IBM inventing brains on a chip

OK, not really. Here is a piece of the story

Instead of requiring the type of programming that computers have needed for the past half-century, the experimental chip will let a new generation of computers, called "cognitive computers," learn through their experiences and form their own theories about what those experiences mean. ... "Imagine traffic lights that can integrate sights, sounds and smells and flag unsafe intersections before disaster happens," said Dharmendra Modha, the project leader for IBM Research. "Or imagine cognitive co-processors that turn servers, laptops, tablets and phones into machines that can interact better with their environments." CNN

It seems like I’ve heard this before. Didn’t we have fuzzy logic a ways back. Wasn’t the promis of fuzzylogic similar to what they are talking about here?

I imagine a computer that get’s pissed off that it can’t have sex with that cute toaster in the bread room and deliberately causing wrecks at the intersections it watches over, just for a laugh.

I imagine computers requiring therapists instead of programmers to fix bugs.

The first computer that cries when it is about to be turned off will topple our society.

Will computers modeled after the human condition require religion to function properly? Will they need to believe in something in order to not fall for anything? Will said devices want to have vacations? Will they need to take coffee breaks? Will they want recreational drugs like digital alcohol? Will they feel slandered to be referred to as digital life forms?

Will intelligent computers be held responsible for their actions instead of the programmers who simply told the device to learn?

Say a computer in charge of a traffic light decides to change the light in order for an emergency vehicle to go through against the other traffic. Say someone gets killed in an accident caused by the change in traffic flow. Who or what is responsible? The programmers never told the traffic light specifically when to change the light.  The programmers told the traffic light to learn when the best time to change the light happens to be and do that. Who or what is at fault?

The programmers will say that they set parameters like the following.

• Make traffic flow without interruption
• Let emergency vehicles through more quickly
• Route traffic around anomalies.
• When everyone wants in to / out of town, give that traffic priority
• When there is an event route not related traffic away from the venue

These all sound like great things, but that kind of thinking by people gets people killed on our cyty streets every day. Do we expect intelligent computers to do a better job?

I want R2-D2, Not Maxmilian.