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Is human creativity a wall that AI can never scale? Many people are
happy to admit that experts in many domains can be matched by
either knowledge-based or sub-symbolic systems, but even some AI
researchers harbor the hope that when it comes to feats of sheer
brilliance, mind over machine is an unalterable fact. In this book,
the authors push AI toward a time when machines can autonomously
write not just humdrum stories of the sort seen for years in AI,
but first-rate fiction thought to be the province of human genius.
It reports on five years of effort devoted to building a story
generator--the BRUTUS.1 system.
This book was written for three general reasons. The first
theoretical reason for investing time, money, and talent in the
quest for a truly creative machine is to work toward an answer to
the question of whether we ourselves are machines. The second
theoretical reason is to silence those who believe that logic is
forever closed off from the emotional world of creativity. The
practical rationale for this endeavor, and the third reason, is
that machines able to work alongside humans in arenas calling for
creativity will have incalculable worth.
Is human creativity a wall that AI can never scale? Many people are
happy to admit that experts in many domains can be matched by
either knowledge-based or sub-symbolic systems, but even some AI
researchers harbor the hope that when it comes to feats of sheer
brilliance, mind over machine is an unalterable fact. In this book,
the authors push AI toward a time when machines can autonomously
write not just humdrum stories of the sort seen for years in AI,
but first-rate fiction thought to be the province of human genius.
It reports on five years of effort devoted to building a story
generator--the BRUTUS.1 system.
This book was written for three general reasons. The first
theoretical reason for investing time, money, and talent in the
quest for a truly creative machine is to work toward an answer to
the question of whether we ourselves are machines. The second
theoretical reason is to silence those who believe that logic is
forever closed off from the emotional world of creativity. The
practical rationale for this endeavor, and the third reason, is
that machines able to work alongside humans in arenas calling for
creativity will have incalculable worth.
This is the first book-length presentation and defense of a new
theory of human and machine cognition, according to which human
persons are superminds. Superminds are capable of processing
information not only at and below the level of Turing machines
(standard computers), but above that level (the "Turing Limit"), as
information processing devices that have not yet been (and perhaps
can never be) built, but have been mathematically specified; these
devices are known as super-Turing machines or hypercomputers.
Superminds, as explained herein, also have properties no machine,
whether above or below the Turing Limit, can have. The present book
is the third and pivotal volume in Bringsjord's supermind quartet;
the first two books were What Robots Can and Can't Be (Kluwer) and
AI and Literary Creativity (Lawrence Erlbaum). The final chapter of
this book offers eight prescriptions for the concrete practice of
AI and cognitive science in light of the fact that we are
superminds.
This is the first book-length presentation and defense of a new
theory of human and machine cognition, according to which human
persons are superminds. Superminds are capable of processing
information not only at and below the level of Turing machines
(standard computers), but above that level (the "Turing Limit"), as
information processing devices that have not yet been (and perhaps
can never be) built, but have been mathematically specified; these
devices are known as super-Turing machines or hypercomputers.
Superminds, as explained herein, also have properties no machine,
whether above or below the Turing Limit, can have. The present book
is the third and pivotal volume in Bringsjord's supermind quartet;
the first two books were What Robots Can and Can't Be (Kluwer) and
AI and Literary Creativity (Lawrence Erlbaum). The final chapter of
this book offers eight prescriptions for the concrete practice of
AI and cognitive science in light of the fact that we are
superminds.
What Robots Can and Can't Be is a self-contained, rigorous,
sustained argument for the unique, two-sided position that: (side
one) Al will continue to produce machines with greater and greater
capacity to pass stronger and stronger versions of the Turing Test;
but that (side two) the Person Building Project' (the attempt by
cognitive engineers to build a machine which is a person) will
inevitably fail. The defense of side two rests in large part on a
refutation of the proposition that persons are automata -- a
refutation involving an array of issues, from free will to GAdel to
introspection to Searle and beyond. The defense of side one brings
the reader face to face with Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson as they
tackle perhaps their toughest case (Silver Blaze'); the upshot of
this visit with Conan Doyle's duo is an algorithm-sketch for the
solving of murder mysteries. Side two also involves a look at the
author's mechanical' approach to writing fiction, and the
philosophical side of computerized story generation. The volume is
peppered with numerous illustrations, all quite professionally
done.
Vigorously demonstrating the relevance of reasoning to important
moral problems, the participants in this dialogue resist the
temptations of strident emotional appeal in an effort to present
the most honorable and intellectually sophisticated sides of their
arguments. This effort leads them to consideration of ante-bellum
slavery, to a comparison of the notions of absolute truth in ethics
versus mathematics, and to constructive discussions of genetics,
artificial intelligence, euthanasia, personal identity, human
sexuality, and Roe v. Wade.
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