The Artificial Intelligence Disadvantage
Overcome by the Watson Supercomputer
In February 2011, IBM overcame the disadvantages listed below, demonstrating the Watson Supercomputer, which recognizes patterns in text data to surpass the capabilities of the human mind.
The Artificial Intelligence Disadvantage
A Lack of Effective Tools
The handicap for Artificial Intelligence is that it lacks the pattern recognition tools needed to succeed. The study of Artificial Intelligence began formally in Dartmouth College in 1956 as an effort by a group of scientists to evaluate and mechanically replicate human intelligence on the assumption that "every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it." Their objective was to write computer programs, which could finally create human level intelligence in computers and robots. Those early scientists failed to realize that the mind uses pattern recognition and not computation. They also woefully underestimated the memory storage capacity required to achieve such an ambitious objective.
The
Artificial Intelligence Disadvantage
Millions of Years Of
Memories
Nature
has transmitted the programmed memories needed to sustain life on an
unimaginable scale. The evolutionary process logically assembled
these in cell memories, testing myriad variations. The DNA memories
of every living thing on the planet had digital, error-correcting,
and self-replicating codes. Those vast blueprints improved with each
generation, across millions of years.
Organisms, whose
inherited traits were less suited for competition and reproduction,
were eliminated and those with advantageous traits were reproduced.
It was an enduring process, which had finally yielded astronauts and
neurosurgeons. That assembled code of knowledge described the
structures of humans and oak trees, hummingbirds and whales.
The
Artificial Intelligence Disadvantage
Competition With Cubic Miles
of Code
At
the moment of conception, a single fertilized human egg contains
information equivalent to about six billion chemical letters, which
can be recorded in a thousand 500 page books. In a grown human body,
with the DNA in each cell containing a sequence of over 3 billion
chemical nucleotide bases, the total of those codes in the body would
fill the Grand Canyon fifty times over with 500 page manuals. This
was just the code in the nucleus of cells. Back in 1956, scientists
attempted to imitate life, using computers with 1.5K memories.
The
Artificial Intelligence Disadvantage
Many Parallel Coded
Systems
Human
intelligence is supported by massive coded memories in myriad fields.
During the eons that it took to assemble the DNA codes, nature also
assembled ascending levels of knowledge in the immune system, the
spinal cord, the reticular system, the limbic system and finally, the
prefrontal regions. Millions of potentially pathogenic organisms and
substances had to be neutralized. Cubic miles of recognition code
enabled the immune system to act decisively within the organs,
tissues, cells, and cell products of the body by differentiating
between myriad self and nonself entities.
Knowledge in the
spinal cord coordinated muscle movements millisecond by millisecond
to power the rippling movements of a centipede, the graceful steps of
a dancer, or the soaring flight of a bird. Memories for myriad smells
enabled the reptilian systems to distinguish between prey and
predator. Knowledge in the limbic system responded suitably to a wide
range of events, which triggered anger and fear, or jealousy and
despair. The computation capabilities of the computer cannot manage
the pattern sensing responses of living things, based on knowledge
assembled over millions of years of history and a lifetime of
experience, play and imagination.
The
Artificial Intelligence Disadvantage
The Human Cortex Scales Up
More
Human
intelligence added myriad new levels to animal intelligence. The
great achievements in science and art are based on stored knowledge
of millions of relationships between numerous fields. Every stroke of
the brush on a canvass by a master is backed by a knowledge of the
effects of line, color, perspective, texture and myriad details of
the facial representation of complex emotions. A work of art is only
possible through immense inherited skills and those acquired over
years of practice and training. This lode of innate knowledge adds
cubic miles more of codes in the nervous system. Artificial
intelligence has barely touched on these complex pattern sensing
tasks.
The
Artificial Intelligence Disadvantage
Incredible Speed In
Execution
Artificial
intelligence fails in the speed of knowledge retrieval. An animal
mind stores billions of pages of code. This data is evaluated and
acted on within milliseconds. Subconscious processes of your immune
system utilize internal code recognition systems to attack a detected
invader. The olfactory system, using an inbuilt knowledge of smells,
enables an animal to instantly recognize a scent and sense danger. An
escape plan is hatched within the instant in which a wild animal
perceives a situation to be dangerous.
The action cannot be
stupid. The animal should not head into the predator. In the tangled
undergrowth of the wild, increasing distance from danger demanded
uncommon creativity. Memories of a lifetime had to be recalled. A
safe objective had to be chosen instantly. There are myriad options
in often treacherous terrain, with impassable obstructions and life
threatening dangers. That objective of getting away is even achieved
by slipping into a safe sanctuary, inaccessible to the predator. Like
the underside of a rock. Artificial intelligence cannot compete in
the field of real time information retrieval achieved by
animals.
The
Artificial Intelligence Disadvantage
Barely The First Faltering
Steps
Over
half a century, AI has traveled far. In chess, as in simple
computation, a computer can beat a human. Expert Systems assist the
industry with a wide range of diagnostic software. Robotic vehicles
have independently traversed long distances. Optical character
recognition and speech recognition have advanced enough to have many
practical applications.
But, massive storage and simultaneous
real time retrieval of multi-sensory data is still not within reach.
Natural language processing suffers from that problem. It requires an
understanding of language, culture, history and emotions to be able
to translate a sentence. Imagine the vast knowledge of the
environment needed for a robot to understand a simple context like
“outside.” Common sense requires cubic miles of knowledge. Which
computer can store a lifetime of video memories and recall a single
frame within milliseconds? To succeed, artificial intelligence
requires myriad pattern sensing algorithms and the ability to extract
contextual knowledge in real time from cubic miles of coded
memories.
The
Artificial Intelligence Disadvantage
Overcome by the Watson
Supercomputer
In
February 2011, IBM overcame the disadvantages listed above,
demonstrating the Watson
Supercomputer, which
recognizes patterns in text data to surpass the capabilities of the
human mind.
This
page was last updated on 30-Dec-2013.
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For my peace of mind, I earmarked 20 minutes for meditation on the terrace. With my eyes closed, I sense my hands on the chair and feel the numbness in my feet.
I feel my breath flowing through my nose, my throat, my chest and my stomach. I can hear the chirping of birds, the phut phut of auto rickshaws, the occasional roar of a truck and the insistent hooting of horns.
The wide sky and the treetops come to my attention, when I open my eyes, I see a pale moon over two hundred thousand miles away. I see the nuclear fires, blazing for millions of years in the pale globe of the setting sun. I see a single star millions of miles away in space.
I can see green shoots coming up on a tree, watch the dives and swoops of birds, the great circles of the hawks and flocks of birds flying home for the night.
Diffused light from the sun reflects off a parrot on the tree and enters my eye through a pinhole opening. I sense the bustling mood of the bird, even though it is smaller than a drop of water in my eyes.
All these things are seen and felt by me in a few brief minutes. In the distance, is the head of a man seeming to be no bigger than a pea. Yet, that head too sees and feels such things. Ten million people in this great city see and feel in ten million ways.
My mind wanders to a misty view of postwar London; an exciting glimpse of Disneyland. An awed view of Tiananmen Square. The looming Himalayan ranges. My mind takes me to distant galaxies.
It carries me into the heart of millions of invisible neurons, where electrical charges flash thousands of times a second powering my contemplation. I see the campaigns of Julius Caesar and Alexander. I feel the longings of Jehangir.
Already my mind has taken me to palaces, battlefields and even the stars. If I lost everything, but can just see and feel, in just a few brief minutes, my mind can travel the world, or imagine the cosmos.
While my thoughts wandered far and near, the thought "20 minutes is a long time" also kept floating in. And yet, life has already blessed me with over twenty million waking minutes! I have an infinity of time on my hands. Have I a right to expect more from life?
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