2006

pdt

wed
jun
21

(Dream) There's a lot of commotion and activity in the other room, and I find refuge with a black man in an otherwise empty room. There's some discussion, I can overhear, as to whether the black "bum" can be trusted with any money. Myself, I stay out of it. (Fin)

pm
3:34

When I got home yesterday I found an e-mail from David Daniels. Here's all it said:

http://www.thegatesofparadise.com

http://www.dartmouth.edu/~news/releases/2006/06/19.html

http://www.thegatesofparadise.com

3:40

I looked at the middle link, to dartmouth college, and wrote the following e-mail, which I copied back to David:

Subject: an outsider's new direction in artificial intelligence

In regard to: http://www.dartmouth.edu/~news/releases/2006/06/19.html
Artificial Intelligence Turns 50

Dear Ms. Knapp,

I'm Richard Ames Hart, Dartmouth Class of 1968, and have literally been doing independent research in artificial intelligence for the last twenty years, culminating in taxi1010.com , Non-escalating Verbal Self-Defense.

The idea is this: artificial intelligence, as practiced by most people in the field, has to do with making machines somehow "smarter." If this idea were translated into the world of exercise equipment, we would be designing exercise equipment to make itself somehow "stronger," a ludicrous endeavor. Exercise equipment is for making people stronger, not exercise equipment stronger! Similarly, artificial intelligence should be an endeavor to make people smarter, not machines smarter!

taxi1010.com approaches this task by saying, if a person uses a sentence that is somehow "hurtful" to another human being, why can't artificial intelligence techniques be used to teach people how to respond in effective ways so as to set boundaries, apply a sense of humor, transform the rhetorical framework into a healing paradigm, and all without acting like a geek or wonk?

It does this by encoding each word in an attack with specific candidate responses, which people use in the real world.

You break words down into letters to look up that word in a dictionary, a form of artificial intelligence. Why shouldn't you break sentences down into words to determine effective responses? This is taking artificial intelligence to a whole new level: teaching people, and especially children, how to be more capable and street smart, based on actual words in a sentence.

I hope you can take some time to look at taxi1010.com to more fully explore this new direction, and to further see how this research in real-world artificial intelligence can be of use to people in everyday life.

          ______||||__
    _///  @       #      \____
tt{|_____1010_____|}}}}*
         /0               /0

3:42

The last sentence was a little awkward, and after a margarita and pizza, still not sure how to rewrite it, I just sent it off into the ether.

4:01

Susan E. Knapp wrote: "Brock, Jim, This comes from an alum who saw the most recent press release online. I'll leave it up to the two of you how to reply. -Sue"

"Dear Richard Roe,

"John Kemeny wrote a book called Man and Computer in 1972 in which he discussed the symbiotic relationship between humans and machines. I hope that is the way we can go.

"Thanks for your comments.

"Jim Moor Director AI@50"

9:12

Some education, huh? Amazingly clever.

9:16