Barumonk
Artificial Intelligence - Part 2; "Rosie the Robot serves pancakes."
by
, Thu, 10-27-2011 at 11:11 PM (150078 Views)
For those of you born more recently, Rosie the Robot is from an older animated series called the Jetsons. She basically looks like a couple large tin cans with some antenna and claws and acted as the maid for the family. You can actually buy something quite similar from a start up company called Willow Garage.
Willow Garage's PR2 (stands for Personal Robot, Version 2) is a small robot that accepts customer written scripts to do different tasks. Think of it like the Matrix when Neo is getting all that kung fu uploaded into his brain, same idea. This touches on what I said in Part 1 about assembling a bunch of weak AI traits to make a strong AI, this is really it right here. Willow Garage's concept is that you pay less for the robot if you make all your scripts open source. After enough scripts for everything exist, then the robot should be able to do anything and everything with a high level of skill and zero learning curve.
Of course, this isn't a true strong AI because it can't learn from it's own mistakes, but this is really where the industry as a whole is headed right now. There are others doing different things, but they really lack funding. The problem is that most companies want AI for a specific purpose, and a weak AI is faster to implement, easier to control and debug, and costs less than attempting to develop a strong AI - so no one funds strong AI development. What purpose is there to create a strong AI when a weak AI fills the needs of those with money to throw away?
Well, let's think about it. Have you ever played Civilization? If you have, you know that there is quite a lengthy research tree that goes through several eras in human history. So, what if research was done in a different order? What if humans discovered these technologies and made these breakthroughs in a different order? Wouldn't that mean that some technologies would never have been discovered, and that others that we haven't even though of would instead take their place? Yeah, that's right. You could use AI to emulate species and civilization development and potentially create breakthroughs by altering the conditions of the AI's world.
Another concept that extends this, what about alien species? If you tried this with completely different parameters for the Earth itself, then the entire species could evolve and develop quite differently over the course of several million years. It could give us an idea of what to look for instead of going in blind. Playing god has it's benefits, considering the things most companies do, I don't see why they don't seriously consider something like this.
The pancakes are done. Where did I put the syrup?