On the stage of the recent TechCrunch50 conference, startup Imindi, which offers a service involving the mapping of thoughts and associations in a database for use in social networking, received a hostile welcome from Silicon Valley. This does not mean that the Imindi service lacks innovation. On the contrary, Imindi might just be too novel for many people.
The Imindi founders have challenged the world to think of artificial intelligence not as making computers smarter because of human beings, but as making humans smarter because of computers.
Artificial intelligence has been a topic of debate for decades. The newest effort, it may be argued, is the World Wide Web. Kevin Kelly, a futurist and founder of Wired magazine, explained the entire Web as a huge, non-stopping machine in his TED speech late last year. According to this interpretation, what every Web user or Web developer does is to program the machine and make it smarter and more powerful over time -- the fundamental goal of artificial intelligence. Google (Nasdaq: GOOG), as leader of the current Web, is a primary contributor to this great AI project.
Artificial intelligence is supposed to let machines do things for people. The risk is that we may rely too much on them. Two months ago, for instance, writer Nicolas Carr asked whether Google is making us stupid. In my recent blog series "The Age of Google," I extended Carr’s discussion. Due to the success of Google, we are relying more on objective search than on active thinking to answer questions. In consequence, the more Google has advanced its service, the farther Google users have drifted from active thinking.
But at least one form of human thinking cannot be replaced by machines. I am not talking about inference/discovery (which machines may be capable of doing) but about creation/generation-from-nothing (which I don’t believe machines may ever do).
Relying too heavily on artificial intelligence could cause people to stop thinking. This is the basic assumption in many science fiction movies -- that robots will beat humans someday, if humans become so stupid that machines are smarter.
Imindi’s founders say we may expect computers to improve -- and we will improve from using them. This is why the sci-fi nightmare might never happen. Humans can always be smarter when we also learn from the machines we are creating.
Of course, some may doubt whether people would be willing to enter their thoughts using services like Imindi's in the first place. But if we just look around at how many bloggers are on the current Web, we should not be in doubt of the answer. In essence, there is no difference between writing a blog post and drawing a mind graph using a service like Imindi’s.
Indeed, it may be easier and faster to use such a service to express our thoughts than to produce a well written blog post. When the Imindi service automatically connects thoughts from many people, that could produce the entry point to the real Web 3.0 -- a new generation of the World Wide Web.
The Imindi goal is also a natural extension of the Web 2.0 philosophy of collective intelligence. From my perspective, services like these will be a milestone in Web evolution.
— Yihong Ding, Semantic Web researcher and blogger
Imindi for me is an interesting experiment ( at least). Success or failure will only be decided by time but with appropriate security and privacy models it can b e intriguing. People have been sharing their status and other things on the social networks. If Imindi can convince people that it would not share your thoughts directly rather it would make inferences and recommendations from your thoughts , then it can be interesting . Just like people are interesting in knowing what their friends are doing they may be interested in knowing who else has similar thought patterns like them. But accuracy of predictions etc remains a question
Intersting post!..I was wondering how experts see AI vs. Human mind. Can AI imulate human mind...It is not so easy to be definitive in answering this question. But it is intertsing to convince yourself for Imindi as it it a fnacy though criticially taken by some.
As usual, you immediately get the point. ;-) Preserving human intelligence is a key consequence of this new take of AI approach.
In history, we have tried to preserve knowledge for later generations. In acient time, we had invented books. In modern time, we invented audio records and videos. Nevertheless are they doing what they are supposed to do, it is not enough for efficient knowledge preservation. In short, we have only stored the static side of human intelligence and nearly totally omitted the dynamic side of human intelligence, i.e., how the knowledge was thought in the original brains when it came out. As the result, young generations need spend much redundant time to reproduce the links among knowledge that their ancestors indeed have already thought of.
This new type of human thought service tends to solve this problem. By this type of service, we may not only learn the thoughts but also know how the thoughts were come out and how the thoughts were connected from the original thinker's point of view. Therefore, it might significantly reduce the time of learning cycle. This is why it would make us humans be smarter because we now can spend more time on active thinking of new creation other than rethinking whatever our ancestors have already thought of.
Furthermore, the mind collected by these thought engines would become a type of physical external memory of human beings. It reduces the labor of brains by storing a few valuable but infreqently used knowledge into some accessible external memory. Unlike the traditional text notes or so, this type of external memory itself may automatically extends its content by connecting to newly created external memory of the other persons. Hence you see, it is not only the real human is learning, the virtual persons (with the external memory of the real ones) are also learning. If we add them together, it would greatly improve the effienecy of human learning cycle. Eventually, it may signficantly affect the modern education system in long run.
But even with all of these, it does not really covers what Imindi might bring to the world, for example, the contribution of real universal identity in the future. This is why I am so great a fun of this new product. Its potential is unbelieveable broad.
Hey Yihong. Very interesting post!! And all good responses.
Re: "...to think of artificial intelligence not as making computers smarter because of human beings, but as making humans smarter because of computers." - interesting concept. Human brains are perhaps the most powerful natural processor+memory, but they're bio-based and they don't exactly work like computer CPU's and RAM's. For instance, computers can do more complex calculations much faster than our brains, but our brains can do a better job at reasoning, making sense of info, processing images and sounds, recognize complex pattern, and manage memories, etc, than any computer-based algorhms can (also, part of what makes us human: emortions). So, integrating the human brains with the computer brains will certainly bring new possibilities as they assist each other. The main question, however, is how exactly are we going to do that? What could be an interface? are we talking about embedding a chip inside our skulls or hooking up our brain with signal wires (maybe iBrain from Apple Inc.)?
Another thing I want to point out, though, that AI is often mistaken with 'automation'. To me, there are 3 basic elements of AI that distinguish it from 'auto': 1. pattern recognition (or data recognition in the case of Internet - semantic web), 2. ability to self-learn over time, and 3. reasoning/decision making.
For example, if you give a kid a calculator, the kid can do difficult arithmetic calulations fast, but the calculator is hardly AI. Besides, not much practice for the brain will result in less ability to visualize and compute (the brain might become rusty) - very much in the same direction as asking whether "Google is making us stupid". Google search is pretty smart at solving very large linear equations very fast to give relevant search results but it's yet to realize the AI capability. We can have many auotmation tools that do specific tasks for us automatically but they are not making decisions for us per se.
Nevertheless, the concept is incredibly wild and interesting, which may open up a whole lot of possibilities including allowing us human to make collections of our thoughts. We only live so long - what we leave behind is our knowledge, experience, wisdom and love through our life work, our interactions with our friends and family, and records in forms of books and other medias. But imagine if we could leave a database that represents our thoughts more precisely than our writings in books or blogs, we might find a way to sustain and advance our intelligence.
Thank you for the comments. In fact, however, it is not a mind game, it is the beginning point of constructing individual identities.
Let's say what the most severe problem of the current Web is. If we watch it in depth, the issue must be the identity overload. The success of Web 2.0 has created us too many identities on the Web that become harder and harder to manage. The question thus become: how could we solve it?
Some people told---OpenID. We just assign a generic ID for everybody to login to every site. But may it really solve the problem? Let it alone whether every site would support this standard, even if the support does come true, it actually does not solve the problem because of the natural information barriers existed between any two Web sites. So how to solve it?
The only possible solution is to build certain information that does not conflict to the interest of any particular site while at the same time it could improve the performance of any site, and in addition, the information could unite the information flow over the Web. What is such kind of information that may realize all these functions, it is human mind! And this is the true contribution of this new type of AI taking that Imindi represents. And this is why it is truly revolutionary.
I must say that the world is still a little bit too early to get this insight. Even researchers like you cannot get its true innovative intent at the first place. This is why Imindi faced so embarassing on the stage of TC50.
But time will demonstrate. Imindi, or other services like Imindi, will lead the Web into a new stage. Again, it is not just a mind map. It is the truly universal identity.
Well Well Well, I hope you are not trying to tell us that this is an abridge version of the AI the world have been waiting for all these years. If it does not get attention in the Valley why do you think a guy like me should ve interested in it? Reading your post and other reference materials, i can see why the guys at the valley don't seems intersted at all. I will have to ask the folks at predictify to see how many months they will give this startup to exist!!
This is the dumbest thing i have read for quite along time. Is this plagiarism 3.0? So if i map my thoughs with others and then write a blog, then it means you have to acknowledge all the individuals whose thoughts who you have mapped out.So it means one is not capable of independent thoughts but has to rely on a network of thoughts.
I also think it will be nice to chime in on Kim Solez's piece on Singularity. I support you in trhe fact that humans and not machines will always be in charge no matter how guys like Kim want to make us to believe.
Thank you for the comments. There are something I need to clarify.
First, this article is actually not mainly on artificial intelligence but more about human intelligence. Originally, I have another title for the post. Suggested by the IE editor, we changed to another one since they think it might deliver message better. Anyway, I want to let you know that it is a rethinking of intelligence, which not necessarily be the artificial intelligence in the normal mean.
Then we may focus on the argument of the value of artificial intelligence. In fact, I didn't say that AI becomes less important in any sense. What I want to say is actually that there exists another side of AI that probably we have less considered so far. That is, when the traditional AI emphasizes on let humans help computers, how about the other side letting computers help humans. Here "help" means to trigger better thinking rather than helping doing some particular task.
So, I think you get my points now. It is not about whether AI is useful (and indeed I believe its value). By contrast, it is an attempt to argue whether there is another side of AI we need to be aware.
On the sci-fi movie issue, well, you may not believe, but truly many people watch the movies based on the assumption that computers become generally smarter than humans, certiainly, however, there are a few exceptional ones who are the heros finally save mankind by defeating machines. I would say that this kind of story is actually hardly to be true because we are going to learn from computers just like we humans have learned from nature, though computers are man-made products. It is this capability of learning and active thinking that makes our human and we are going to be that way.
New services such as Imindi start to claim this path. And I truly believe it be the right future we are pursuing.
I have no doubt that we will ultimately be able to emulate cognition successfully - to the point of the machines, yes, telling jokes (thank Marvin Minsky, I think.)
I think the solution to the problem is in some sense easier than we (the AI community) have realized til now, thus of course we're waiting for a "breakthrough".
I suggest that the topic of AI in the context of people failing to think for themselves is a red-herring. People already fail to think for themselves because they are being engineered to stop doing so on the one hand (propaganda and the mass-media), and because they are not being taught to do so (failed education system, which for 100 years has been geared toward producing "compliant workers".) AI is nowhere near a state of doing any "thinking" for people and so is no excuse. If an AI "expert system" arrives at a solution at variance with the investigating team's intuition, you can be sure they will try to validate the AI solution. We're nowhere near "trusting" machines in that sense - there's just no history because there are no "truly cognitive" machines yet.
Search Engines do not even try to understand simple queries - looking up patterns of words is a paltry substitute for understanding the query to begin with. Most searches in that sense should produce ONE RESULT, if you see what I mean.
I take exception to phrases like "leader of the current Web" - Google doesn't deserve to "lead" anything any more than any other company does, apart from their Capitalization blinding people. We don't see semantic breakthroughs coming from Google; as far as I can see they are just as pedestrian in "cognitive search" as the next group flailing around for ideas. They're busy making money, is what they're BUSY doing.
"Due to the success of Google, we are
relying more on objective search than on active thinking to answer
questions. In consequence, the more Google has advanced its service,
the farther Google users have drifted from active thinking."
I fail to see how this would be. Somone trying to find an answer to a question uses search to find sources of information. That person has to review the material found to determine if their question was answered or not. As more archived (hardcopy-only) material is brought to the web, the web becomes the one place to LOCATE all possible answers, but the inquirer remains the person to Decide if their question was answered. The only alternative in this example is for the person to "figure it out for themself," which they could always do.
Whether the answers they get from the web are correct and honest is another matter.
"Relying too heavily on artificial intelligence could cause people to
stop thinking."
I see no imminent need for fear of this. We have a big job just RIGHT NOW trying to get people to think for themselves - and AI is nowhere near the horizon. We need people to START thinking now - that IS a serious problem for us RIGHT NOW - and AI so far has nothing to do with it.
"This is the basic assumption in many science fiction
movies -- that robots will beat humans someday, if humans become so
stupid that machines are smarter."
I think that's a misreading! It was never that humans would become "stupid" - it was always that the machines would be SMARTER (and somehow become just as MALEVOLENT as humans can become.) Find me a book or movie where the humans lost because they were stupid per se - I think there is none. "Humanity" had to be smart enough to Create the Machine in the first place - how "stupid" were "we" when we did that?
I don't mind "incremental" approaches to "collective intelligence", but I see the true goal to be that someone just figures out how to emulate cognition in a machine, and I claim that is Possible and I claim that that possibility is Obvious.
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