Jed,
Thank you for posting the link to that most interesting article.
For some years now I had thought that consciousness was just the brain
making an image of one's surroundings and examining that image. I see
now that is unnecessary, that the brain examines the actual image in
real time and doesn't have to make a new 3D image fifteen times a second
and look at that. The basic concept remains though, that consciousness
is simply the act of examining the image together with inputs from the
other sensors.
I think it follows we will have a "conscious" computer even earlier than
Kurzweil forecasts.
AA
On 12/15/2016 5:47 PM, Jed Rothwell wrote:
There was a long article about artificial intelligence (AI) in the New
York Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/14/magazine/the-great-ai-awakening.html
It was pretty good, with some technical detail. You will find more
detail in recent Sci. Am. article by two of the leading people in the
field. I can't find it on line . . .
There has been an important breakthrough with neural networks. They
have been around for decades, going back to the 1950s I think. The
difference is they are now many orders of magnitude larger, and they
are multi-level, with the output of one network connected to the input
of another.
This was the technique that led to a computer beating the world
champion in go. The NYT reports that Google has applied this to their
translation software, resulting in dramatic improvements. In a few
months, the quality of the translations improved as much as it did in
10 years with the older technology. The article quotes an example.
This sentence in Spanish by Borges:
Uno no es lo que es por lo que escribe, sino por lo que ha leído.
The old Google translate system rendered this:
One is not what is for what he writes, but for what he has read.
The new one:
You are not what you write, but what you have read.
I ran some Japanese and some English text through the latest Google
translate. This is mainly text that I translated myself. The new
Google translate is remarkable. A little unnerving. Because, you see,
if you run some of my translated essays you will see that I took
liberties, adding information I thought would help a native speaker
understand. These are not literal or exact translations. Since I wrote
the original text myself, I am allowed to to that. But, I also did it
with Mike McKubre's paper. I am a little worried that someone may call
me out on it! Sooner or later, Google's computers will be getting in
touch with me, calling me out. Google sells a gadget that sits in the
room listening to your conversations, awaiting your commands, the
Google Home:
https://madeby.google.com/home/
I can see the day coming when the Google Home speaker will blare out:
"ROTHWELL! Get over here. What is the meaning of this?!? McKubre wrote
'I was tasked' and you have it: 'the conference organizers asked me to
. . .' We are now in the process of reviewing all of your work going
back to 1998, which will henceforth be called Calendar Year 1 of Our
Lord Google."
http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/McKubreMCHcoldfusionb.pdf
http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/McKubreMCHcoldfusionc.pdf
- Jed
