Please think about what you are doing, and try to avoid loose wiring.
My wife has suffered from Post-Natal depression ever since the birth
of our son 4 and half years ago. Yesterday, I took her into hospital
again to ensure that she is safe (she is plagued by voices at the
moment) whilst the new medication ramps up to a level which is
therapeutic for her.
This, as you may expect, is quite distressing for all of us. We have
support systems in place though, and my work are being frankly
fantastic about it all.
It gets me thinking though. I can program computers to get them to
behave in particular ways, but how do you rewrite the programming in a
brain.
I recently read 'Pragmatic Thinking and Learning - Refactor your
Wetware' by Andy Hunt (www.pragprog.com).
This is great for yourself, or even trying to suggest to others. I
have found some easy to apply tips and some which I need to get round
to trying, but one thing it shows is that we have set ways of doing
things. Our Logic/Linear-mode (L-mode) tends to be dominant, and seems
to have the most influence, unless, as the book suggests, we
deliberately try to get information from our Rich-mode (R-mode).
The key thing with this though is that we control the flow of
information, we determine if we will do it. We seem to have a
controlling Sensible-mode (S-mode).
And this is what I like about Computer Programming. A computer really
only sources from L-mode, and it allows the L-mode to control it. So I
can write a program that is logical, instructs the computer, and it
doesn't get anything else influencing it (well, assuming I have taken
care of external running factors such as OS, file locations...)
My wife though, is not controlling her own thoughts. What is, we don't
know, but not her. Her S-mode seems to lose it's control. Whether the
thoughts are L-mode or R-mode based (traditionally, it would look like
those things are "Right-brain" thought processes, although when she
explains her thoughts, you could argue the Logic-mode is having a
say).
Luckily, this time, my wife's S-mode seems to be working enough to
stop her finishing the act, but she is getting somewhere close to it
(popping enough pills out of a blister pack, but at the last minute,
throwing them in the bin instead of taking them).
So where am I going with this.
My opening request is to think about AI, and not introduce loose
wiring. Truly Artificial Intelligence should be able to think both in
L-mode and have R-mode, but with an overriding S-mode to control all
the thoughts.
I like programming because what I produce only has to act logically. I
am in turmoil because my wife has some 'loose wires' which are not
allowing her to act completely rationally, and I can't fix the bug in
the program to correct it.
If AI is a true goal of the computer technology industry, then lets
hope that the coding which goes into it won't allow for the loose
wires which screw up the controller, or else we might just have a lot
of depressive machines which need careful looking after whilst we feed
them lots of pill programs to try to make them better.
Here's hoping that the pills my wife is now taking soon start to sort
out her programming. I'm glad I never became a psychiatrist.
From blog: http://vampiresoftware.blogspot.com/2010/03/artificial-intelligence-vs-human-brain.html
Writer: Andy Brown: I am a software developer at The Sanger Institute,
Wellcome Trust Genome Campus, Cambridge, UK, working on applications
and pipelines with New Sequencing Technology Data (around 5TB of it a
day!)
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