Imagine a drug, a pill called Death, that will give you one perfect week, sending energy, purpose, intelligence and optimism surging through your system.
But Xinhua also has another purpose — intelligence gathering — and two days later the agency's reporters sprang into action, leaving a government-organized media tour to sneak into a hospital to photograph the bodies of those slain during a wave of bloodletting by Han Chinese after the initial burst of unrest.
Almost nobody in A.I. these days seems to aim for what Alan Turing himself envisioned — a flexible, general-purpose intelligence of the sort that human beings have, which allows any ordinary individual to master a vast range of tasks, from tying his shoes to holding conversations and mastering tenth-grade biology.
Bruce Swartz, a senior attorney at the department of justice, told the committee the data was collected "only for a valid purpose – foreign intelligence and counter-terrorism".
There is a respectable line of evolutionary argument that scheming, and the manipulation of the behaviour of one's fellow humans that goes with it, is the primary biological purpose of intelligence.
Forget the hypothetical emergence of general purpose artificial intelligence, at least for a moment: we're handing over more and more of what happens in our world, today, to the speed and efficiency of unthinking deciders.
No wonder, Zimbardo argues, popular culture teems with moodles ("man poodles") or infantilised jerks (think: Jackass, Failure to Launch, Step Brothers, Hall Pass and The Hangover series), devoid of economic purpose, emotional intelligence, temperamentally unable to commit or take responsibility.
In particular, he thinks that people are too scared about general purpose artificial intelligence.
How then can you imagine that the universe as a whole is devoid of purpose and intelligence, when it embraces everything, including these artifacts themselves and their artificers?" Numerous other examples are reviewed by Moore (2009).
If needed, the steps of GHA can be partly or completely superseded by the special purpose mathematical/artificial intelligence based algorithm.
Instead of trying to solve the grand problems of general purpose artificial intelligence, Siri focuses on a few important vertical domains, for example: restaurants, movies, events, local business, weather, and services and data on the Web that relate to them.
