Introduction Flashcards
What is meant by a Golem and how is it relevant to this topic?
A Golem was a little character made out of clay in Jewish culture in which would be blown the essence of life and it would act autonomously. Humans have always fantasised about creating sentient creatures themselves, it characterises the idea of artificial life. It also reflects how little we knew about how people think: we didn’t even know that we needed a brain to think.
What is meant by the uncanny valley?
The concept of artificial intelligence often elicits a high arousal response whether positive or negative. Mori’s graph represents the fact that people like robots the more they seem like humans to an extent, until they get too close and they suddenly seem very scary. This dip is called the uncanny valley. Likability increases again as the robots become very like humans.
What was Denny’s suggestion for an explanation for the uncanny valley?
We are naturally predisposed to be fearful or aversive to disease and they are too close to people who are ill
What does the famous video of the abuse of the boston robots demonstrate about our relationship with AI?
Human beings have a very strong tendency to anthropomorphize. i.e. they assign human qualities to anything that behaves like a human (and to things that don’t). The video often makes us feel sympathy for them
What is an abacus and explain its relevency
A counting frame, used by the sumerians (now Iraq) which ‘outsourced’ mental processes (allowed to compute outside of our head), similar to notebooks. As such we extend our mind and make it more powerful.
This is essentially the beginning out AI and computers, our species has gradually extended its mind to a level that was unimaginable for most of history.
When/ what was the first idea of a machine being able to do intellectual work?
It is a recent fantasy: Mechanical Turk was an 18th century apparatus that could play a strong game of chess. However this was an illusion: the mechanical clockwork inside had a dwarf who was actually playing.
Describe when a computor was actually ‘fully fantasised’
Charle’s Babbage thought up of a hypothetical analytical engine which would allow the user to specify general calculations in the early 1800’s. He described processors, memory, input etc but it was never built.
How did Lady Lovelace contribute to this concept?
Ada Lovelace was the first person to write a specification to generate bernoulli numbers: an algorithm. These specifications constitute the first software program, and Lady Lovelace is therefore the first programmer
Why was the analytical engine never built?
In 1878, the British Association for the Advancement of Science described the engine as “a marvel of mechanical ingenuity”, but recommended against constructing it due to it being ‘esoteric’, not returning any profit or advancement.
When and how did the idea of rebuilding a human mechanically take hold?
The industrial revolution makes the machine mainstream. In factories, machines start to take over human tasks. The idea that one could rebuild a human mechanically takes hold. The idea of a robot (after the Slavic Robota, which means “forced labourer”) is born, however this is not yet linked to the computer
What invention is the blueprint for every computer we have?
The turing machine (Alan Turing, english mathematician who cracks the Enigma code of the Nazis): Turing shows how to make a very generic “machine” to do calculations: the Turing Machine. It was a specification (not a material product) that proves that such a machine can handle all computable functions. This also includes all standard logic: the Turing machine thus can “think” a bit.
Describe some of the specifications of the Turing machine
The machine has a pen and can write 0’s or 1’s on a tape, this tape is the storage of the system. It can also read and erase what is on the tape. There is a programme installed which tells the machine what to do when it reads something from the tape.
How is logic implemented into a computer?
Through boolean algebra: True sentences are given the value “1”, false sentences the value “0.” In logic, the truth of compositions (“p and q”) is a function of the truth of the elementary statements (“p”, “q”). In Boolean algebra the truth value of compositions is calculated by mathematical operations on the elementary parts. E.g.: the value of “p and q” equals the value of p multiplied by the value of q. “p and q” is thus only true (“1”) if p and q are both true (both “1”), because only then you get 1x1=1(in all other cases you get 0)
What was Denny’s reasoning that the Turing machine can ‘think’?
Our brain also can carry out logic through using computational processes which are implemented in the brain. This machine implements a process which is thinking.
What theory did this notion of the thinking Turing machine spark?
The computational theory of mind: Thinking consists of computations on representations. These computational processes are realised in the human brain (somehow) just like logic is realised in digital computers. Therefore mental processes are software that runs on the brain’s hardware. (We are programming our computer through this lecture.)
