Bots are dead, long live AI (Part 1/5)
Why did we choose to create artificial intelligence?
The presence of social media, messaging and digital substitutes for human interaction will change the way humans are behaving in social and cultural manner. After a trend in the nineties led to the replacement of desktop operating system through browsers and websites, another paradigm shift from browsers to apps has been seen in the last years. Yet, another technology change is on the horizon. Beerud Sheth boldly describes that just as websites replaced client applications then, messaging bots will replace mobile apps no. It appears that bots or intelligent messaging agents will become the new mean of communication for organizations and privates alike. Venture capitalists like Benedict Evans see a change towards mobile messaging: Old: all software expands until it includes messaging. New: all messaging expands until it includes software. So if messaging is the new platform, then bots are the new apps. Therefore, intelligent messaging agents are defined as computer programs that read and write messages, just like human users.
To begin with, a thought experiment of how thinking works is necessary to understand the brain and to create a theory of mind. As Ray Kurzweil puts it in How to create a mind, the brain can be seen as a hierarchical pattern recognizer containing about thirty billion neurons to form three hundred million pattern recognizers in a humans neocortex. Patterns can be learned, predicted, recognized and implemented into other patterns. However, since processing happens simultaneously and relentlessly within the brain, there is no beginning or end in the processing of the pattern. According to Kurzweil, patterns are tripartite consisting of an input, a name for the activation of the pattern and connections to higher- and lower-level patterns. Further, he argues that the human pattern recognition module performs probability estimations of input, size and importance of input parameters to determine the likelihood of a correct representation in the mind. Even though patterns are multidimensional, the hierarchical structure of the neocortex allows the assumption that pattern recognition processes one-dimensional pattern inputs, such as lists of data.
When creating a mind, it is essential to create a mind that is capable of learning. As Marvin Minsky put it: The principal activities of brains are making changes in themselves. The human neocortex is training itself and learning new patterns continually in order to make sense of the input information. The learning process includes building connections among patterns as well as strengthening existing connections if patterns are triggered simultaneously. This explains a model of neuronal learning that is used for artificial neural nets as well.
According to Kurzweil, the retrieval or memory of information can be performed as non-direct or direct thinking. Thereby, stored patterns are memorized as circuitous sequences of associations for a non-direct thinking process and as hierarchies of list including sub-lists for directed thinking which focuses on problem solving or response formulation. Especially during a direct thinking process, the mind is confronted with a cultural or ideological codex guiding the thoughts. Kurzweil phrases this set of rules accordingly: Many of these taboos are worthwhile, as they enforce social order and consolidate progress.
Consequently, the general idea of how thinking could work is to use connected patterns and clusters of patterns as well as narratives or stories to educate and train a mind to achieve a certain goal. Then, the next step is to define intelligence generally. Referring to Alan Turing, this includes all capabilities needed for mimicking a human person.
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This post starts a series of extracts from my Master’s thesis revolving around socially intelligent artificial intelligence. Thanks for reading! :) If you enjoyed this article, hit that ❤ button below. Would mean a lot to me and it helps other people see the story.
