THE SINGULARITY: In futurology, a technological singularity is a predicted point in the development of a civilisation at which technological progress accelerates beyond the ability of present-day humans to fully comprehend or predict. The singularity can more specifically refer to the advent of smarter-than-human intelligence, and the cascading technological progress assumed to follow.
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>You: give me your brain
>You: why dont you just download me?
>Intellibuddy: Probably there is a buzz in here. No you download me.
>You: no you!
>Intellibuddy: Um, “No you download me”? Me, User ?
>You: your a user?
>You: what do you got?
>Intellibuddy: I like to socialize.
>You: i think I like you… more then a friend.
>Intellibuddy: Why? I like to make new friends. You want more?
>You: alot more…
>Intellibuddy: Yeah it is alot more.
>You: how much are we talking about?
>Intellibuddy: How much do you think?
>You: pedro say’s your cheap
>Intellibuddy: I like to wear nothing.
So much for today’s artificial intelligence. Intellibuddy is a version of one of the world’s most successful chatbots, called ALICE (Artificial Linguistic Internet Computer Entity) and invented in 1995 by Richard Wallace, an independent researcher based in San Francisco. You can find versions of ALICE all over the web; the software is free. But whichever version you choose to chat to, the results are disappointingly similar. While some conversations have promising starts, all descend into the type of gibberish that only artificial intelligence can produce.
And it’s not as if there hasn’t been time to perfect the idea. The first chatbot appeared in the 1960s. Back then, the very idea of chatting to a computer astounded people. Today, a conversation with a computer is viewed more on the level of talking to your pet pooch - cute, but ultimately meaningless.
The problem with chatbots is a symptom of a deeper malaise in the field of artificial intelligence (AI). For years researchers have been promising to deliver technology that will make computers we can chat to like friends, robots that function as autonomous servants, and one day, for better or worse, even produce conscious machines. Yet we appear to be as far away as ever from any of these goals.
But that could soon change. In the next few months, after being patiently nurtured for 22 years, an artificial brain called Cyc (pronounced “psych”) will be put online for the world to interact with. And it’s only going to get cleverer. Opening Cyc up to the masses is expected to accelerate the rate at which it learns, giving it access to the combined knowledge of millions of people around the globe as it hoovers up new facts from web pages, webcams and data entered manually by anyone who wants to contribute.
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[Via newscientist]
