Is the work being done really so directly attributable to Stephen Wolfram or is there a army of hard working individuals behind the scenes not being referenced here? I'm not suggesting they list everyone by name or anything, but a simple shift to something like "our team" would seem more generous. Of course this is all moot if he is indeed primarily or almost solely responsible for the progress being referenced.
http://bactra.org/reviews/wolfram/
"So much for substance. Let me turn to the style, which is that of monster raving egomania, beginning with the acknowledgments..."
That's what the money is for
It turns out most people don't care if their car is also a surface-to-air missile, or if their dishwasher can also compose poems.
Mathematica does actually seem to have dominated its niche for decades. People did and do all manner of things with it.
Wolfram Alpha, their "computational knowledge engine", has only been live for 6.5 years. It's sort of baffling who it is for (but I do, very occasionally, find it extremely useful), but it seems what they are trying to do is bigger than a normal startup that helps you find a taxi or rent out your extra bedroom or search the news.
They may well fail, but I don't think you can say that they have failed yet.
Watson has the same problem - and when they released the SDK last year it was kind of like, well, just try it, but they seem to have at least determined to focus on health care.
Also his Riffle example is thinking about the problem the wrong way round. It looks like he tried to turn code into english, when it should be the other way around. Here is an actual english version:
1. Start with a purple square
2. Clone the square, rotate it by 0.1 radians and scale it to fit the previous square
3. Also alternate the colour between purple and yellow.
4. repeat clone process until square is just a dot in the middle of the screen
All these ambiguities we can solve, but a computer cannot hence why our programming languages are so specific to the point of cognitive overload. Also none of his later examples show to me that Wolfram is better than English, unless of course you use wolfram daily (as he 'the creator' likely does/did), in which case you're brain is already optimized to read it...
This isn't even mentioning that language is only part of how we communicate. We can often leave so much out because our visual system, body movements, previous experiences, memory and other senses fill in the rest.
We can solve it by specify what each word means. That's no different than programming.
Also, your step 4 has bug because "repeating the clone process" does not include "rotating and scale it to fit" part. It'll just keep cloning the square all days and never get the square to be the size of a dot.
Also, If you screen is not a square and you did not start in the center of the screen. Then the square can be as small as a dot, but it won't be "in the middle of the screen".
Tell me what programming language / compiler can do that by just specifying word meanings? Context, sentence structure, your understanding, etc all play into it as well.
The word that's going to cause the most trouble is probably "it". What does "it" mean? In this specification, it means the cloned square. But in a longer specification (written in this style), the meaning of "it" will depends on which instance of the word we're talking about, because what it refers to keeps changing...
Back in university I'd frequently help seniors out with projects. The one project involved battleship AI in mathlab. In maybe 3 hours I got it as good as it was probably going to get pitted against a truly random opponent. However, PNRGs aren't truly random. It was so quick and so effortless to grab stats on the biases the PNRG had (in order to optimize the guess selection process). It was the first time I ever used the language and I can honestly admit it had very little to do with my capability and so much more to do with how damn fluent and intuitive that language is.
It's inconsistent, messy and evolutionary but, wow, what an absolute masterpiece.
Like you I'm still not sure whether parent poster meant that, or is confused about Matlab vs Mathematica.
Lets ignore the fact that, for some reason, he thinks his particular programming language is better than all other ones for interacting with an AI. Am I missing something here? This seems kinda "duh" to me.
Looks like he's pretty sure there is more to it.
It does seem reasonable that if AIs evolve they will, in their evolution, develop constructs of 'reality' that Wolfram calls "Post Linguistics Emergent Concepts"(1) and that, if they do, until human languages develop deeply "precise" 'words' for each of these PLECs, Spock will have to translate for Kirk; Spock, talking to an AI, will be (mostly?) unintelligible to Kirk.
This raises the question can one reasonably believe that humans are capable of more than 'bare bones' precision in words? Can one be both Kirk and Spock?
On that note it is encouraging that Wolfram appears to think our systems may be (become?) a driving force in our evolution; we may evolve to a point the use of a precise or imprecise language is a moment-to-moment choice.
It may be that these precise and imprecise languages will develop into a single language.
Before that happens, if you were such a dual-linguist, which language would you prefer? Under what conditions would you switch? What would communication be like in a world where the commonly spoken language was a meld of precision and imprecision? Which of the two would have the most influence on the other? Past a certain stage are there generally distinctions in character?
>Now, in the electric age, the very instantaneous nature of co-existence among our technological instruments has created a crisis quite new in human history. Our extended faculties and senses now constitute a single field of experience which demands that they become collectively conscious. Our technologies, like our private senses, now demand an interplay and ratio that makes rational co-existence possible. As long as our technologies were as slow as the wheel or the alphabet or money, the fact that they were separate, closed systems was socially and psychically supportable. This is not true now when sight and sound and movement are simultaneous and global in extent. A ratio of interplay among these extensions of our human functions is now as necessary collectively as it has always been for our private and personal rationality in terms of our private senses or "wits," as they were once called.
Also, one of the advantages of natural language is it's imprecision: it makes communication more robust, and leaves room for interpretation.. in much the same way as imprecise duplication of the genome allows for evolution, imprecision in language allows for alternative interpretations of the results.
Plus, if you want to, you can check interpretation and understanding just by asking some questions and creating feedback.
Actually, I just don't get how this is advancing the art in either direction.
That is how we talk to an AI. This article is framing a set of powerful computational entities as an "AI", and that is not yet defensible.
So much of what we communicate among humans depends on implied, common context. We know what would make sense to other people, or have a good idea of that, based on our understanding of ourselves and other people.
When I think, "AI", I think about something that knows me other than a set of attributes and rules, and I can know it in the same way. Imagine a little kid type intelligence connected to those powerful compute entities and with a great memory. Better than our memory. And it's fast.
It's that "little kid" type intelligence that is missing! We have the fast, we have the great memory, we have lots of powerful compute entities too.
What we actually don't have is the "intelligence" to complete the idea of "artificial intelligence"
Assuming that by AI, Wolfram is referring to a computational device built by humans, the communication has already happened in the act of designing and constructing the machine. Real communication is over once you flip it on.
What Wolfram is proposing is to then run a Wolfram Language interpreter on top of this new machine and use that to communicate, presumably to ask it for the meaning of the universe. Instead of creating a lingua franca between man and machine, this will prove only that the machine can emulate a von Neumann computer and run the Wolfram interpreter on top. You are NOT communicating with the machine at that point, you are communicating with a parser and a nifty collection of mathematical routines.
Think of a parrot. You teach it to say "Polly want a cracker!" - and the parrot may even learn a few human words - but are you really communicating? Can the parrot express to you the thrill of flying, can it explain to you what a total mind-fuck it is for it to be stuck in a cage begging for crackers when it should be flying with its flock and living its life? No, the parrot can only ask you for a cracker, just the way you taught it.
Man will never have a relationship among equals with a machine, regardless of how much software he pours on top - the machine has a frame of reference that can never be communicated to a human, it's different at the electronic level, never mind the symbolic or linguistic. The machine will have a reality so different from that of the human that even if it could communicate something of substance, it would be as futile as asking your parrot to help you with a math problem - the parrot is not stupid, and in fact can do many things you would find highly mathematical, but it cannot help you with your homework because you are in two different mental universes, no human-invented language can bridge them.
Is this true? I didn't realize this.
Thought this was the AI (aka Stephan Wolfram) telling humans how it'd prefer we interact with it.