I always crazy about sci-fi futuristic movies. Humanoid robots, machines vs men (with the help of Arnold) wars, or robots taking over the whole earth and keeping men as batteries. Simply love them. Most of those movies introduced the existence of highly-intelligent machines. Sometimes they are shown as having a human-level intelligent, in other case they are even better. Well now the question is: is it even possible? To what extent the development of so called Artificial Intelligence (AI) will be?
Back in 1960 something, experts predicted that in 20 years machine would be capable of doing everything human capable of, which is often called as "Strong AI". With respect for those AI experts, we are now in 2008 and it's not even close. Strong AI is proven to be much more difficult and complicated to achieve. This misprediction has caused AI experts being addressed as a “liar”, and consequently being forced to changes the direction of AI research from “Strong AI” into a more short-term, specific domain of problem, which is called "Applied AI" or "Weak AI". However, the dream of “human level AI” will never cease, and debate about it is always interesting to follow.
There has been a great discussion about whether human level AI is likely to be achieved by a mere symbol processing like what most weak AI commonly use. By applying a huge collection of formal rules and in addition, scaling up processing capabilities and storage capacity, and there we are. This opinion is greatly opposed by some experts. As current system lacks of something that is called “understanding”, “minds”, “conscience”, or other things which is related to mental states. The argument based on the idea that there is something more than just behavior to call a machine have an intelligent comparable to human. For example, let say that a machine capable of translating English to French. Even if the machine did it correctly, it is arguably incorrect to say that the machine actually “understand” English (or French).
But who need minds anyway? Intelligent is all about behavior, and it alone is enough. To see it from a different perspective, I (and my ignorance) have a trouble to imagine what “minds” and “conscience” are. Are they just some terms used to express something unexplainable? Or perhaps it just simply does not exists from the very beginning?
I have a nice discussion with one of my friend about this matter, and his view is somewhat different from what I expect, but nevertheless very fascinating to be followed. His first thought is that, even if human are capable of doing it, creating a machine with human level intelligent is unnecessary. Life is difficult enough, why would you like to increase the competition among human by introducing some humanoids? Other thing he expressed is that there is no way human will be able to do such a thing. An inventor would not be able to invent anything equal or beyond itself, as human is not God.
p.s: I am not an AI researcher nor expert in this field. Just someone who has an interest in it.
Scour (currently in beta) is another web 2.0 hype tagged as "social search engine" intended to give user more authority to determine results from searching process. Scour aggregates result from Google, Yahoo, and MSN and combine them with the votes from users to decide the order of the results. Besides voting, Scour also allows users to leave comments for every search results. Sounds like another Digg? Another worth mentioning feature from Scour is the reward system. Users will get a certain number of points for every search or another contribution they make (voting, commenting, inviting friends). After several thousand of points, users are able to convert them into a visa gift card. While this pay-per-search idea is nothing new, I wonder if the social part of Scour will able to keep them surviving in the next few years given the fact that they will probably have to compete with Google (Google is developing their search engine with a similar idea to Scour, I bet without the reward system).
I have tried Scour for around three days now, and I'm sure they want to improve on several things (it's a beta anyway). Currently the results are limited to 3 pages no matter what keyword I use to do the searching. The search results are also lack of highlighting (updated: not anymore!). They have also included a browser-integrated search bar, which is good for me since I want to try it without having to change the way I use Google. However, every time I click on a search result a frame appeared in the bottom of the page which allowed the users to give vote or comment on the result (this frame didn't appear when I tried to open the search result on a new tab instead of clicking it). This might be a good way to encourage users to participate in the voting/commenting activities, but I found it a little bit annoying. Hopefully they will find a better way to do it.
