Tuesday, June 12, 2018

Artificial Intelligence  -  Just the Beginning.

MIT teaches AI to transform photos into creepy images.

This is an example of an A.I. agent that is specialized. It just makes scary pictures. 
Cortana, Sari and Alexa are also specialized. They find things on the web, do simple math and keep track of appointments. They are not generalized. They would not pass for humans in a Turing test.

The consensus among A.I. researchers today is that A.G.I. (Artificial General Intelligence) is still thirty to forty years away.

Some even argue that A.I. stands for "Augmented Intelligence". That A.I. is just a set of tools we use to augment our own intelligence. Neural networks help us spell words correctly, identify possible viruses to protect our PC's, recognise our faces to log us in, correct our english, translate a foreign language, or search the internet.
Today we understand how neurons work, but not the brain. We create Artificial brains by arranging neurons in rows and columns. But that is not how they are done in biology.

We can use MRI to see the locations in our brains where math is done. And, we see they are different when we do spelling.   Math takes place in two places at the same time. One in the left half of our brain, and a similar place in the right half. Why? Is there some sort of arbitration mechanism in the human brain that chooses the correct answer to the math problem or the correct spelling of the word?
Do we do it in two places just for redundancy?
Does our brain simply pick the answer form whichever side finds it first? Or, since answers are based on rather fuzzy strengths of neural pathways, is the brain looking for a consensus? Maybe the left brain says the answer is either 3, 7 or 9, while the right side says the answer is 3 or 4. Three is chosen simply because both sides of the brain seem to agree. Right now, I can't answer that question.
There is a bundle of nerves that connect the two halves of the brain, (the corpus callosum), but  that seems to be just a communications path, (much like a bundle of fiber optics). But that still does not answer how or why the brain does most things in two places.

While on the subjec of the human brain versus A.I., here is an interesting experiment.
Are the white blocks moving up and down or right and left. This is a common test used to determine where in the brain  movement processed. Try looking at the center of the black square. Try viewing the test from an angle by moving your head three or four feet to the extreme right or left of the screen. This test is often used to determine if you are right or left brained.

Ambiguous apparent-motion quartet

Additional reading:

Also; this book is on amazon and is available for Kendel:
The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind - by Julian Jaynes