Algemeen Jacques Ellul Günther Anders Lewis Mumford Herbert Marcuse Andrew Feenberg Wiebe Bijker Algemeen Luddieten Wapentuig als voorbeeld Transport Radio en televisie Internet Artificiële intelligentie Algemeen Hypermedia en hypertext Informatieovervloed Privacy Spionage, inlichtingendiensten Cyberoorlog Hackers Algemeen Het schrift Boeken en tijdschriftenDeze bundel artikelen van Brooks geeft een goed inzicht in de ontwikkeling van de vroege AI.
Brooks is zelf een insider die er via het bouwen van een ander type robots hard aan getrokken heeft om de benadering binnen de AI om te buigen van een symbolische en representationistische aanpak naar een aanpak die uitgaat van de belichaming (embodiedness) van robots in een echte, zij het nog beperkte werkelijkheid.
Het boek is grotendeels technisch, maar filosofisch komt er af en toe ook wel wat aardigs naar voren.
Rodney A. BROOKS"This is a collection of scientific papers and essays that I wrote from 1985 to 1991, a period when the key ideas of behavior-based robotics were developed. Behavior-based robotics has now been widely adopted for mobile robots of all sorts on both Earth and Mars."(vii)
"... autonomous mobile robots are conceived of as robots that can operate in worlds where the layout of obstacles are not known ahead of time; they are to operate in the sorts of worlds that people and animals can negotiate with ease."(vii)
[Daar gaan we weer ... Het woord 'autonoom' wordt hier op een misleidende manier gebruikt. Er bestaan geen autonome machines / robots in de filosofische betekenis van het woord.]
"In all cases the technological implementations came first, and the philosophical realizations followed later. For this reason the technical papers are presented first and the philosophical papers second. However, either part of the book can be read first as all the papers were written to be read as single works. Philosophers may safely skip the technical papers without finding themselves ungrounded in the philosophical sections."(vii-viii)
[Denigrerend eigenlijk. 'Eerst denken dan doen' is blijkbaar niet zo herkenbaar bij AI-techneuten. Bovendien is hun 'denken' niet het denken van een geschoolde filosoof. Dit alles vormt precies de reden waarom we de ontwikkelingen niet aan AI-mensen moeten overlaten.]
"Abstract. We describe a new architecture for controlling mobile robots. Layers of control system are built to let the robot operate at increasing levels of competence. Layers are made up of asynchronous modules which communicate over low bandwidth channels. Each module is an instance of a fairly simple computational machine. Higher level layers can subsume the roles of lower levels by suppressing their outputs. However, lower levels continue to function as higher levels are added. The result is a robust and flexible robot control system.
The system has been used to control a mobile robot wandering around unconstrained laboratory areas and computer machine rooms. Eventually it is intended to control a robot that wanders the office areas of our laboratory, building maps of its surroundings using an onboard arm to perform simple tasks."(3-4)
[Ik volg in Part I niet de technische uitleg, pik alleen filosofische punten op. Hoe kun je zo de controle van de mobiele robot beschrijven / benadrukken en dan daarna zo kritiekloos praten over 'autonome robots'? Wat bedoeld wordt wordt duidelijk in de negen uitgangspunten die Brooks hierna geeft. Bijvoorbeeld:]
"We want to build cheap robots which can wander around human inhabited space with no human intervention, advice or control and at the same time do useful work."(8)
"We are interested in building artificial beings — robots that can survive for days, weeks and months, without human assistance, in a dynamic complex environment. Such robots must be self sustaining."(8)
"Abstract. (...) This paper suggests one possible mechanism for analagous robot evolution by describing a carefully designed series of networks, each one being a strict augmentation of the previous one, which control a six-legged walking machine capable of walking over rough terrain and following a person passively sensed in the infrared spectrum. As the completely decentralized networks are augmented, the robot's performance and behavior repetoire demonstrably improve. The rationale for such demonstrations is that they may provide a hint as to the requirements for automatically building massive networks to carry out complex sensory-motor tasks. The experiments with an actual robot ensure that an essence of reality is maintained and that no critical disabling problems have been ignored."(28)
De robot kreeg de naam Genghis.
Over een andere robot met de naam Toto die een andere discussie moest aanzwengelen over de relatie van een robot met de werkelijkheid (het representatieprobleem; centrale aansturing of niet).
"The field of artificial intelligence (AI) tries to make computers do things that, when done by people, are described as having indicated intelligence. The goal of AI has been characterized as both the construction of useful intelligent systems and the understanding of human intelligence (Winston 1984)."(59)
[Waarin weer alle vaagheid van het woord intelligentie. Maar waarom zou je bij machines over intelligentie willen praten? Het is overbodig.]
"The key idea of the new approach is to advance both robotics and AI by considering the problems of building an autonomous agent that physically is an autonomous mobile robot, and which carries out some useful tasks in an environment which has not been specially structured or engineered for it."(60)
[Idem voor 'autonoom'.]
"One of the shortcomings in earlier approaches to robotics and AI was that reasoning was so slow that systems that were built could not respond to a dynamic real world. A key feature of the new approaches to robotics is that the programs are built with short connections between sensors and actuators, making it plausible, in principle at least, to respond quickly to changes in the world."(68)
"Given the current capabilities of computer perception, this forces behavior-based robots to operate in a much more uncertain, and much more coarsely described world than traditional AI systems operating in simulated, imagined worlds. The new systems can therefore seem to have much more limited abilities. I would argue (Brooks 1991b), however, that the traditional systems operate in a way which will never be transportable to the real worlds that the situated behavior-based robots already inhabit."(75)
"Artificial intelligence started as a field whose goal was to replicate human level intelligence in a machine. Early hopes diminished as the magnitude and difficulty of that goal was appreciated. Slow progress was made over the next 25 years in demonstrating isolated aspects of intelligence. Recent work has tended to concentrate on commercializable aspects of "intelligent assistants" for human workers. No one talks about replicating the full gamut of human intelligence any more. Instead we see a retreat into specialized subproblems, such as ways to represent knowledge, natural language understanding, vision or even more specialized areas such as truth maintenance systems or plan verification. All the work in these subareas is benchmarked against the sorts of tasks humans do within those areas. Amongst the dreamers still in the field of AI (those not dreaming about dollars, that is), there is a feeling, that one day all these pieces will all fall into place and we will see "truly" intelligent systems emerge.
However, I, and others, believe that human level intelligence is too complex and little understood to be correctly decomposed into the right subpieces at the moment and that even if we knew the subpieces we still wouldn't know the right interfaces between them. Furthermore, we will never understand how to decompose human level intelligence until we've had a lot of practice with simpler level intelligences." [mijn nadruk] (80)
"I wish to build completely autonomous mobile agents that co-exist in the world with humans, and are seen by those humans as intelligent beings in their own right. I will call such agents Creatures. This is my intellectual motivation. I have no particular interest in demonstrating how human beings work, although humans, like other animals, are interesting objects of study in this endeavor as they are successful autonomous agents. I have no particular interest in applications it seems clear to me that if my goals can be met then the range of applications for such Creatures will be limited only by our (or their) imagination. I have no particular interest in the philosophical implications of Creatures, although clearly there will be significant implications." [mijn nadruk] (86)
[Niet bepaald filosofisch.]
"Abstract. There is an alternative route to Artificial Intelligence that diverges from the directions pursued under that banner for the last thirty some years. The traditional approach has emphasized the abstract manipulation of symbols, whose grounding in physical reality has rarely been achieved. We explore a research methodology which emphasizes ongoing physical interaction with the environment as the primary source of constraint on the design of intelligent systems. We show how this methodology has recently had significant successes on a par with the most successful classical efforts. We outline plausible future work along these lines which can lead to vastly more ambitious systems."(111)
"Symbol systems in their purest forms assume a knowable objective truth. It is only with much complexity that modal logics, or non-monotonic logics, can be built which better enable a system to have beliefs gleaned from partial views of a chaotic world. As these enhancements are made, the realization of computations based on these formal systems becomes more and more biologically implausible. But once the commitment to symbol systems has been made it is imperative to push on through more and more complex and cumbersome systems in pursuit of objectivity." [mijn nadruk] (114)
[Dat is een beetje in overeenstemming met mijn eigen commentaar bij dat soort geformaliseerde systemen. Ze zijn uiteindelijk zo reductionistisch dat je er weinig aan hebt in de rëele wereld.]
"To build a system based on the physical grounding hypothesis it is necessary to connect it to the world via a set of sensors and actuators. Typed input and output are no longer of interest. They are not physically grounded."(115)
[Zoals al eerder uitgelegd hierboven. De rest van dit hoofdstuk is weer niet filosofisch, maar een beschrijving van het werk dat door de tijd heen gedaan is door Brooks en de zijnen.]
"The theme of the paper is how computers and thought have be intimately intertwined in the development of Artificial Intelligence, how those connections may have led the field astray, how biological examples of intelligence are quite different from the models used by Artificial Intelligence, and how recent new approaches point to another path for both computers and thought."(135)
"It would be the height of arrogance and foolishness to assume that we are now using the ultimate technology for computation, namely silicon based integrated circuits, just as it would have been foolish (at least in retrospect) to assume in the 16th century that Napier's Bones were the ultimate computing technology (Williams 1983). Indeed the end of the exponential increase in computation speed for uni- processors is in sight, forcing somewhat the large amount of research into parallel approaches to more computation for the dollar, and per second. But there are other more radical possibilities for changes in computation infrastructure. These include computation based on optical switching (Gibbs 1985), (Brady 1990), protein folding, gene expression, nonorganic atomic switching."(140-141)
Volgt een korte geschiedenis van de AI en voorlopers als Turing.
"Turing thus carefully considered the question of embodiment, and for technical reasons chose to pursue aspects of intelligence which could be viewed, at least in his opinion, as purely symbolic."(142)
"The years immediately following the Dartmouth conference shaped the field of Artificial Intelligence in a way which has not significantly changed. The next few years, in the main, amplified the abstraction away from situatedness, or connectedness to the world.16 There were a number of demonstrations along the way which seemed to legitimize this abstraction. In this section I review some of those events, and argue that there were fundamental flaws in the conclusions generally drawn."(150)
"For the remainder of section 3, I rather briefly review the progress made over the last fifteen years, and show how it relates to the fundamental issues of situatedness and embodiment brought up earlier."(154)
"In this section I will skim over a scattering of recent work from ethology, psychology, and neuroscience, in an effort to indicate how deficient our everyday understanding of behavior really is. This is important to realize because traditional Artificial Intelligence has relied at the very least implicitly, and sometimes quite explicitly, on these folk understandings of human and animal behavior."(160)
"The common view in Artificial Intelligence, and particularly in the knowledge representation community, is that there is a central storage system which links together the information about concepts, individuals, categories, goals, intentions, desires, and whatever else might be needed by the system. In particular there is a tendency to believe that the knowledge is stored in a way that is independent from the way or circumstances in which it was acquired."(162)
"In fact, however, the brain is embodied with a much more serious coupling. The brain is situated in a soup of hormones, that influences it in the strongest possible ways. It receives messages encoded hormonally, and sends messages so encoded throughout the body. Our electrocentrism, based on our electronic models of computation, has lead us to ignore these aspects in our informal models of neuroscience, but hormones play a strong, almost dominating, role in determination of behavior in both simple (Kravitz 1988) and higher animals (Bloom 1976).
Real biological systems are not rational agents that take inputs, compute logically, and produce outputs. They are a mess of many mechanisms working in various ways, out of which emerges the behavior that we observe and rationalize. We can see this in more detail by looking both at the individual computational level, and at the organizational level of the brain." [mijn nadruk] (164)
"There are two reasons that embodiment of intelligent systems is critical. First, only an embodied intelligent agent is fully validated as one that can deal with the real world. Second, only through a physical grounding can any internal symbolic or other system find a place to bottom out, and give 'meaning' to the processing going on within the system."(167)
"A deeper problem is ''can there be disembodied mind?". Many believe that what is human about us is very directly related to our physical experiences. For instance Johnson (1987) argues that a large amount of our language is actually metaphorically related to our physical connections to the world. Our mental 'concepts' are based on physically experienced exemplars. Smith (1991) suggests that without physical grounding there can be no halt to the regress within a knowledge based system as it tries to reason about real world knowledge such as that contained in an encyclopedia (e.g., Lenat & Feigenbaum (1991))."(168)