to the point of how children think, in order to estimate the sympathies and antipathies of a human being which influence his character. The scales of “truth” and “false” can be calculated and analyzed, but we’ll be unique for every person. Thus, every Artificial Intelligent program will have its own character, therefore using common knowledge given by the developper.
A small conclusion of a small person
In many cases, the for the new discover is not a brand new vision of the thing, but an attentivness for real world and the nature, which we are trying to copy in order to prove ourselves that we can do it. At this point we can come out with a question: what is artificial? Where is the border? The attempts of creating the system as intelligent as a human can be assumed as the final goal of computer science branches. Will we be able to achieve that?
