Free Will, Computers, and Forbes Magazine

Here. 

Comments

[Alan]

Smilansky will certainly love the closing!

[Mark Smeltzer]

LOL. Despite the article's catchy title, the first mention of the phrase free will occurs in the last sentence of the article:

The algorithmization of counterfactuals now brings us a giant step closer to understanding why evolution has endowed humans with the illusion of free will, and how it manages to keep that illusion so vivid in our brain.

[Paul Torek]

The actual subject of the article, which had nothing to do with free will, is pretty impressive - if the claims are true. Can AI systems really come up with intelligent judgments about whether smoking tends to increase or decrease academic achievement?! Can they sort relevant evidence from irrelevant facts? Without having the domains delineated for them and handed to them on a silver platter? More power to 'em, but I'd like to see some actual evidence.

[Mark Smeltzer]

There's nothing truly general purpose yet... there are some things that work pretty well that are domain specific, but nothing on the scale that the article implies that we will be seeing soon. (My work intersects this field from quite a bit, and one day I would like to be full time devoted to AI studies.) Until we invent MUCH more efficient means for storing data, it is unlikely that any of this stuff will leave the mainframe world anytime soon. (Though there are some interesting suggestions about using spare cycles on home PCs to power a distributed AI.)

The Wolfram|Alpha (http://www.wolframalpha.com/) answer engine is the closest thing, but it uses handpicked, authoritative databases to fuel its inferences. In other words, it doesn't have a process of consuming raw data and making judgments about the validity of raw data. If you haven't played with it already, it is definitely worth spending a few minutes to check it out.