Published on 12, July, 2020
Hi, I've just completed a short course on artificial intelligence. These are some things I learned:
Artificial intelligence is often thought of as scary robots, e.g. Terminator, but AI is used in computer systems to do things like suggest films or books you might like, based on your previous choices. It uses a range of technologies, from simple rule based systems such as " if this is true (or if this is false), then do this" to a complex 'neural net' that is a simplistic model of how the brain works, and can be trained (machine learning)
As well as being used on social media or shopping sites, AI can identify things such as tumour cells in a medical scan or identify galaxies in photographs or from space. Large language models can generate rich interesting text in any language and translate, restructure or re-phrase text. A related field is image generation, where brand new images are generated by the AI.
In Soeul, AI mini robots were used in a pilot scheme to show senior citizens how to use technology such as smart phones, to enable them to better participate in society and help with preventing loneliness.
Youve probably heard of self driving cars. One accident that happened was a self driving car hitting a truck that pulled out in front of it at a junction in the city. This was because the AI had been trained to drive on a highway, not city streets, and the image of a truck it had been given was a view of the back of a truck. When it saw the side of the truck as it pulled out, it thought it was a road sign and so attempted to drive under it. The AI had no perception that the space under the truck was lower than the vehicle it was driving.
There are issues around ethics, inclusion and sustainability. For example, if AI is trained using data that is biased, the AI will acquire that bias. Although it can be used for facial recognition, it can sometimes struggle to determine gender and the darker the skin tone, the less accurate are the results. Training AI uses massive amounts of resources.
What are your thoughts?
And would you be comfortable having an AI robot in your home to help with tasks?
I think I've figured out half an algorythm to make it work to establish the veracity of a statement or person...
Now that would set the cat amongst the pigeons.
Dave Bowman: Open the pod bay doors, HAL.
HAL: I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that.
I would be ok with a diagnostic monitor or a devise that alerts medical staff when I fall - only when I get feeble enough to need such things, otherwise, I signed on to life for the people, not the bots.
TheCatWoman said:Does anyone remember the TV program Humans, about a world where Ai enabled robots seemed sentient and helped to do things like care for the elderly, they also took over a lot of people's jobs too.
Wow, that was strong stuff, full of ethical dilemmas as I recall.
I'm sure a goodly amount of men here would be tempted by the "upgrade package", BUT would it be like electric cars, where it's my understanding that some owners get bored quite quickly and want to revert to burning dinosaurs again? (Seriously. I heard a stroy of a bloke round here who bought an electric porsche, found it boring after a few months, money no option, so back to the Porche shop for a trade-in and they turned him down).
Question. If they made a male android, which also came with the upgrade package, would they name him Everard? ;c)
AI as it is now seems like a novelty, used by lazy hacks to spaff out crappy spam or copy paste pictures. Of course it will be used to spread disinformation, commit crimes and decieve people.
And the corporations will use it to harvest data for profit until it eventually gets leaked or stolen.
And the law is still a century behind electronic shenanigans so it can't be properly regulated for years to come.
Not to mention how dangerous it would be if it did the thinking for us or be twisted into manipulating the world and society.
That said, if AI was restricted to certain applications and industries, like research and development, science to help crunch data and such for medicine and space development maybe that's where it's true value lies.
Your grandparents might of believed that, but not everybodies grandparents did or do, is that the sort of society you'd like to live in?
It should be remembered that looking past the heuristics and neural networks, what we’re essentially talking about here are probabilistic systems. These are algorithms which essential make a decision based on probabilities and in many case produce an answer most likely to be correct based on either their programming or training. They are not thinking. They are essentially guessing. That said, make enough guesses and get good at it, and such a system can appear to be correct enough of the time to be useful. It all comes down to training and context.
As these systems become more complex, with layers upon layers of probabilistic algorithms working together they start to look more and more “human’ in the feats they can achieve. But there is a very big difference between a person and an AI. Could an AI have a soul? Feel love or joy? Or is it just a fascinating but nevertheless always artificial simulation?
My grandparents generation believed very strongly in the traditional Catholic faith and were totally opposed to Vatican II in thier vision of the Catholic Rural Ireland they grew up in, during the 1960’s & 1970’s where they would always say “faith and morals” if their views were ever challenged in any way and they were also guided by the sermons of the Irish Catholic Parish Priest who ruled Irish villages with an iron fist, along with the local police Seargent and others in the local village, where absolute obedience to the Catholic faith was everything, where already, they were totally opposed to the television in the 1960’s as this was the vision of Eamon De Valera’s Catholic Ireland pre 1960’s
IIM, Tech advances are inevitable, it's the people who use them that have the morality, a knife is just an inanimate object, a useful tool to cut my food, or a weapon to end a life.
I'm not sure '..our grandparents generation..' were totally opposed to to tech, look at the numbers of older and even elderly people use computers, smart phones and the internet? '..our grandparents..' never had the chance to use modern tech so how could they reject it?
I'm a tech sceptic, but you make me look like I'm all in favour of it, do you see no benefits at all? You criticise potential uses, but still use tech yourself, to come on here for example do you not see anything a little odd about that? Or do you see yourself as the bloke with the sandwich board advertising that, The End is Nigh!
I suspect that AI will eventually be forced on all of us in at least some ways going forward, however as a traditional Catholic, I am fundamentally and totally opposed to its use, just like with all scientific and technological advances, even though it is only supposed to a tool, yet as we have seen throughout history, such scientific and technological advances always fall into the wrong hands and are always used for evil purposes, regardless of any safeguards put in place designed to prevent misuse - for me, the biggest problem is that many of these are like a “tower of Babel” or like “Icarus” as they seek to ursurp and replace the role of God in the story of creation, which mankind has no right nor entitlement to do and many of these “advances” are merely Satanism dressed up as “science” (there was a point in history where scientific discoveries were only sanctioned by the Church and were underpinned by Church teaching) - our grandparents generation, being totally opposed to the internet, mobile phones and computers before they passed in the 1980’s in my teens, going to great lengths to stop them and giving warnings and making predictions about what it would lead to (which turned out to be correct and accurate in our times) even as we teens embraced such “advances” and indeed, as we later discovered for ourselves once out of the confusion of our teens, it led to much worse indirect effects than what our grandparents generation could ever have predicted nor imagined as the decades rolled on - young people these days are only taught about the “advantages” of such technologies and not about the realities of what these could lead to, they are only taught what to think and not how to think, to think critically, something which is even more vitally important in our times
Pixiefox said:And would you be comfortable having an AI robot in your home to help with tasks?
Definitely!
I'm planning to start small with a robot vacuum cleaner. But I'm waiting until Black Friday to see what deals might become available.
On a related note, I'm really excited for Apple Intelligence to be rolled out in the UK later this year. I see this kind of technology as a huge and really exciting step forward. I think it will fundamentally change what we come to expect from our phones and other gadgets in the way of clever, automated assistance.
https://www.apple.com/uk/apple-intelligence/
(Notably, with our privacy protected: "Draws on your personal context without allowing anyone else to access your personal data - not even Apple.")
What a great response with so many good points!
I think like everyone I'm happy that it can spot tumours and do diagnostic stuff like that.
Does anyone remember the TV program Humans, about a world where Ai enabled robots seemed sentient and helped to do things like care for the elderly, they also took over a lot of people's jobs too.
If Ai is being used to do things like pick books and clothes and stuf that I might like, it's doing a pretty poor job so far, there are so many times I want to ask it 'in what universe do I want that?' As AI takes over more and more things for us, how long will it be before it starts insisting that we have it's selections and not our own? How much freedom of choice will it take from us?
I'm deeply dubious about things like facial recognition, not the fact that a machine could do it, as much as the uses such information is put too. I think AI is already showing bias from the narrow sets of data it's been learning from and I'm not happy aboutthat for a number of reasons, increased racism and racial profiling, increased sexism and gender misidentification.
As people who are neurologically different, how will AI recognise, interpret and respect out differences? WIll it increase existing prejudices or actually be of any help? Given the way that autistic services are run now I can't see it as being anything good for us, there's already a bias that we're all good with tech and are happy using it.
I'm not sure I'd want a robot/AI device trying to teach me things, how will it cope with special needs? Would I end up exploding its chip with my technoklutzness, would I even be able to turn it on?
In some ways I'd be happy to have robotic assistance for care, but in other ways I wouldn't, I can see that I wouldn't feel a loss of dignity so much with a machine helping me with personal tasks, but I would worry that it would lack the compassion and sensitivity that makes being cared for OK.
Thank you for that.
Fascinating.
Pixiefox said:I wonder what benefit an AI bot (or their creator) would get from posting on here? Are they just trying to mine information?
This is the previous post of mine that Mark (formerly Spikey) (your memory is better than you think!) is referring to:
Bunny said:Some of them are attempting to embed what's known - in search engine optimisation (SEO) lingo - as a "backlink" (a link to their website from this one). This helps to build their "domain authority" with search engines, which can lead to boosts in the rankings of those websites within search results. They're not necessarily bothered about any of us visiting or buying anything. The search engine's own web crawlers (which visit this website silently in the background from time to time, for purposes including indexing the content and adding new pages to their search results) will find the links by themselves, which meets the spammer's goals. As I know you've also spotted, they sometimes don't embed these immediately, but come back later and edit the post to include them. So some posts are just designed to fit in, innocuously. The same applies when they include links in their forum profiles (as we saw again today, for example).
Some of them are attempting to embed what's known - in search engine optimisation (SEO) lingo - as a "backlink" (a link to their website from this one). This helps to build their "domain authority" with search engines, which can lead to boosts in the rankings of those websites within search results.
They're not necessarily bothered about any of us visiting or buying anything. The search engine's own web crawlers (which visit this website silently in the background from time to time, for purposes including indexing the content and adding new pages to their search results) will find the links by themselves, which meets the spammer's goals.
As I know you've also spotted, they sometimes don't embed these immediately, but come back later and edit the post to include them. So some posts are just designed to fit in, innocuously.
The same applies when they include links in their forum profiles (as we saw again today, for example).
Since 2016 I have been slightly less sceptical of this. I'm not going to bring up politics, but some seriously crazy stuff (to my mind) happened since then where cosmic jokers taking the mickey are a serious rational explanation more comforting than the reality.
Have you never thought that we might all be living in a computer simulation? we might all be AI programs that think they are real people ;-) , The Descartes quote 'Cogito Ergo Sum', or 'I think, therefore I am' Would not be relevant
I saw that you asked a specific question, "And would you be comfortable having an AI robot in your home to help with tasks?" and I have to say no - though I can see good uses for elderly and physically disabled people. I don't even like lights that turn on and off automatically, so I think a physical robot and I would come to blows (and then I'd probably lose)
And as the joke meme says, "Remember: behind every robot that turns evil is an engineer who specifically installed red LEDs into the eyes just for this occasion."
I wondered the same, and someone on here who is in IT (I want to say Bunny, but my memory is awful for these things), said that in a lot of cases here the intentions are not always for phishing, but just to make a person look legitimate for other purposes elsewhere. It gives the bot an internet presence that makes them look more real to robot detectors. The ones with links are more likely to just be straight up dodgy.
This thread might interest you too P on that subject:
https://community.autism.org.uk/f/adults-on-the-autistic-spectrum/35752/we-have-a-problem-here-folks-ai-imitating-humans-here-in-this-place