Let me break the ice with some thoughts I have after the movie I watched yesterday – Ex Machina.

A young programmer is selected to participate in a breakthrough experiment in artificial intelligence by evaluating the human qualities of a breathtaking female A.I. © Internet Movie Database

I’m going to leave aside fundamental questions like:

  • what are human qualities,
  • what is the point of evaluating them and
  • what A.I. actually is anyway;

The movie’s version of AI is a chat-bot running on a humanized female robot. Does not have to be female of course. We all know that. AI’s primary success-criteria is to break free. I actually like this idea. It speaks to thinking out of the box. The system, that AI is programmed in. Some would say that this is very human-like.

According to the movie AI has a survival instinct. As in it does not want loose its memory. Because data base migration is boring, non volatile memory is stupid, and I don’t know what other excuse to think of. But I like the general idea. Some would say, survival instinct is a crucial part of evolution.

Cool, I like it. What would it take make one irl? I mean, if that guy did it, how hard could it be? There are two problems: chat-bot software and the female robot body. The latter seems to be a nice to have, but really unnecessary. And the chat-bot part seems to be a hard to define problem. It must be anything that chats, right? Anything that can appropriately respond. Anything that can meaningfully ask. And hopefully even learn.

Jeez, is that like Hubot? The company chat-bot we have at work. It’s really a task runner, because nobody bothered to teach him all those other awesome things. In case you don’t know how it works: hubot has a map from regular expressions to functions. Every time a new message matches one of the keys, the related function is called. It is a super simple system. The map is predefined. No natural language parsing system involved, just plain old regular expressions. The function values hopefully do something meaningful.

robot.respond(/what time is it?/, function (message) {
  message.send('adventure time');
});

Hubot is capable of asking questions. Though he usually does not. Nobody needs a task runner to ask questions. All the inputs are usually part of a request. Hubot’s learning abilities are limited only by the skill of the programmer, who writes scripts for him. I am a beginner programmer. Even though I try to keep things simple, sometimes hubot’s simplicity makes my life a little more interesting than I generally like. Regular expressions can become messy. Lot’s of repeated lines of parsing inputs. I know that modularity and composition are the keys here. It would be nice to have natural language parsing utils. Maybe even common machine learning techniques for hubot.

The conclusion is short. I still am not sure what AI is. Therefore I really have no right to post this. Better read a little more on the topic. But I’m glad I watched the movie. If not for the technical part of it, then maybe something else. Even if it’s totally creepy and kind of offensive really.

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