Who Were the Sea Peoples?

In the comments on this post , rob argues that a bunch or "circuits" (or neurons, I guess) behaving according to deterministic, mechanical laws is exactly what "gives rise" to intelligence, in humans or computers. The problem with this view is Occam's razor . Let us consider a door lock. If the lock is set, one can't open the door without a key (at least without breaking it). We can see why this is so on simple, mechanical principles. Now, it just could be that the door "knows" when it is supposed to let people in who don't have the key, and when it shouldn't. But generally we reject any such hypothesis as superfluous: once we understand how the door mechanically does its job, we simply don't need to posit any "knowing": it won't "do any work" in our explanation of when we can get in the house and when we can't. Now let's say we add some biometric feature to the door: the owner can still get in by f...

I am searching for an assembly language simulator for I can teach my Operating Systems students how processes work at the CPU level. In the course of doing so, I came across this site , and found: 10110000 01100001 The first few bits (10110) are an instruction to copy a value into a register. The next three digits (000) identify the register which the value will be copied into. The rest of it (01100001) is the value which is to be copied. Of course 10110 is meaningless, and the computer doesn't "know" that it means "copy the value." The processor is designed so that the series of electrical impulses represented by 10110 (on-off-on-on-off) causes the desired result. This is part of what is meant by "mechanical." Yesiree. Maybe if all of the AI true believers had to program in assembly for a month, they'd all realize, "Oh yeah, it's just a bunch of circuits performing that exact mechanical operations I set up for them to perform."...

It used to be that when people contemplated "big ideas," they asked things like "What is justice?" or "How should people live together in a political community?" But today, apparently " big ideas " means contemplating complete nonsense, like "Are we living in a simulation?" A simulation is an abstraction. Of course, there is something really going on: it is electricity moving around some circuits. But think about the proposal from that perspective: maybe we are really just living inside some electricity moving around circuits. How could someone "live inside" an electric current? The rest of the simulation is nothing more than our own interpretation of what that electric current represents. There is no thunderstorm in a weather simulation; we choose to interpret the current's movements as representing a thunderstorm. If we wish, we could instead choose to interpret it as a piece of music , or directions for firin...

A long, long time ago, I ran into my friend Salis while I was prying a rock from the ground. "Boy, that lever sure is making an effort to get that rock out of the ground!" Salis remarked. "No, I don't think so... I think it's just a tool. I'm the one making the effort," I replied. A few centuries later, he came across me using a polyspastos to place large stones high atop a building. "Whoa, now there's no way you can deny that thing is making an effort to lift those stones!" he commented. "Well, certainly is is a better lifting machine, but why does that make any difference as to whether or not it is 'making an effort'?" "Ha, back in the day, you never thought machines could lift this much. And you know they'll be even better tomorrow." "Yes, but how is that..." "People like you are stuck in the past!" Finally, several centuries later, he came across me using a TA...

Contemplate this post . Here is a key passage from Shannon's original paper: The method of attack on these problems may be described briefly as follows: any circuit is represented by a set of equations, the terms of the equations corresponding to the various relays and switches in the circuit. A calculus is developed for manipulating these equations by simple mathematical processes, most of which are similar to ordinary algebraic algorisms. This calculus is shown to be exactly analogous to the calculus of propositions used in the symbolic study of logic. What I want to highlight here is that Shannon was talking about existing circuitry. Was this existing circuitry really doing symbolic logic all along? Or did Shannon just realize that we could interpret that circuitry as performing logical operations? And there is no reason the "circuits" in question need be electrical: they can be plumbing , and what flows through them can be water. (Interesting...

Maybe. Many of my worked-up correspondents are outraged because, they claim, I deny the possibility that computers can think. But I have never denied that possibility, and have explicitly said I don't deny it in the past. In fact, as that post notes, I keep denying it, and yet my critics simply ignore my repeated denials, and accuse me of a bias in favor of "meat machines" over "silicon machines." Let me say it again: Maybe Big Blue actually realizes it is playing chess, and actually knows that it has an opponent. Maybe it actually feels triumphant when it beats a grandmaster! Can thermostats think? Maybe. Maybe a thermostat knows when it is cold in the living room, and knows that the furnace must be kicked on. Can electrons think? Maybe. Maybe an electron knows it ought to orbit a nucleus in a certain orbital. What has puzzled me throughout this discussion is why AI enthusiasts want to deny thought to simple physical mechanisms, but at some (se...

At the beginning of his  Interpretation and Overinterpretation (1992), Umberto Eco tells the following story: At the beginning of his Mercury; Or, the Secret and Swift Messenger (1641), John Wilkins tells the following story: How strange a thing this Art of Writing did seem at its first Invention, we may guess by the late discovered Americans, who were amazed to see Men converse with Books, and could scarce make themselves to believe that a Paper could speak... There is a pretty Relation to this Purpose, concerning an Indian Slave; who being sent by his Master with a Basket of Figs and a Letter, did by the Way eat up a great Part of his Carriage, conveying the Remainder unto the Person to whom he was directed; who when he had read the Letter, and not finding the Quantity of Figs answerable to what was spoken of, he accuses the Slave of eating them, telling him what the Letter said against him. But the Indian (notwithstanding this Proof) did confidently abjure the Fact, cur...

Computer programs are machines. The brilliance of a general-purpose computing machine is that its circuitry can be re-wired on the fly by a program loaded into memory. But we could always create hardware that duplicates any program: we burn the program onto a PROM.* But let's say we think there is a machine out there that might solve our problem, but that it is very, very complex, and we are not sure how to build it. The brilliance of "machine learning" software is the realization that we can build a machine X that searches the space of possible machines for the machine Y which is the one we really want. We code some criteria for "Getting warmer!" and "Getting colder!" and then set X going, looking for Y. We can call this "learning" if it makes it easier for the people working on these problems to picture what they are doing. But it is really not different, except in complexity, than a program searching a database for a record that meets...

Arthur C. Clarke once said that "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." (For those who can't follow its construction, of course.) This explains a lot of the belief in Artificial Intelligence. This magical thinking regarding a piece of technology is on full display in the television show Criminal Minds , where the "search wizard," Garcia, can, with about 10 keystrokes, pull absolutely any combination of pieces of information out of her magical computer. ("Garcia, get me the names of all people released from prison in the last month who are on psychiatric drugs and subscribe to HBO."*) I just saw on episode in which Garcia was asked to find the location of the mobile phone of the "best friend" of an FBI agent's missing niece. That's all the computer needed: "Find the location of Meghan's best friend's cell phone." About 3 seconds later, a little dot was blinking on a map. You see, b...

Is that any analogy must differ from the situation to which it is analogous in some ways, or it would just be that situation. This problem is especially tricky when dealing with people in the grip of an ideology, because inevitably, what they will do is seize upon one of these differences, and play it up as if the fact there is some difference makes the analogy worthless. (Of course, if that were true, every analogy would be worthless, because, as I said, there is always some difference.) And so it went with my first round of Turing Test analogies . The point of the whole exercise was to show that black box tests don't tell you anything about where in a system the intelligence lies. If a computer passes the test, I would agree that is evidence that there is intelligence somewhere in the system! Furthermore, I can tell you just where that intelligence lies: it is with the programmers who built the program that enabled the machine to pass the test. Just like there is intelligence...

I recently gave some analogies to show the emptiness of the Turing Test in terms of deciding whether a computer is intelligent or not. Commenters managed to find some completely irrelevant ways in which my analogies were not exactly like the Turing Test. One of them went so far as to claim that the Turing Test wasn't about deciding whether computers are intelligent. In that case, fine, I can stop writing about it. But it certainly is used that way, again and again, by people who want to be able to claim, "Well, a computer passed the Turing Test, therefore, it is intelligent!" In any case, I thought I would offer and even closer analogy, to make it harder for AI devotees to evade the main point of these examples. (That they will  try to evade it, I have no doubt, for the will to believe is strong!) So let us consider the equivalent of a Turing Test for simulated battles, such as those in The Lord of the Rings . In this case, the analogous test will involve having t...

The idea behind the Turing Test is that we must evaluate the possible intelligence of anything we encounter as though that thing were a black box. So let us do a "Turing test" to decide who is the most knowledgable high school history student in the United States this year. Preliminary competitions have narrowed the field down two candidates: Jamal, who comes from a poor family, and Emily, who is from a wealthy one. Per Turing, we must set each student within a black box from which that student's answers will emerge, and we are simply not allowed to inquire at all what is going on within that box. Jamal's parents, being poor, and trusting in the honesty of the contest, simply put Jamal in his box. But Emily's parents, knowing the way the world works, and being rich, hire a dozen top historians from around the world to sit in Emily's box with her.  Every time a history question is asked, Jamal answers the question himself, but Emily asks her team what the ...

Here : "With this defeat, computers have bettered people in the last of the classical board games, a game known for both depth and simplicity." This is about equivalent to saying that "Shovels have bettered people in digging dirt out of the ground." Folks, this is a machine built and programmed by us humans , the we employ to better our performance at a task we decided upon.  It is the crudest sort of magical thinking to attribute what happened to our tool as if it were an autonomous being.

Today, many people have trouble believing the intelligent, scientific people like Newton and Boyle were deeply involved in alchemy. When people in a couple of hundred years look back on our time, it will be Artificial Intelligence that will play that role: "Can you believe that smart people thought that by re-arranging wires, they could make a machine intelligent?!"

I have said before on this blog that if we wish to ascribe thoughts about chess to a chess-playing computer, we should, for the very same reasons, ascribe thoughts about home heating to our thermostats. It is nice to see that one of the founders of the discipline of artificial intelligence agrees with me on this point: 'In 1979 McCarthy wrote an article[22] entitled "Ascribing Mental Qualities to Machines." In it he wrote, "Machines as simple as thermostats can be said to have beliefs..."' Of course, McCarthy thinks thermostats have beliefs about home heating and Big Blue has beliefs about chess, while I think neither is true, but we agree that the evidence should lead us to decide both cases the same way. (It is like we agree on the proposition, "If Joe is guilty, then Bill is guilty too," but disagree on whether Joe is guilty.)

My student told me, "My setup is exactly the same as Brian's, but his works and mine doesn't." "No," I replied, "if your setup does not work, that is because it is different than Brian's." We got online so I could see his screen. Brian and I had set "PYTHONPATH" to point to a particular directory. When I asked to see the other student's value for "PYTHONPATH," he said, "Oh, I used 'PATH' for that. I thought it wouldn't matter." So he had set the wrong variable. But rather than seeing the box in front of him as a dumb machine, where you have to set each switch properly or it won't work, he viewed it as something semi-magical that would just "know" that by 'PATH' he meant 'PYTHONPATH.' And if it wasn't working, well, the likely explanation was that the box was busy thinking about something else, like world domination , rather than it just being a dumb machine...

In response to post like this one , I have been asked again and again questions like "Why do you deny the possibility that machines might be able to think?" This is rather stunning to me, as I have posted numerous times, on this very same blog, my affidavit that I do not now, and never have, denied this possibility for even a second! I have posted the example of a thermostat turning up the heat because it "feels cold," not because I deny the possibility that the thermostat feels cold, but because I want to see if my AI enthusiast correspondents are willing to be consistent, and admit that their thermostat might truly feel cold, just as their Turing-test-passing machine might truly be conversing. I am, in fact, perfectly willing to contemplate the idea that atoms are held together because electrons "feel attracted" to protons: such geniuses as Gottfried Leibniz , Alfred North Whitehead , C.S. Peirce , and, more recently, my friend David Chalmers , have...

You have to hire a Croatian translator. Two candidates for the job show up to interview, me, who knows not a word of Croatian, and my friend Neil, who is Croatian. You begin to interview us, but I have brought a trump card: I have along my attorney, Elen Touring, who says, "Wait a second, this is not fair to my client: Mr. Ganic here simply looks much more Croatian than Dr. Callahan, and so you must interview them blind. In addition, since Mr. Ganic sounds more Croatian, and you only need to have someone translate written material, it is only fair that you can't hear them either. You must test them both, behind curtains, without knowing which is which. So we both are concealed in curtained rooms. In Neil's, he translates Croatian text to English "by hand." But in mine, I just type it into Google translate on my phone, and write down the English output. When you judge my output superior, Attorney Touring insights you must hire me. Someone may wish to point...

The Newlyn-Phillips machine is an analogue computer for calculating the value of certain macroeconomic variables when other such variables are changed. It is a hydraulic machine that circulates colored water through a series of pipes and valves: If you showed a bunch of people this machine in operation, and then asked them, "So, this machine sure knows a lot about the macro-economy, doesn't it?" I'd bet most would reply, "What? It's just a bunch of water running around in pipes. It's only humans who interpret the levels as economic aggregates." In fact, it is entirely possible (albeit unlikely) that someone built a machine that functions identically, but is actually used to flush clean some manufacturing equipment or run a fancy bathroom. In those cases, no one would even imagine that there was anything to do with macroeconomics going on. But once the parts of a machine of essentially the same type are hidden in tiny microchips, and the machine circ...

Here : "Artificial intelligence, in fact, is obviously an intelligence transmitted by conscious subjects, an intelligence placed in equipment. It has a clear origin, in fact, in the intelligence of the human creators of such equipment. This point is always seems rather obvious to me: there is intelligence in a rabbit trap... put there by the trapper who built it. And there is intelligence in a chess-playing computer... put there by the programmers and designers who built it.