Human vs. Computer: How About a Real Challenge?

Update 18Feb2011: AI researcher Ben Goertzel presents some thoughts on Watsons ascendancy at H+Magazine online. H/T Brian Wang

Much has been made about the recently televised Jeopardy victory by IBM Watson, and earlier victories and impressive performances by specialised chess computers such as Blue Gene etc. Even in poker, computers are increasingly seen as threats to human dominance, thanks to clever human programmers. In the game world, Go is most often seen as a game where computers have not come close to experts.

What do these massive, power gobbling, ultra-pampered, spoon-fed, one-trick-pony game-playing super computers tell us about the human vs computer rivalry? Realistically, the rivalry is still human vs. human, with one team of humans utilising ultra-fast electronics devices to store, "analyse", and retrieve massive quantities of data, to gang up on a single human opponent.

Watson is certainly faster to the button than its human opponents, but we already knew that electrons were faster than nerves. Once the "natural language processing" trick was mastered, Watson could more readily lock out his opponents from responding -- even when they both clearly knew the answer.

But Watson could not drive itself home after the game, could not flush away its excretions (heat) by itself, could not feed itself, etc. In the end, Watson is a very expensive gimmick which served as a showcase for various specialised programming problems.

Perhaps if Watson could master all the games mentioned above, at once, and defeat experts in all of the games, it would be impressive as a game-player. But not really. Look at all the money, mass, and energy tied up in the junkpile called Watson. How would IBM make it more capable of playing multiple games? By throwing more mass, money, and energy into the already-huge junkpile. Not very clever, really, compared with the three pound human brain and all the things it can do -- including designing, building, repairing, and programming "smart" computers.

It all points out the fact that the state of artificial intelligence is pretty pathetic, all in all. Despite over 60 years of promises to create human-level intelligence "within 10 years", AI still stinks badly, and promises more of the same into the forseeable future.

The Jeopardy challenge -- like all similar challenges -- was a huge and expensive publicity hullabaloo. It is quite likely to damage the Jeopardy brand in the long run. It certainly puts forth an entirely false idea about the modern capability of computers, vis-a-vis humans, to reason and make decisions.

What would be a real challenge for Watson? How about a spontaneous, unplanned race over an extensive, lengthy, novel, 3-D obstacle course with ladders, walls, tunnels, slides, sand, and foot-deep water traps -- against a 5 year old human child?

Let's face it: Modern life requires humans to overtly or covertly (via proxies) partner with computers to achieve optimum performance in large areas of our lives. But what will it take to get computers to the point where they are consciously setting the agenda for humans, rather than the other way around?

It will take an entirely new "substrate of thought" than the high speed digital architectures currently used to such great -- if ultra-specialised -- effect. Worse, modern AI researchers for the most part have no idea what form such a new substrate would take. Certainly they do not understand the substrate for the only proof of concept of conscious intelligence which currently exists -- the human brain.

Too much like robots themselves, too many AI researchers unwittingly plod along artificial pathways leading to nowhere but diminutive local optima. Watson is only one illustration of the kludgy phenomenon.

What will it take, and how long will it take to discover it? There are limits to pure reason and speculation. Experimentation is necessary. Hands must be dirtied and hypotheses must be generated and tested. For the luggiest of lugheads out there, we need much better challenges than chess, Jeopardy -- or even Go -- to spur the effort required.