Question: Are you an advocate of furthering AI research?
Daniel Dennett: I think that it’s been a wonderful field and has a great future, and some of the directions are less interesting to me and less important theoretically, I think, than others. I don’t think it needs a champion. There’s plenty of drive to pursue this research in different ways.
What I don’t think it’s going to happen and I don’t think it’s important to try to make it happen; I don’t think we’re going to have a really conscious humanoid agents anytime in the foreseeable future. And I think there’s not only no good reason to try to make such agents, but there’s some pretty good reasons not to try. Now, that might seem to contradict the fact that I work on a Cog project with MIT, which was of course is an attempt to create a humanoid agent, cogent, cog, and to implement the multiple drafts model of consciousness; my model of consciousness on it.
We sort of knew we weren’t going to succeed, but we're going to learn a lot about what had to go in there. And that’s what made it interesting; is that we could see by working on an actual project, what’s some of the really most demanding contingencies and requirements and dependencies were.
It’s proof of concept. You want to see what works but then you don’t have to actually do the whole thing.
I compare this to; imagine the task of robotics, of designing and building a robotic bird which could fly around and you know, weigh three or four ounces, could fly around the room, could catch flies, and land on a twig.
Is it possible in principle to make such a robotic bird? I think possible in principle.
What would it cost? Oh much more than sending people to the moon. It will dwarf the Manhattan Project. It would be a huge effort and we wouldn’t learn that much.
We can learn by doing the parts, by understanding bird flight and bird navigation, we can do that without ever putting it all together, which would be a colossal expense and not worth it.
There’s plenty of birds, we don’t need that, we don’t need to make any and we can make quasi birds. In fact, they are making little tiny robots surveillance flying things, they don’t perfectly mimic birds, they don’t have to. And that’s the way as I should go as well.
Recorded on Mar 6, 2009.
Discuss
Angel Jimenez on March 13, 2009, 6:09 PM
What I mean by that is that the Human Brain has come up with what are acknowledged to be, very creative laws that have advanced civilization. Why work on a silicon brain when ours is so fantastic and proven. Sure, you can remove certain behavior and thoughts that prevent fast progress but, if we find the good parts, we may have the best thinking possible.
About the bird, if you made a small indigenous bird that no one would kill for food and no one would object to, you could have yourself the ideal spy.
IMHO
shawn disney on July 7, 2009, 12:14 PM
This whole idea is dangerous. Military robots are going to need to have a “Value System”, both to survive and to perform missions; it is going to have to at least mimic value judgments, (one would hope) in deciding whether to kill little old ladies or not, etc. It would have to have “self-consciousness” of at least some sort, to be able to function as any more than a remote weapon. As for the alledged superiority of the human brain, I notice that the drones in Afghanistan are “controlled” by “brains” , but the targets are chosen by “military intelligence”, 1.e. unsubstantiated , paid-for fingering of potential victims, supervised by people don’t speak the language, and have contempt for the proposed victims. I see no sign of that ever changing, and I predict that very few would want to live in a society like that. Not to even mention that the robots, of necessity being logical and fact oriented, might take a notion that we were dangerous to them. Have these think tanks followed out their own logic? How are robots going to cope with the idea that some countries may have nuclear bombs, but others should be bombed if they even aspire to tlhem? disigny
ronankeating on October 18, 2009, 4:45 AM
description of the difference between the left and the right filled under “Timeless Posts” on his blog:
http://artmarketer.blogspot.com/2009/10/data-unveils-highest-speed-of-ddr3.html
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