Multitasking and day dreaming

Discussion in 'Intelligence & Machines' started by grazzhoppa, May 11, 2004.

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  1. grazzhoppa yawwn Valued Senior Member

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    I do not know much about current theories towards developing AI or current technology, but I was reading in a psychology book about why people day dream or space out and it brought up a question. This psych book claims the human mind "day dreams" often because off all the input that it is keeping track of, and that to actually focus on one thing requires a lot of effort and by default, if you're not forcing yourself to concentrate on something, your brain will "space out."

    Now, this might be an drastic imperfection in the way peoples' minds opperate or it could actually have been an advantage, early on when the brain was responsible for keeping track of all the senses in order for the person to be aware of their surroundings so they could hunt better, or just survive in the wild. But now, it would be advantageous for our brains to be wired to be ,by default, able to focus on one with little effort. Obviously the machines and AI that is currently in use has their processing power usually focused on one task at a time, like personal computers or automobile building robots. But to create AI, the machine has to be multitasking, as our brains do, taking in all the information from its sensory "organs" and deciding what to focus on and which is more of a priority in a single moment before more sensory information is gathered to process.

    The question is whether AI will suffer from day dreaming or spacing out, as our brains do. Creating something in our likeness, would it suffer from the same detachment of reality when there is so much input being fed to it, as what happens with our brains where we must muster some energy to focus on one thing out of all the stuff being processed in the "background?"

    Like with driving, we are aware of what's happening around us, from smell to sight to sound. But we are focusing on moving our hands and feet in tune with what we see right in front of us. It's easy to stop focussing on the road and simply indulge in a good song from the car stereo or start a converstation with the person sitting next to you. But we consciously make the decision to give information regarding what's in front of us priority over environmental things like the stereo or people next to us. Would AI suffer from the problems of getting distracted from things like ambient sounds or distractions from inside the car? Would the AI be "programmed" to ignore certain sensory information in order not to day dream, space out, or unfocus from the task at hand?
     
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  3. Stryder Keeper of "good" ideas. Valued Senior Member

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    I think these things are a given when trying to produce an intelligence system, especially on a neural network, since all nodes parallel process information and the system has to work out which ones to listen to.

    As you question would it get spaced out? Well the answer probably is that it would since currently the artificial intelligence systems currently created don't seem to do to well at constructing sentences, perhaps it's because they don't seem to have the interest in the words that would actually make a sentence carry across well.

    With us humans, we have many ways to gain attention when we have information to be processed. One particular method is correctly formatting paragraphs with parenthesis like fullstops and commas. However this method is based on how we use spoken dialect. Where we place a comma or fullstop is determined by our natural pauses for breath.

    There is also the way in which we tone what we say, for instance what I have written here you could read aloud in many different ways, with drops and pickups in tone to draw attention and occasionally stop peoples minds from wondering about what you previously said. (When people tangent in thought as they process what they have heard)
     
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