Archive for July, 2009
The current accepted school of thought is that consciousness in an “epiphenomena.” What this means is that it is a product of the workings of the brain and “springs out” of the the brain’s interactions the same way that music “springs out” of the vibrations of strings.
Given this reduction of consciousness to purely physical terms, we can do away with concepts of the “soul” or the “spirit” and state that given the right hardware, consciousness will form automatically. It is true however, that if we were to try and build this hardware (and create the states of the hardware) using a blueprint that would end in a conscious entity, we would be frustrated by the complexity.
But Henry Markram – Director of the Blue Brain Project claims that we can have functioning Human Brain within 10 years! He says that his team has already had some success in trying to replicate the brains of rats, with the Neurons beginning to self organize themselves – in other words, developing a personality.
He says if he fails, it will be proof that consciousness is more than merely a “rising up” of the brain – that there is something more. Will he or won’t he succeed? Stay tuned…
The field of Artificial Intelligence has passed through many phases and has suffered many triumphs and defeats. The “AI winter” refers to periods in the history of AI where there was almost no public interest in AI research and no funding either. This was inevitably caused to due to previous high expectations that fail to deliver.
To get a feel of what it’s like, imagine this. You get carried away by the claims of a certain speech recognition software and decide to try it out. You’re told that you can speak naturally and that you merely have to dictate into a microphone and the software will type out your sentence in words. You start to get visions of handless computing without needing to type. However, when you actually try it out you’re dismayed by the flaws in the technology. You can barely get a proper sentence out and your realize that the promises are false.
This experience will lead to you being skeptical of any such AI claims in the future. Either with regard to facial recognition, handwriting recognition, or translation into foreign languages. Such were the reasons for decreased public interest resulting in periods of “AI Winters” where some researchers were even afraid to include the words artificial intelligence in their research papers.
Over a period of time, this blog will attempt to take examples of previous approaches to certain AI problems and then compare them to what we have achieved so far. This will hopefully provide readers with a picture of far we have come…and how far we have to go.