The Face on Mars

First things first, something you must understand. I’ve seen pictures of the Face on Mars and the surrounding areas. I’ve seen the old pictures and the new ones. This isn’t about the Face as much as it is about human reasoning. I don’t know if the Face is a face. I don’t know if it’s artificial or not. This makes me no different than anyone else on the planet Earth. And that’s the important thing to know.

I’m supposed to believe in quantum physics. I’m supposed to believe in the String Theory. I’m supposed to believe in multiple dimensions (other than the standard four). I’m supposed to believe in a lot of things that I can’t see, hear, or touch.

But I’m forbidden to believe in a older civilization that once existed on another planet in our solar system. Believing that all matter is made up of vibrating strings is OK; believing in an intelligent race that was on Mars is not. How does that work?

Because there’s no proof. Aside from some clever math, there’s no proof of the rest of the stuff either.

I have no problem with the idea that there may have been life in the solar system before us. I attribute this to my amazing ignorance of how everything started. I like it this way. It allows me to use my imagination.

It just seems wrong to me to summarily dismiss something without investigating it. The Face looks enough like a face to me to warrant looking into. We’ve got orbiters that can take a closer look anyway, what’s the harm? NASA’s reaction always seems suspicious to me, which tends to nudge me over to the fringe thinker’s side. In the same breath, it seems wrong to go whole hog and say the Face is artificial. Nobody knows. And we’re not going to know until we send people up there to have a look. And that, to me, is the most important thing of all. If NASA wants to go to Mars, what better way to drum up funding and get the nation whipped up about it if not to say they want to find out for sure if the Face is really a face, or just a trick of nature?

What makes me angry is when scientists here on Earth decide that something is natural without having a really good look at it. Nobody can tell from space if it is or not. News flash: If the Face is artificial, then it’s alien. That’s important, not just for the obvious reason, but because it’s something that’s totally out of our realm of experience. You cannot, without having further information, pass judgement on something that’s alien to Earth using Earth-bound experiences.

Let’s use a metaphor. There’s a scientist on Mars. He was born in a city like New York. He grew up there, among the high sky scrapers all his life. Cars and people everywhere. He went to a large university and got his credentials. He works for the Mars Space Agency. He’s given a series of photos, taken by a Martian satellite, of Earth. It’s a desert region and there’s nothing spectacular in them. Some vegetation. There’s a bunch of caves in rows on a mesa. He thinks that’s a little unusual, given the linear arrangement of caves but that’s about it. Obviously there’s no life there, but vegetation, so he tosses out the photos as normal. He’s a city dweller, he knows cities, and there’s no city in these photographs.

I would leave it there as an exercise for the reader to figure what’s wrong here. But I don’t have any so I’d be waiting for eternity. The photos this Martian scientist was given had a settlement of Hopi Indian pueblo’s. But he missed it because they look natural, and they’re out of his scope. He never lived in a cave, nor have Martians in general. He passed it on as a weird natural landscape. As humans who have been brought up in a closed environment on Earth, that’s what we face. We wouldn’t know a Martian city (deserted or otherwise) if it bit us on the ankle. We don’t know what a Martian city would look like. It might look like ours, it might not. If it’s buried in sand, it would be that much more difficult to figure out.

Why would an alien culture build a gigantic face on the plains of Mars? Damned if I know. Why would some old Egyptian build a gigantic pyramid? Beats the hell out of me. I can’t answer a human-oriented question, how can I even hope to answer a totally alien one? How can anyone? Nobody on Earth is a trained Xeno-culturalist, unless they know something we haven’t been told.

So do the right thing. Leave yourself open to possibilities, and work towards getting the question answered. Try and get humans on Mars to have a look at it and see what’s up. That’s my advice.

AI - Part 3

The concept of passing the Turing Test is easy. In practice, well, it’s a bit more difficult. As a mind exercise try thinking of one thing you would ask to determine if you were talking to a computer or a person. Now try and think of a way that you would do the programming for it.

For instance, you may ask “What is an egg?” Well, that’s relatively easy. Just have a definition for egg handy. But should it be hard-coded, or should it be something searchable then parse it into a more “human” type of response? You’ll find that one question leads to other thoughts. Like, “What are chickens famous for?” Well, laying eggs. How would you work that one? Or, “What’s got a shell on the outside and a yolk on the inside?” Think of a question then think how you would expect a computer imitating a human should answer and you’ll see it get more and more complicated.

Of course, you have to expect the unexpected. This is where outside information is necessary. To cope with things that you may not have thought of at the time but are so common that any human should be able to answer it. If someone were to ask you what rain was you should be able to answer it. But while you’re working on your code, tossing down Twinkies and Jolt, you just may forget to add that in there.

Learning systems are great, and necessary, but you can’t rely on them. If someone asks your program what rain is and it doesn’t know it can ask the person what it is. But what if they lie? Then it’s a dead tip-off to the next person who asks the same question. It can ask for another explanation and that person may tell the truth. How does your program figure out who the filthy liar is?

AI - Part 2

 

Artificial Intelligence

Part II

Just for the fun of it, I went to a couple of places on the web that have a web-based chat bot. I tried six of them, and only one could answer this question: What is 27 + 4? Four gave me nonsense responses, one said it didn’t have a calculator, and one actually gave the correct answer. When I told the one that said it didn’t have a calculator to just use the computer, it decided it was the president of the USA. Hardly convincing stuff.

As another aside, I’ve spent years living with people in households with computers and working in places that were full to the brim with computers. I am frequently asked questions about math and what time it is. I’m the world’s worst mathematician and it astounds me that people can’t take the time to pull up the calculator in any operating system and get a correct answer.

Even if a computer could fool someone into thinking they were a real person it doesn’t mean that it’s intelligent. All it’s doing is matching up its input to a likely response. To borrow John Searle’s argument for a moment, imagine you are stuck in a box with a set of cards that have symbols printed on them and an instruction sheet. Another card drops through a slot in the box you’re in. You compare the symbols on the card with the instruction sheet, which tells you which of your cards you should push out of your box. That done, you sit and wait for the next card to drop in.

Here is what happened. The box you’re in is situated in a shopping mall in Japan. Someone walked up to the information box, wrote down “Where is the bathroom?” in Japanese and then put it in the box. You picked up the card, matched the symbols on the sheet and found out which card to return. The card you sent back out instructed the person to look near Takashimaya’s.

You don’t read Japanese. You have no idea what the question was (or if it was a question) and no idea what the response was. This is, essentially, what a computer is doing. It’s rather unfortunate that many people spend a lot of time functioning like this as well. You know it, we all do it.

Kim: Hi! How are you?
Sally: Fine!

But computers have a larger handicap. If I were to ask you what time it was (even if I’m sitting in front of a clock) you could find out. If I asked you what the weather was like, you could look out the window. If I asked you what was on television you could check that, too. We have the ability to do things, to interact with the world. The computer is not so lucky unless it’s been programmed to do so. Being able to check things like the time, or the weather would be excellent if you wanted your program to pass the Turing Test. Certainly it would be more convincing than a canned response.

Me: What’s the weather like where you are?
AI: It’s foggy out.
Me: It’s been foggy for the last four days, then.
AI: I have a little red pencil box.

Versus

Me: What’s the weather like where you are?
AI (checking weather.com): It’s cloudy, but at least it isn’t raining.
Me: Oooh, clever.

Which one seems more like a real person?

If I asked a woman what a dress was, she could tell me. She would know what a dress is. She would have seen one, probably worn one, felt one. If I asked a computer what a dress was I would, at best, get a definition. It wouldn’t know what a dress was. It wouldn’t have seen one, felt one, and probably not have worn one. Can there be a true intelligence without outside stimuli? I don’t think so. I think this is true for humans as well.

AI

Artificial Intelligence

Part I

Artificial Intelligence. We’ve been surrounded by the concept for a while now. Movies and television shows have a lot of ideas about it, and sometimes it’s neat. And sometimes it’s dangerous. From robotic cops to homicidal houses; from artificial children to perfect wives.

I’m not a big fan of the term “artificial intelligence.” Either something is intelligent, or it isn’t. I’m not going to nitpick, though, because there’s nothing else it can really be called. Faux Intelligence, quasi-intelligence, whatever. It’s all the same.

These days, AI consists of a system of canned responses. You type something to the computer, it looks through a database of words, and comes up with something that might be relevant. Like the old program Eliza. Certainly, they’ve gotten a bit better since then (it would be hard not to) but they’re still not up to snuff.

Personally, I don’t believe it’s possible to achieve the Hollywood concept of AI. Not right now. I do think it would be possible to come up with something that would pass the Turing Test. That would be relatively easy. And I do think it would be possible to achieve something very close to true intelligence in a man-made object. Just not right now. This, unfortunately, brings to mind some serious questions about us, humans, and our intelligence.

This is a general description of the Turing Test:

“When talking about the Turing Test today what is generally understood is the following: The interrogator is connected to one person and one machine via a terminal, therefore can’t see her counterparts. Her task is to find out which of the two candidates is the machine, and which is the human only by asking them questions. If the machine can ‘fool’ the interrogator, it is intelligent.”

When worded this way the error of the Turing Test is glaringly obvious: just because the computer fooled somebody does not mean that it is intelligent. How well the computer fools someone is entirely dependent on how thorough the program’s designers were. Asking an innocent question that the designer didn’t think of could blow the entire deal. “Say, where did you grow up?” or “What high school did you go to?” Still, that would just blow the test. You know the computer is still not intelligent. It’s not thinking. If you asked it “How are you today?” it will not try to figure out how it is, judge whether you’re really interested or just making conversation, and then come back with a suitable reply. It will compare your question to a set of answers it’s been programmed with and then respond back. It may fool somebody, but it’s not really thinking about it.

But then, that’s why it’s artificial intelligence. It’s not real. It’s fake. The Turing Test, then, boils down to a type of IQ test for the designers rather than the computer. And the people asking the questions.

As an aside, I’ll mention here a little story about something that happened to me when I was in high school. We had a class trip to the AT&T building in New York City. They had a big display there about technology and computers and things. Kind of like an amusement park for nerds. One of the things they had were two terminals that were hooked together, back to back. Two people could talk back and forth. Now, with instant messengers it’s no big deal but back then it was neat. Anyway, I was typing to some girl and she thought she was talking to a computer. To convince her otherwise her friends had to move her around to my side and see that I was, in fact, typing what she was seeing. I suppose it doesn’t say much for my personality but I am proud that I managed to pass the Turing Test.

Genetic Research helps build a better cat

Here’s an interesting news item for you cat lovers out there.

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Genetic Research Leads To Cuter Cats

In an exciting development of genetic research, The Landry Institute has released news of their new experiments with cats. More specifically, with kittens.

“People love kittens,” said Dr. Landry. “They’re cute, they’re fluffy, they’re small. Watching them play is a joy. Even when they’re doing something destructive, they’re just as cute as buttons.”
Dr. Landry believes that his new development in genetic research will keep millions of cat lovers happy.
“Eventually the kitten owner notices that the little tyke isn’t so little anymore. The kitten has turned into a fat, lazy, destructive cat. Nobody gets a kitten thinking that they want a lazy, surly, genital licking cat,” explained Dr. Landry
The Landry Institute has developed a way that will keep a kitten a kitten. Forever. By snipping out certain links in the DNA chain the growth and maturity of a kitten is stunted.
“Using our research, kittens will stay kittens. Always cute and lovable.”
Does this mean that the kitten will live forever, not aging?
“Ah, sadly, no,” says Dr. Landry. “The kitten will still have about the same life span. However, working with partners involved in the cloning industry we have come up with a solution. The kitten needs to be brought in for regular checkups. When we determine that the kitten is near the end of its life cycle, it’s cloned. When the clone is ready and the kitten is brought in for another checkup, it’s replaced. The owner need never know that the little fellow was switched. It is, in effect, immortal.”
What does the future hold for the Landry Institute?
“We’re pretty sure we can do the same thing for puppies,” said Dr. Landry. “And we’d like to do the same with human babies,” he continued. “But we’re having legal issues there, for some reason.”
“People love babies. They’re cute, they’re small and adorable. Watching them play is a joy, even when they’re doing something destructive. They’re cute as buttons,” Dr. Landry explained. “But nobody has a baby keeping in mind that they’re going to grow up into fat, lazy, surly teenagers. Granted, they don’t lick their genitals as much, but still.”