“Expect libertarian, futurist, and transhumanist opinions here.

Thinking is the art of expanding boundaries - this is only achieved by venturing into territory not charted by commonly held views. If transcending the mental constructs your society has put in place to guard you against the vastness of the cosmos - this site may not be for you.”

Please be kind enough to allow me to offer a heartfelt suggestion. Inasmuch as I have been, for many years, an individual and personal student of metaphysics, I felt compelled to respond. Please accept my very fervent suggestion that you obtain and read the book “Thinking and Destiny” by Harold Waldwin Percival. If it is hard to find, contacting the publisher The Word Foundation by e-mail would allow you to order the book (as well as getting a bit of a taste regarding its content and approach. Despite the Foundation’s name, this is not a “biblical” or “religious” work. Nevertheless I feel that it is the most cogent presentation regarding the significance of the information concerning all religion, and “higher thought”… that exists…period!!!

As well, may I say that it is my personal opinion that there is NO MORE IMPORTANT BOOK on the face of this earth that deals with the subject of man and woman and the origins of humanity. I feel very strongly that this is a work you MUST read.

Thank you so much for your attention to this suggestion.

My Very Best,

Mike Sheller
obproj@verizon.net

We are happy to announce that Elbot won the prestigious Loebner Prize for Artificial Intelligence. The competition took place on October 12th, 2008.

Elbot is an internal project at Artificial Solutions that has been developed over the last 7 years. It is our most intelligent bot with an enormous knowledge base, and he is currently used for advanced testing and sets the basis for the personality module. If you want to have a chat with Elbot, you can visit him at http://www.elbot.com/.

Loebner is the only official competition that annually uses the Turing Test to prove Artificial Intelligence. Basically, it means that the judges have to distinguish the answers from a Bot from the ones of a human focusing on Natural Language Processing. This year Elbot managed to fool 3 out of 12 judges that he was human!

The Loebner Prize has existed since 1990 and is one of the most renowned competitions for Artificial Intelligence and Chat Assistants. It usually attracts more specialized media and bloggers - you will be able to find many pages if you search for Elbot + Loebner today - but this year it even got the attention of the BBC and other main stream media.

thanks for your thoughts.

I would say that reshaping your beliefs continually is an improvement because in the course of your life you are exposed to lots of ideas/thoughts which may not have been present in your childhood environment.

Think of Leibniz, Darwin, Turing, Einstein - whomever - these were truly great minds, and their ideas have not yet penetrated well into the public (often only in a distorted fashion) - so growing intellectually means reading about and trying to “rethink” the great ideas of these people.

And this also means unlearning a lot of stuff which was only a local heuristic.

fixed, thanks for the notice, must have been some Freudian thing

@Carver
Thanks for your comments, I am aware of all the points but a detailed response will have to wait for later blog posts.

Here some quick remarks: Searle’s Chinese room and the Gödelian arguments are highly controversial.

Concerning the Chinese room, I side with the critics of Searle who say that “understanding” occurs at the system level. As a thought experiment it proves nothing anyway. See for instance the very interesting paper When are thought experiments poor ones? by Peijnenburg and Atkinson for the problematic nature of thought experiments.

Gödelian arguments against mechanism are often raised (most notably by Lucas and Penrose) but have all been shown to be erroneous by logicians (Solomon Feferman, Judson Webb come to mind immediately).

As to the difficulty of constructing AI, one should never forget that it is only a few decades since the invention of programmable computers. False hopes were raised by the pioneers (Turing etc) - they did indeed underestimate the difficulty of AI - and these hopes were dashed; this does not mean that AI is impossible.

Speculating about AIs in the 1950s was a bit like speculating about going to the moon when the steam engine was invented - it was a bit too early, that’s all.