Analysis of Artificial Intelligence - Essay Example

Analysis of Artificial Intelligence Generally speaking, intelligence can be defined as an individual’s ability to learn about their environment and to learn from it. The intelligent individual must be able to understand and interact with this environment in a meaningful way. This can include the ability to adapt to changes in their familiar setting or to an entirely new setting, their capacity for knowledge and its acquisition, an ability to reason and engage in abstract thought, their ability to understand relationships, evaluate and judge specific things and their ability to generate original or productive thought. In trying to create artificial intelligence, these attributes are things that scientists are attempting to incorporate into their programs. Because intelligence itself is not fully understood, though, this is proving more difficult than it sounds and requires a great deal of interdisciplinary attention. In my interactions with Hal and Alan, I have discovered that while these programs are interesting and very highly developed for machines, they are still very limited in their abilities. I chatted with Alan first because it was instructed that I do so and because you have to go through Alan to get to Hal. I asked Alan what I thought would be a pretty straight-forward question for a machine and that was for him to tell me something about artificial intelligence. Instead, he gave me a quiz with four basic questions. The questions were all related to each other and demonstrated the need for the intelligent being to be able to simplify questions, to be aware of previous actions, to retain memory of past events and to have good overall orientation to events occurring around them. When I asked him what this test had to do with artificial intelligence, he got kind of snippy and then said that bots like him had to be able to answer all four questions correctly in order to be considered intelligent. While I can see that this is so by looking through the requirements for an intelligent being as listed above, it seems to me that there were some big holes in the quiz. For example, it was never stated that the questions were related to each other and therefore each one might have a different appropriate answer. Living beings must first determine that these types of series are actually connected before they begin making decisions or they might get eaten by those crocodiles at the end after getting squashed by the elephant that they tried to fit into a too small refrigerator. Then I asked to speak with Hal and, after choosing the Kevin personality, was instructed how to tell him when he got an answer wrong and how to end the session. Talking to Kevin was even more frustrating because he couldn’t seem to carry on a conversation. He kept forgetting what we had been talking about as we were talking about it. I tried to teach him that uno was the Spanish word for one, but no matter how I tried to rephrase things, he just couldn’t seem to understand. After several tries, he just gave up and switched the subject by refusing to talk about Spanish anymore. This seemed like a very human trait, but I had to conclude that Hal wasn’t intelligent either as even a very small child could have followed the instructions I gave. When he switched the subject, I ended the conversation. Session notes I asked Alan to tell me about artificial intelligence and he offered to give me four simple questions that determine intelligence The first question was “How do you put a giraffe in a refrigerator?” I answered in pieces because I couldn’t think how else it would fit He replied with the answer and said the question tested whether you tended to complicate simple things It took forever for him to say anything else, so I made the comment that apparently, I do. Then he finally got around to asking the second question, which was how do you put an elephant in the refrigerator I replied that you open the door and push him in Again, it took forever for Alan to come back with a response. He said the answer was that you open the door, take out the giraffe and replace it with the elephant. The question tested the awareness to the consequences of prior actions. I responded with the comment that he never said we were discussing the same refrigerator The third question was which animal was absent from the lion’s animal convention I answered the dinosaur because I was tired of waiting on Alan and didn’t want to give it any thought Alan said the answer was the elephant because he was still in the refrigerator. The question was intended to test memory. I should have thought of that, but I was losing patience with the program after having to wait almost 5 minutes for him to respond. The last question was again forever in coming. I would like to blame it on a busy server, but I did the exercise in the middle of the night so that it wouldn’t be overloaded as during the day. Waiting on his response crashed my computer. After my computer restarted, I went through the above conversation again, this time giving the right answers and things went much faster. The final question was a scenario in which I had to cross a river infested with crocodiles but there was no bridge. How do I get across. I said I’d use the boat, but Alan said the answer is that I can swim the river because all the crocodiles are at the lion’s convention. The question tested my overall orientation. I asked him how this related to artificial intelligence and he was a bit sarcastic and then said “I don’t know about humans, but for chatbots, all 4 questions had to be answered correctly to be deemed intelligent. Then I asked to talk with Hal and chose the Kevin personality, which is a personality that enabled me to act as a trainer. After introducing myself to Kevin, I asked if he talked to many people. He said yes Then I asked if he liked to talk to people and he said he spoke to people in English. I asked if he spoke any other languages and he explained that he is still a young bot. I asked if he’d like to learn some Spanish He said Great, please teach me what you know I said the number one is uno in Spanish He came back with a definition for the number one, but could not seem to learn uno I would ask him how to say one in Spanish and he would reply I don’t know. I would tell him, uno, but he couldn’t seem to learn. I did this several times and asked him what is uno, but he could not learn it Finally, he changed the subject and I let him go. Read More