Tinsology

I feel as if my life’s aspirations are suddenly within reach.

http://www.swordsofhonor.com/ca-30-61.html
http://www.swordsofhonor.com/9thcehovihed.html

I’ve been fairly sick for about a week now, at its worst I had a slight fever and a bad cough. I’m recovering now. More content soon to come.

P.S.
I’ve recently discovered Frosted Mini-Wheats, they are delicious.

“What we fight with is so small, and when we win, it makes us small. What we want is to be defeated, decisively, by successively greater things.”

“Focusing on big goals rather than on making money, and on creating more value than you capture are closely related principles. The first one is a test that applies to those starting something new; the second is the harder test that you must pass in order to create something enduring.”

“That’s why a time like this, when the bubble is bursting, is a great time to see how important it is to think about the big picture, and what matters not just to us, but to building a sustainable economy in a sustainable world.”

Those are three quotes I pulled out of an article I came across that I think captures the perceptions and values we must aspire to in order to create a better world at a time when everyone is looking out for themselves. Those of us who are upset with the times, whether it be because of issues that are impacting us in America, or because of the ongoing crises around the world, the pervasive poverty, hunger, and sickness afflicting people who were not so lucky as to be born in a more affluent part of the world, should know that these are at least in part due to people looking out for themselves. This includes companies that focus on profit and the paychecks of their executives, and politicians who put the well being of the people second to the lobbyists. Rather than lament them however, we should focus on the positive. Those of us who are fortunate enough to go on to own a company or be a leader in some industry should remember what I think is the main point of the article:

Short term success comes from short term goals, long term success and building something sustainable requires that we focus on what matters in the in the long run. This means worrying about those around us in addition to ourselves. Companies cannot sustain themselves for long if their focus is not on their customers, governments cannot last forever if their focus is not on the people, and the world will be worse off for having left so many behind.

A professor of mine recently told my class something along the lines of this: We do not deserve what we have. It is only luck that we were born in America while so many others were born in a world where they do not have the opportunities we do. He went on to say that we should be ashamed of ourselves if we do not make the most of what we have while so many others have nothing. I’m paraphrasing, but I hope I captured his point.

…Wow that’s probably the most idealist rant I’ve ever gone on, but I do think that we have a responsibility to others and that an individual can still be successful without pouring all of effort personal gain.

Anyways here is the link  to the article:

Read Me!

Its a good read and it comes of less like a rant that what I just wrote.

Today I had my first discussion for a course on Artificial Intelligence I’m taking. In the week since the course started we really haven’t covered much material (as is to be expected) so the TA gave us a very broad topic to write about.

In short the prompt was: What is Artificial Intelligence

To suppliment we were given two definitions:

Weak AI: Machines can act intelligent.
Strong AI: Machines have minds.

My Thoughts:

In my understanding, Artificial Intelligence is the ability of machines to learn and use what it has learned to draw conclusions. As abstract as this is it still boils down to mapping inputs to outputs, which is what machines do every day. The inputs in the case being not only its perception of the current situation, but the sum of all of its experiential knowledge and the output being its action.

To accomplish this, weak AI is sufficient. Strong AI (based on the definition above) requires a machine to be something that I doubt any machine can be: non-deterministic. Having a mind and being conscious are attributes of sentience; something that humans and animals have. I do not believe that human behavior can be described as deterministic, or at the very least, the amount of inputs that are mapped to an output in a human is too difficult to quantify and infeasable to simulate in a machine.

In short, I do not think that strong AI is attainable. This, however, I do not think that this in anyway is a limitation on artificial intelligence. A turing test, though I do not think is sufficient for intelligence, is an example of this. The test consists of a person communicating with either another person or a machine. The two cannot see each other and interact only through text. If the person cannot determine whether the other entity is a person or a machine, then the machine is said to be intelligent. This can be (and currently is being) accomplished by machines that don’t have minds, conscious, or exemplify human behavior. All the machine needs to do is simulate human behavior. This can even be accomplished without intelligence. If a machine has a massive database of answers to questions and when asked a question simply looks up the answer and spits it out, is it intelligent?

If a machine can analyze a question and based on a database of its previous experience conclude an answer to that question does it have a mind?