TED: Google Consciousness

[zooterkin]

lol - tolerate it??? lady that's why I come here! sheesh arn't you paying attention?

Is getting people's sex wrong one of your strategies for getting attention? Or is it just a symptom of your lack of regard for facts?

 

[WWHP]

gee zoo - i always thought you were a dood. sorry miss zoo, wont make that mistake again

 

[case#46cw39]

"Drawing on their experience as pioneering social media strategists, Rome Viharo and Maf Lewis have created a new phenomenon with their proposal that Google has a form of consciousness." http://www.googleconsciousness.com/

How shall computer scientists and the public at large assess if Google truly has artificial, machine consciousness?

I have proposed elsewhere the Searle Line in the Sand, which is inspired by the Chinese Room Experiment of Professor John Searle. To cross the line into authentic machine consciousness, or strong AI, a machine must at least exhibit:
1. semantic understanding of language sentences (ie not merely processing syntactic squiggles with no understanding)
2. ability to perform deductive reasoning, a universally accepted form of human thinking.
3. sensory experience of the world which it can reason semantically about.
4. a "self" or unified "I" who knows it is Google (for example), knows what is not it, and behaves through this personal lens of self.



Maybe with the advent of the semantic web along with a general reasoning capability, robotic sensors and a unified self tieing it all together, Google will someday be Mr. Google or possess machine consciousness.

Until then, Google is not even close to being conscious. Hopefully the public won't be fooled.

Without these four capabilities, no claim of strong AI or machine consciousness can be made, however with them it can. But both access consciousness and phenomenal consciousness would have to be solved.

I once asked Professor Searle if he would consider such a machine that was not syntax based but had a semantic reasoning capability (thus overcoming the Searle Chinese Room Problem) if he would consider it to contain some "access consciousness" and he said yes.

 

[WWHP]

nice. was that from 'conscious entities' or another source? if so can you provide a link? I am building out the references section up on the site and would be great to have that up there. The only references to google consciousness previous to our talk that I found was a blurb on conscious entities and a vague reference on Wired - thx!

 

[zooterkin]

The only references to google consciousness previous to our talk that I found was a blurb on conscious entities and a vague reference on Wired - thx!

Nonsense. How about using Google to check? If you search for "Is google conscious?", which was just the first term I tried, the first two hits are:
http://machineslikeus.com/news/google-consciousness

Google consciousness
Monday, 15 March 2010
In this intriguing dialog, Peter Hankins explores the argument for and against Google consciousness.

and
http://blogoscoped.com/forum/87170.html

Is the Google AI already conscious?
mister scruff

Friday, February 23, 20074 years ago • 998 views
rather than searching for stuff, if you start asking Google personal questions, you can get some surprising results that almost past the Turing AI test...

But I don't suppose you'll let the facts get in the way of your self-promotion.

 

[Mojo]

Wait, this is you in the talk?


You didn't mention that in the OP. You are essentially advertising yourself. That's very dishonest of you.

Oh, he's been even more dishonest elsewhere, even shamelessly using sock puppets to puff his piece of nonsense.

He's done it before here as well, in the first thread he started here. He got caught by the first response. Note the prevarication about whether it was just one of his favourite sites, a site he "sponsors", the meaning of the word "homepage"...

 

[WWHP]

yay! miss zoo is still in the game

Nonsense. How about using Google to check? If you search for "Is google conscious?", which was just the first term I tried, the first two hits are:
http://machineslikeus.com/news/google-consciousness

machines like us is a reprint or redeux of the conscious entities blog

and
http://blogoscoped.com/forum/87170.html

that link comes up dead...try again? [EDIT: just found the link...sheesh that's hardly an article about Google being conscious, it's a pretty tongue in cheek reference]

But I don't suppose you'll let the facts get in the way of your self-promotion.

lol, well the facts are that the talk is about Google COnsciousness as a metaphor and it's about the story of our personal discovery regarding it.

Do you understand what the talk is about miss zoo? I would be surprised if you did, it would mean it's the first thing I have talked about that you understand.

NO POINTZ for YOU!

 

[WWHP]

He's done it before here as well, in the first thread he started here. He got caught by the first response. Note the prevarication about whether it was just one of his favourite sites, a site he "sponsors", the meaning of the word "homepage"...

lol, oh i've put on my show in many more places than this... i am happy to OPENLY and TRANSPARENTLY admit.

thanks for keeping this thread bumped up guys and gals.

 

[WWHP]

one of the most cherished things I love about some of these characters and ol chums on this thread is their sheer irrational presuppositions that seemingly go right over their heads. I love how I am both being accused of promoting *myself* while simultaneously being accused of hiding who I really am online. Either way they wish me to lose! but all the while they help me promote the *ideas* that I most certainly admit to viral marketing in the most delightful of ways.

 

[case#46cw39]

Bad news. It isn't google that would be conscious. That's a dead idea, the idea of a Conscious Google. In the future the discussion will revolve around whether or not the Internet has become conscious or not based on it becoming a semantic web etc. So the correct meme for the future is ...

CONSCIOUS INTERNET.

In the CONSCIOUS INTERNET (see semantic web), google and other programs will be mere mechanical tools it uses to consciously do its willed behavior. Like a hammer.

Sorry, you have backed the losing pony. And this thread and idea is dead on arrival.

Conscious Google is a worn out, incorrect, and scientifically trivial concept. The correct concept is the Conscious Internet when it becomes the Semantic Web. This is how people who have actually studied machine consciousness, perhaps the best meme of all in the future, view it.

"Machine Consciousness 2011" using Google scholar is the best place to start a study of machine consciousness:
Artificial consciousness
A Chella… - Perception-Action Cycle, 2011 - Springer
... 1, DOI10.1007/978-1-4419-1452-1 20, c Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2011 ... It is not
by chance that the first mention of the term artificial consciousness appears in those ... in the aftermath
of the cybernetic decline, the idea of designing a conscious machine was seldom ...
Cited by 28 - Related articles - Library Search - All 4 versions
Machine consciousness: A manifesto for robotics
A Chella… - … Journal of Machine Consciousness, 2009 - worldscinet.com
... We outline the foundations and the objectives of machine consciousness from the standpoint
of building a conscious robot. Keywords: Robot consciousness; embodiment; situatedness;
representation; externalism; robotics. ... Copyright © 2011 World Scientific Publishing Co. ...
Cited by 6 - Related articles
Qualia and conscious machines
POA Haikonen - International Journal of Machine Consciousness …, 2009 - worldscinet.com
... Machine consciousness; qualia; phenomenology. Imperial College Press | Global Publishing |
Asia-Pacific Biotech News | Innovation Magazine Labcreations Co | Meeting Matters | National
Academies Press World Scientific is a Member of CrossRef. Copyright © 2011 World ...
Cited by 8 - Related articles
A cognitive architecture for robot self-consciousness
A Chella, M Frixione… - Artificial intelligence in medicine, 2008 - Elsevier
... Keywords: Self-consciousness; Machine consciousness; Conceptual spaces; Cognitive systems. ...
Following this interest, computational models of machine consciousness for autonomous robots
have been proposed and discussed, see Chella and Manzotti [1] for a review. ...
Cited by 11 - Related articles - All 7 versions
Challenges in developing computational models of emotion and consciousness
E Hudlicka - International Journal of Machine Consciousness, 2009 - worldscinet.com
... neuroscience. Keywords: Emotions; consciousness; computational models; attention;
cognitive appraisal. ... Press World Scientific is a Member of CrossRef. Copyright ©
2011 World Scientific Publishing Co. All rights reserved.
Cited by 3 - Related articles
[PDF] A computational model of machine consciousness
[PDF] from ohio.eduJA STARZYK… - … Journal of Machine Consciousness, 2011 - ohio.edu
Page 1. International Journal of Machine Consciousness © World Scientific
Publishing Company 1 A COMPUTATIONAL MODEL OF MACHINE
CONSCIOUSNESS JANUSZ A. STARZYK School of Electrical Engineering and ...
Cited by 1 - Related articles - View as HTML
Beyond Consciousness?
JG TAYLOR - International Journal of Machine Consciousness, 2009 - worldscinet.com
... The resulting features of the machine's consciousness, as the highest order controller, is seen
to need to be similar to our own. ... Keywords: Attention; control; inner self; hierarchy; unity of self;
purpose of consciousness. ... Copyright © 2011 World Scientific Publishing Co. ...
Cited by 2 - Related articles
The potential impact of machine consciousness in science and engineering
I ALEKSANDER - … Journal of Machine Consciousness, 2009 - worldscinet.com
... Machine consciousness; phenomenology; conscious robots. Imperial College Press | Global
Publishing | Asia-Pacific Biotech News | Innovation Magazine Labcreations Co | Meeting Matters |
National Academies Press World Scientific is a Member of CrossRef. Copyright © 2011 ...




ETA I admit I didn't start Internet Consciousness or the transcendent Machine Consciousness memes. First entries in google search for conscious internet:

Global Brain - The Internet could become conscious by mid-2030s
memebox.com/futureblogger/show/158 - CachedMar 15, 2008 – A higher level of consciousness – self-awareness – would require that the global brain could reflect on its own functioning. The Internet ...
►
the amazing, conscious internet? not quite. » weird things
worldofweirdthings.com/.../the-amazing-conscious-internet-not-quit... - CachedFeb 2, 2011 – Why it's the internet according to New Scientist, an entity that's either on its way to waking up to its own existence, or that's already ...

The Conscious Internet
www.goertzel.org/dynapsyc/2003/McCartney03.htm - Cachedby F McCartney - Related articles
The Internet is a network which is spawning a quantum leap in human consciousness. The blending of digital reality with human reality blurs the distinction ...

Brain Dump: Is the Internet Conscious?
fredhsu.blogspot.com/2007/11/is-internet-conscious.html - CachedNov 20, 2007 – Is the Internet Conscious? I've been reading on some Aritificial Intelligence stuff lately, and was thinking about how the brain is a series ...

Can the Internet Think?
www.1729.com/blog/CanTheInternetThink.html - CachedNov 16, 2005 – Can the Internet think? Is it a conscious entity? ... or "Is the Internet conscious?", I'm not asking questions about artificial ...

 

[WWHP]

I agree with you - however that is part of what the *meme* Google Consciousness is a metaphor of and for.

Remember, Maf and I get hired to create memes in viral and social media

 

[WWHP]

ETA.

fyi thanks for making some great and thought provoking contributions to this thread

 

[case#46cw39]

Hello. Since you said what's highlighted below, I thought I would let you know where computer scientists currently stand on this issue and play the role of your harshest critic. (Somebody has to do it lol). To popularize such a meme you would have to know some things about the art and science of Machine Consciousness, the Conscious Internet, and the Semantic Web. This can only help you in your quest not to make simple mistakes and to know what your up against, and the competition.

And contrary to your claim below, no computer scientist would say "Google has a form of consciousness." Machine consciousness is more complex then what Google is. And my pet peave is that the public will be fooled into believing that some chumpy, syntactic program, machine, or robot is conscious when it clearly fails the Searle Chinese Room Test. Anyway, just trying to offer some scientific input

"Drawing on their experience as pioneering social media strategists, Rome Viharo and Maf Lewis have created a new phenomenon with their proposal that Google has a form of consciousness." http://www.googleconsciousness.com/

 

[WWHP]

Hello. Since you said what's highlighted below, I thought I would let you know where computer scientists currently stand on this issue and play the role of your harshest critic. (Somebody has to do it lol). To popularize such a meme you would have to know some things about the art and science of Machine Consciousness, the Conscious Internet, and the Semantic Web. This can only help you in your quest not to make simple mistakes and to know what your up against, and the competition.

And contrary to your claim below, no computer scientist would say "Google has a form of consciousness." Machine consciousness is more complex then what Google is. And my pet peave is that the public will be fooled into believing that some chumpy, syntactic program, machine, or robot is conscious when it clearly fails the Searle Chinese Room Test. Anyway, just trying to offer some scientific input

"Drawing on their experience as pioneering social media strategists, Rome Viharo and Maf Lewis have created a new phenomenon with their proposal that Google has a form of consciousness." http://www.googleconsciousness.com/

Well we suggest that google has a form of consciousness, that is true. I did say I agree with you but I should have said I agree with you somewhat. You seem convinced it's not - However I am telling you personally that I don't know one way or the other and to maf and I, #googcon is a metaphor for collective intelligence (which to us includes a sentient web) and where it may lead us in the near future. Personally i lean more towards the web being sentient.

what google is doing is certainly interesting, and if the web does produce a form of collective sentience, I believe we are apart and not separate from that sentience.

keep in mind however, it is not my job or my place to prove this one way or another, it's just a great subject matter to me as a metaphor and the talk is a 'story' designed to live on as a meme.

From what I know, Francis Heylighen is the pioneer of this sort of thinking, but again, I could be wrong I am not claiming consciousness, neuroscience to be my expertise by any means. I'm just a fan of philosophy

 

[WWHP]

also, I am going to update that copy you reference on the site. My copy writer wrote that and it seemed like a nice professional summary, however i can see how it may be misleading, like we are the first ones to suggest it or think of it. That's not our claim at all. Your not the first one who got somewhat offended by this, someone else did too, saying this is what they have been writing about for years. I imagine many people have thought of this. The story however is true how it happened for us, our discovery was original in the sense that previous to that, I had no idea Google was be considered conscious and admitted in the talk that at first it was just a snarky idea intended to disgruntle a few materialists. (fail)

 

[case#46cw39]

Well, from your video

Francis Heylighen Belgian cyberneticist, University of Brussels says:

"Consciousness is actually a very simple process. It's not complex at all. And it centers around selection."

The Global Brain
In 1996, Heylighen founded the "Global Brain Group", an international discussion forum that groups most of the scientists who have worked on the concept of emergent Internet intelligence.[4] Together with his PhD student Johan Bollen, Heylighen was the first to propose algorithms that could turn the world-wide web into a self-organizing, learning network that exhibits collective intelligence, i.e. a Global brain.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Heylighen

Here's my problem. You are confusing weak AI which includes things like learning networks, internet intelligence, and the Global Brain, with Strong AI which is the creation of authentic artificial consciousness, commonly referred to more and more as Machine Consciousness. This is a whole other complex problem with specific areas of development such as access consciousness and phenomenal consciousness.

Heylighen may be the father of the "Global Brain" or internet intelligence and learning, which is to say Weak AI, but he is not the father of Machine Consciousness.

He may think that weak AI or learning/intelligence systems are simple and center around selection, but that in no way applies to strong AI or the creation of Machine Consciousnesss, which is a vastly harder problem to solve.

Perhaps the father of Machine Consciousness is Igor Aleksander, along with his research partner Owen Holland:

"an emeritus professor of Neural Systems Engineering in the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at Imperial College London. ... He worked in artificial intelligence and neural networksHis work has centred on the modelling capability of artificial neural networks. He has devised neuromodels of the visual system in primates, visuo-verbal system in humans, the effect of anaesthetics on awareness, and artificial consciousness." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Igor_Aleksander

Scholarly articles for igor aleksander artificial consciousness
… for the Presence of Minimal Consciousness in Agents I … - Aleksander - Cited by 82
Machine consciousness - Holland - Cited by 59
Artificial Consciousness - Aleksander - Cited by 6

But of course the massive Old Guard Figure in Machine Consciousness is John Searle, at Berkeley, inventor of the Chinese Room Experiment. Through this thought experiment he showed conclusively that this was going to be no easy problem and that all current claims to Machine Consciousness were false because they were mere syntactic squiggle processors that had no semantic understanding of what they were reading and saying. And without this semantic understanding (and some other things) there is no machine consciousness present. And this is true today and why the semantic web is the leading edge starter design for any possibility of Internet Consciousness and semantic processing in general for robot consciousness. So this is a much harder problem then building a "mere" intelligent learning system or weak AI.

And so I strongly disagree with your quote about consciousness being a simple process and centering around selection. That may describe weak AI but in no way describes strong AI or Machine Consciousness. Machine Consciousness centers around semantic understanding, reasoning, and self orientation. And any expert in Machine Consciousness will tell you this.

 

[WWHP]

well this is very informative and much appreciative! once we have the forum up on the googleconsciousness site I would like to invite you to contribute - and any articles or insight as well I can put up on the blog. thank you user with the complex moniker name!

 

[Earthborn]

He may think that weak AI or learning/intelligence systems are simple and center around selection, but that in no way applies to strong AI or the creation of Machine Consciousnesss, which is a vastly harder problem to solve.

I disagree. I think the concept of "consciousness" is still so poorly defined and understood, that we don't even know whether it is a hard problem, an easy problem for which we are just missing the solution, or an impossible to solve problem.

But of course the massive Old Guard Figure in Machine Consciousness is John Searle, at Berkeley, inventor of the Chinese Room Experiment.

The Chinese Room thought experiment has its own flaws. Some have argued that if it worked, the whole system of room, instructions and person in the room could be said to be conscious.

I take a somewhat different view. I think how conscious some system is at least in part determined by how quickly it can produce a response. I don't think it likely that consciousness is an all or nothing phenomenon, but something that can come in different gradations, and especially different speeds. The Chinese Room experiment demands us to assume that John Searle locked up in a room can manually work his way through the gazillions of lines of code of a computer program so advanced that it doesn't even exist yet and still within a human lifetime can produce a response that passes the Turing test, and expects us to accept his conclusion that because he doesn't really understands Chinese a computer of whatever speed also won't be able to understand Chinese.

 

[case#46cw39]

I disagree. I think the concept of "consciousness" is still so poorly defined and understood, that we don't even know whether it is a hard problem, an easy problem for which we are just missing the solution, or an impossible to solve problem.

The Chinese Room thought experiment has its own flaws. Some have argued that if it worked, the whole system of room, instructions and person in the room could be said to be conscious.

I take a somewhat different view. I think how conscious some system is at least in part determined by how quickly it can produce a response. I don't think it likely that consciousness is an all or nothing phenomenon, but something that can come in different gradations, and especially different speeds. The Chinese Room experiment demands us to assume that John Searle locked up in a room can manually work his way through the gazillions of lines of code of a computer program so advanced that it doesn't even exist yet and still within a human lifetime can produce a response that passes the Turing test, and expects us to accept his conclusion that because he doesn't really understands Chinese a computer of whatever speed also won't be able to understand Chinese.

I would say that a concept that that is so hard to define in itself shows it to be a hard problem - if we can't even define it, how easy can it be. Defining it is a part of the problem of building it.

All that the Searle experiment shows is that current programming languages/programs are syntactic - they simply input syntactic squiggles and output syntactic squiggles without any semantic understanding of what they are doing. Human consciousness on the other hand is semantic and so semantic processing is the easiest part of the definition of consciousness whatever else it means and so it must be present for him to declare a machine even partially conscious. By that I mean having access consciousness without getting into the whole phenomenal consciousness problem. If this were so simple it would be done now as we have the robotic hardware to drop it into and the coders are about as close to genius as you can get.

Bottom line: No semantic processing, no authentic machine consciousness. It would be a mere simulation not an authentic specimen, like a simulation of the digestive process which however can't actually digest a pizza, just a simulation not authentic digestion machine.

This has become generally accepted and is propelling the fields of semantic processing and semantic reasoning.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web ...
The internet community as a whole tends to find the two terms "Semantic Web" and "Web 3.0" to be at least synonymous in concept if not completely interchangeable. The definition continues to vary depending on to whom you speak. The overwhelming consensus is that Web 3.0 is most assuredly the "next big thing" but there only lies speculation as to just what that might be.

... The Semantic Web is a "web of data" that enables machines to understand the semantics, or meaning, of information on the World Wide Web.[1] ... The term was coined by Tim Berners-Lee,[2] the inventor of the World Wide Web and director of the World Wide Web Consortium ("W3C"), which oversees the development of proposed Semantic Web standards. ... The machine-readable descriptions enable content managers to add meaning to the content, i.e., to describe the structure of the knowledge we have about that content. In this way, a machine can process knowledge itself, instead of text, using processes similar to human deductive reasoning and inference, thereby obtaining more meaningful results and helping computers to perform automated information gathering and research.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web

Conclusion
Semantic processing + human deductive reasoning = at least the bare minimum requirements for "artificial access consciousness".

 

[Mojo]

lol, oh i've put on my show in many more places than this... i am happy to OPENLY and TRANSPARENTLY admit.

Linking to your own material as if it isn't yours is not being open or transparent, even if you always get caught.