Submission + - Artificial Beings (conscious machine) (iste.co.uk)
basiles writes: "Jacques Pitrat's newly published book Artificial Beings — The conscience of a conscious machine (ISBN: 97818482211018, Wiley, March 2009) should interest many Slashdot readers, interested in robotics, software, artificial intelligence, cognitive science (and also ethics and science-fiction).
Almost all of this book (except the appendixes) can be read by readers interested about artificial consciousness and artificial intelligence, robotics, cognition, (even without any expertise on software or artificial intelligence). In particular, I believe that people who enjoyed reading Dennet's or Hofstadter's books (like the famous "Godel Escher Bach...." should like reading this J.Pitrat's latest book.
The author J.Pitrat (one of the French oldest AI researcher, also AAAI and ECCAI fellow) discuss about the usefulness and implementation of a conscious artificial being (currently specialized in solving cleverly very general constraint satisfaction or arithmetic problems) and describes in some details his implemented system CAIA (an artificial researcher in artificial intelligence), on which he is working for about 20 years.
J.Pitrat is claiming that strong AI is an incredibly difficult, but still possible, goal and task, and is advocating the use of some bootstrapping techniques (common for software developers) is mandatory to achieve it, notably thru conscious, reflective, meta-knowledge based systems. Only AI systems could build AI! But J.Pitrat view on AI is quite unusual and challenging.
The meanings of Conscience and Consciousness is discussed (in chapter 2), and the author explains why it is useful for human and for artificial beings. The, Pitrat explains what does "Itself" means for an artificial being (in chapter 3), and discusses some aspects and some limitations of consciousness (in chapter 4). Why is auto-observation useful (chapter 5), and how to observer oneself (chapter 6) is then explained. Conscience for humans, artificial beings or robots, including Asimov's laws, is then discussed (chapter 7), and how to implement it (chapter 8), and enhance or change it (chapter 9). A last chapter discuss the future of CAIA (J.PItrat's system) and two appendixes give more scientific or technical details (both from a mathematical point of view, and from the software implementation point of view).
J.Pitrat is not a native english speaker (and neither am I), so the language of the book might be unnatural to native English speakers.
For software developers, this book give some interesting and original insights about how can a big software system be conscious, and continuously improve itself by experimentation and introspection. J.Pitrat's CAIA system actually had several long lifes (months of CPU time) during which it (the CAIA system) explored new ideas, experimented new strategies, evaluated and improved its own performance, all this autonomously. This is done by a large amount of declarative knowledge and meta-knowledge: the declarative word is used by J.Pitrat in a much broader way than its meaning about programming languages: a knowledge is declarative if it can be used in many different ways, hence has to be transformed to many procedural chunks to be used. Meta-knowledge is knowledge about knowledge, and the transformation from declarative knowledge to procedural chunks is given declaratively by some meta-knowledge (a bit similar to the expertise of a software developer), and translated by itself into code chunks.
For people interested in robotics, ethics or science fiction, J.Pitrat's book give interesting food for thought by explaining how indeed artificial systems can be conscious, and why they should be, and what that would mean in the future!
This book gives very provocative and original ideas which are not shared by most of the artificial intelligence or software research communities. The interesting side of the book is to explain an actual software system, and the implementation meaning of consciousness, the bootstrapping approach used to build such a system, etc...
Disclaimer: I do know Jacques Pitrat, and I actually proofread-ed the draft of this book. I even had access some years ago to J.Pitrat's software, which is not (yet!) published."
Almost all of this book (except the appendixes) can be read by readers interested about artificial consciousness and artificial intelligence, robotics, cognition, (even without any expertise on software or artificial intelligence). In particular, I believe that people who enjoyed reading Dennet's or Hofstadter's books (like the famous "Godel Escher Bach...." should like reading this J.Pitrat's latest book.
The author J.Pitrat (one of the French oldest AI researcher, also AAAI and ECCAI fellow) discuss about the usefulness and implementation of a conscious artificial being (currently specialized in solving cleverly very general constraint satisfaction or arithmetic problems) and describes in some details his implemented system CAIA (an artificial researcher in artificial intelligence), on which he is working for about 20 years.
J.Pitrat is claiming that strong AI is an incredibly difficult, but still possible, goal and task, and is advocating the use of some bootstrapping techniques (common for software developers) is mandatory to achieve it, notably thru conscious, reflective, meta-knowledge based systems. Only AI systems could build AI! But J.Pitrat view on AI is quite unusual and challenging.
The meanings of Conscience and Consciousness is discussed (in chapter 2), and the author explains why it is useful for human and for artificial beings. The, Pitrat explains what does "Itself" means for an artificial being (in chapter 3), and discusses some aspects and some limitations of consciousness (in chapter 4). Why is auto-observation useful (chapter 5), and how to observer oneself (chapter 6) is then explained. Conscience for humans, artificial beings or robots, including Asimov's laws, is then discussed (chapter 7), and how to implement it (chapter 8), and enhance or change it (chapter 9). A last chapter discuss the future of CAIA (J.PItrat's system) and two appendixes give more scientific or technical details (both from a mathematical point of view, and from the software implementation point of view).
J.Pitrat is not a native english speaker (and neither am I), so the language of the book might be unnatural to native English speakers.
For software developers, this book give some interesting and original insights about how can a big software system be conscious, and continuously improve itself by experimentation and introspection. J.Pitrat's CAIA system actually had several long lifes (months of CPU time) during which it (the CAIA system) explored new ideas, experimented new strategies, evaluated and improved its own performance, all this autonomously. This is done by a large amount of declarative knowledge and meta-knowledge: the declarative word is used by J.Pitrat in a much broader way than its meaning about programming languages: a knowledge is declarative if it can be used in many different ways, hence has to be transformed to many procedural chunks to be used. Meta-knowledge is knowledge about knowledge, and the transformation from declarative knowledge to procedural chunks is given declaratively by some meta-knowledge (a bit similar to the expertise of a software developer), and translated by itself into code chunks.
For people interested in robotics, ethics or science fiction, J.Pitrat's book give interesting food for thought by explaining how indeed artificial systems can be conscious, and why they should be, and what that would mean in the future!
This book gives very provocative and original ideas which are not shared by most of the artificial intelligence or software research communities. The interesting side of the book is to explain an actual software system, and the implementation meaning of consciousness, the bootstrapping approach used to build such a system, etc...
Disclaimer: I do know Jacques Pitrat, and I actually proofread-ed the draft of this book. I even had access some years ago to J.Pitrat's software, which is not (yet!) published."
