Monday, September 01, 2008

The only weakness of Artificial Intelligent Systems

~4 years ago I wrote small article about Weaknesses of Artificial Intelligent System.
That article listed only one weakness: artificial system didn't pass natural selection, while human evolution did.
I think I should clarify what exactly this "no evolution" weakness mean.

Natural selection = millions of years of testing

I'm looking at AIS (Artificial Intelligent System) from engineering perspective. All systems need to be tested, and all discovered problems need to be fixed.
Humans have billions years of testing and fixing bugs.
Artificial Intelligent Systems wouldn't have such luxury.
That would mean that some obscure (but important) design problems most likely won't be found, and under certain circumstances these design problems may hurt AI System or even significantly damage the whole society of AI Systems.

Natural Selection and Emotions

Noel Anthony Pierre in his article Social Considerations for Artificial Intelligence assumes that artificially crafted Intelligent System would rely on logic only and wouldn't use emotions.
That's not correct. Logic cannot work without low level intelligent support that emotions provide. That's why Artificial Intelligent Systems would have emotions.
However because of limited testing period (years of testing by engineers versus millions of years of testing by Evolution), artificially crafted emotions wouldn't be as carefully tuned as human emotions.

See also:
More discussions about AI weaknesses