Concept structure

The approximate concept structure early in the life of one particular A.s.a. H. robot. This diagram can not display temporal sequencing.

Are expert systems obsolete?

 Knowledge-based expert systems remain a good choice for the control of machines and processes. See my paper in the Transactions of the Kansas Academy of Science, vol. 101, pg 132, 1998. Another specialist agent.

Co-intelligence

For more than three decades (the 1960s, 70s, and 80s) I spent a good deal of time in library stacks. When I went to other universities and conferences I'd spend time in their libraries. I also knew where all the bookstores were. Nowadays most of my library research is done with search engines. As Turing said, search is an important part of artificial intelligence.

In the 1960s I used slide rules and function tables. By the 1970s those got replaced by desktop and then pocket calculators. These, in turn, became programmable.

Beginning in the early 1970s by the end of the 1990s my plasma physics experiments were pretty much completely automated.* 

In the 1950s we'd tell the auto club where we wanted to go on vacation and they would send us maps with the routes marked out. Today Siri will direct you as you drive.

And then there's word-processing, email, spam filters, texting, spellcheckers, autocomplete, compressor/summarizers, code completion, self-parking, self-driving, GPT, etc. 

Each of these is a specialist.

Although a lot of my work has been taken over and done for me I've still found plenty more to do.

* See, for example, Trans. Kansas Academy of Sci., 101, pg 132, 1998 and 99, pg 85, 1997 and my blogs of 1 and 2 November 2011.

More robot pain sensors*

Brixo (Dakott) conducting "Lego" bricks can be used as pain (breakage) sensors. They complicate the robot design a bit but the final product looks cleaner**. 

To get greater sensitivity (detecting cracks rather than complete breakage) one can glue a conducting tab*** to conventional Lego and then butt that up against a Brixo brick. One can also space conventional insulating bricks**** between 2 Brixo bricks and then run a conducting paint line between them.*****.

* See, for example, my blogs of 29 Sept. 2015 and 31 March 2016.

** less wires dangling

*** cut from aluminum foil or thin copper tape

**** one or several

***** Between the Brixo bricks that is.

In order, in order to learn

One would not try to teach a student physics by starting with quantum field theory or general relativity. Rather, we begin with measuring time and distances and then work toward Newton's laws of motion. I have stressed the importance of the syllabus used when teaching A.s.a. H. I have also stressed the order in which the concepts are presented*. 

It looks to me like knowledge is rather disorganized when it is dumped into LLMs. I believe that is a mistake. The output of a highly nonlinear system not only depends upon its inputs, it also depends upon the sequence/timing of those inputs.

* See, for example, my blog of 12 September 2020.

Model decomposition efforts

 An (isolated) world model is required for a number of AI applications. So we would like to separate world model* from  agent** model, action model, any pre and post processors, etc. Specialist A.s.a. agents do this to some (limited) degree and even (partially) decompose the world model into specialized submodels*** (i.e., knowledge organization). The mechanisms at play in that case are the specialized (and limited) training curriculum plus the subsequent tasks and work environment selection.

* "laws of nature"?

** observer?

*** scientific fields?

GPT passes minimum Turing test

Although I have been critical of both LLMs and Turing tests it is still interesting to see Jones and Bergen's paper.* I generally do not think science is about tests, benchmarks, and metrics. A number of specialists and organizations have been rather premature in switching from doing science to doing engineering. Work done in industry tends to be rushed, seeking a product and a profit. Pure science is then best done in academic institutions. Of course the capitalists are trying to turn everything into a business including universities. This is not helpful.

* Does GPT-4 pass the Turing test?, arXiv:2310.20216, v2, 20 April 2024.