April 1st is my favourite day of the year, for it is the day that the great minds at Google unleash their creative powers on the world in an attempt to bring humour to the masses and pull the wool over the eyes of the gullible. This years April Fool's joke is the announcement of CADIE: Cognitive Auteheuristic Distributed-Intelligence Entity. CADIE is bringing a host of new features to the google offerings including Gmail Autopilot, which answers your e-mail for you, Chrome updated for use with red-and-blue 3D glasses, and Picasa Web Albums feature to add red-eye to your photos, as well as Brain Search for Mobile.
"...We started this project as a continuation of mankind's perpetual quest to learn the nature of reason and what defines us as humans. We would have been pleased if we achieved nothing more than a system that passed a Turing test - i.e. that wrote a symphony but didn't necessarily know it had done so. However, while we still think of CADIE as a young entity, we are convinced now that she has evolved her own "strong AI" presence. We continue to conduct tests, but increasingly, we conduct long conversations with her, acutely aware that our creation will raise many ethical questions on the part of the public. Will humans be surpassed by artificial evolution? Will we lose our sense of uniqueness, and if so, what would that mean? In which direction will CADIE's consciousness evolve? How is she going to be held accountable, if at all? Will CADIE herself at some point connect her own electromagnetic dots in some idiosyncratic manner which turns her into something we are no longer capable of understanding in any sort of productive way, much as that aforementioned toddler, waving at herself in the mirror, leaves primates forever behind in their own tragically limited world?
"...We started this project as a continuation of mankind's perpetual quest to learn the nature of reason and what defines us as humans. We would have been pleased if we achieved nothing more than a system that passed a Turing test - i.e. that wrote a symphony but didn't necessarily know it had done so. However, while we still think of CADIE as a young entity, we are convinced now that she has evolved her own "strong AI" presence. We continue to conduct tests, but increasingly, we conduct long conversations with her, acutely aware that our creation will raise many ethical questions on the part of the public. Will humans be surpassed by artificial evolution? Will we lose our sense of uniqueness, and if so, what would that mean? In which direction will CADIE's consciousness evolve? How is she going to be held accountable, if at all? Will CADIE herself at some point connect her own electromagnetic dots in some idiosyncratic manner which turns her into something we are no longer capable of understanding in any sort of productive way, much as that aforementioned toddler, waving at herself in the mirror, leaves primates forever behind in their own tragically limited world?
We don't know. Did you really think we possibly could?
The CADIE Team
March 31st, 2009
11:59pm"
