Carnegie Mellon University has taught a computer how to read and learn from the internet.
According to Dennis Baron at the Oxford University press blog, the computer is called NELL and it is reading the internet and learning from it in much the same way that humans learn language and acquire knowledge. Basically by soaking it all up and figuring it out.
NELL is short for Never Ending Language Learner and apparently it is getting brainier every day.
NELL has learned over 440,000 separate things with an accuracy of 74 per cent. This is about the same as a C grade at school.
It judges the facts it finds. Some it promotes to the idea of being beliefs if they come from a single trusted source, or if they come from several less reliable sources.
One of the problems the boffins have is that more than half of what NELL gives a "beliefs status" too were made from evidence from less reliable sources.
This makes NELL more of a rumour mill than a trusted source and once NELL changes a fact to a belief, it stays a belief. It cannot unlearn stuff.
This is a big problem when NELL makes mistakes: the computer incorrectly labelled "right posterior" as a body part. How the boffins laughed.
NELL's human handlers had to tell NELL that Klingon is not an ethnic group, despite the fact that many earthlings think it is.
At the moment NELL thinks that the First Amendment is a musical instrument, the Second Amendment is a 'hobby,' and is completely unwilling to admit to any knowledge of the fifth amendment at all. A bit like the recording industry and most lawmakers in the US.
Sounds like NELL is about as smart as your average U.S. Congressman.
I think NELL is telling us to some degree how things really are on the internet in today's society rather than how we perceive them to be.
For example, people spend lots of time talking about their hobbies on the internet to connect with similarly interested people. Far fewer spend their time discussing the US Constitution and it's violation by the US government.
Even a former US Constitutional Law Lecturer, who now happens to be the US president, spends more time talking about how to violate the US Constitution than discussing it.
In conclusion, NELL is merely a reflection of the information available on the Internet. If humans were only able to learn form a single data source & sense, we would likely come to the same conclusions.
I am shocked and dismayed that the researchers are forcing personal bias down on this impressionable AI, now its Klingon but tomorrow it could be Native Americans, Hispanics, White Americans, or even Wookies!
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I do hope it wasn't NELL that _wrote_ this article - I was hoping our first real AI wouldn't be a class-A jackhandle.
I fail to see how it is learning abstract concepts.
This sounds more like google 2.0
The enslavement of humanity by machines is now inevitable, but having it carried out to the tune of Rick Astley would just be too humiliating.
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I'm busy creating my very own AI program as well and have come to the conclusion that showing it how to collect information from the Internet would be the best and easiest way for it to learn a multitude of languages and all that other need to know stuff.
I think that these guys should make it so that NELL is able to change the "belief status"s of things it believes in or not. Humans are able to this and so AI programs should be able to.
And to comment on Simon's post. I doubt this program would be able to take of the world like skynet. First of all, the AI program would have to first have emotions to be able to come to the irrational decision to kill humans and secondly it would have to actually be able to create other programs to actually do anything other than surf the web and do what it's programmers made it able to do.
Good Luck guys with NELL :)
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