Synthetic Intelligence
Artificial Synthetic Intelligence
Wanted to write a few words on Artificial Intelligence, and just as I started to write the title of this post I realized I don't really like the aforementioned term. After a few tries I finally found an alternative term which, I think, better describes what we are taking about here.
No surprise, there is already an article on Wikipedia on Synthetic Intelligence, and the first sentence explains why term Artificial Intelligence is misleading and flawed.
We are creating REAL Intelligence
The Intelligence we are trying to create is real. Maybe we can say, we are creating artificial brain, e.g. translating neural network of the real human brain into a hardware or software, but the intelligence is real!
Moving on
Intelligence that we have, is a result of a process called Natural Evolution. Every living being on the planet is an accumulated bulk of mutations that happen to be good enough to survive in this environment. The more complex the environment is, the more astounding the results are. Happily, environment we live in is complex enough for Intelligence to arise, as a tool of survival.
Currently, human intelligence is only created through process of natural evolution. The main problem with this is time. It took natural evolution hundreds of millions of years to achieve this. To create Intelligence we have today.
Now the Intelligence is trying to create Intelligence again.
Intelligence on a quest
Intelligence creating Intelligence. It's crazy, and recursive in nature. And humans need time to wrap their head around recursion.
But how does Intelligence create something?
Intelligence uses what it already knows to create new things combining known pieces into something new. Unlike Intelligence, Evolution likes to experiment a lot, simultaneously testing and slightly modifying number of solutions endlessly repeating the process until it reaches the goal.
To be slightly technical, it can cover a large search space, and find totally unexpected solutions unlike anything seen before.
Humans are now trying to reverse engineer the work of natural evolution, hoping to discover secrets of human intelligence.
Usually very complex things that we don't understand might appear to be magical to us, and human intelligence certainly one of those things. It's considered magic until we figure it out.
Narrow it down
We have been successful in creation of Narrow Intelligence so far. Narrowing down the scope of things to only a few, gives great results, and those systems easily outperform human counterparts. But fusing more specialized AI systems into one that can do multiple things at a superhuman level is still a challenge.
It is questionable if this is the right way to achieve General Intelligence.
Are we just a bunch of specialized parts working together to create an illusion of intelligence?
Complex environment
We are simulating process of natural evolution for quite some time. It is great for optimization in a huge search space where non of the conventional search optimization algorithms can help. Environments that we simulate are usually quite simple with not so many parameters included. But what if we substantially increase the complexity of an environment we are simulating. Will evolution create anything that might look to us as an intelligent system.
How do you simulate an environment
Environment is usually simulated by something called fitness function. It decides how close a solution is to an optimal solution for a given environment. It takes solution genome as input an returns a value which determines how good a solution is. However, in real life, we are not selected only by what is written in our DNA.. A lot of it depends on what we do and how we make decisions. And it all happens in parallel on the cellular level. Nature is a powerful hardware for parallel execution and can run evolution with a great level of detail. Something we cannot in software, without introducing simplifications and reducing complexity of an environment.
Wrapping up
Those are some of my thought on Intelligence creation and Evolution. Lots of questions still remain unanswered but we are moving forward and hopefully the day will come when secrets of human intelligence will be unraveled.