[Advaita-l] The Foundations of Adhyāsa - 7 (Western Perspectives) (Part II)

[S Jayanarayanan]

 (Continued from previous post.)
 
 
How about a futuristic Technology “creating” Perception in the laboratory, like within a Robot? Would this not disprove The Argument
of Sankara? Here is an extract from an interview with eminent Roboticist Rodney Brooks, that appeared in the magazine
Technology Review published by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), one of the world’s premier Engineering Universities:
 
  https://www.technologyreview.com/s/401409/lord-of-the-robots/
  
  "Lord of the Robots", in Technology Review issue dated April 1, 2002
 
  TR: “But a robotic lawn mower still can’t be relied upon to cut the grass as well as a person.
  What are the major problems that still need solving?”
  
  BROOKS: “PERCEPTION IS STILL DIFFICULT. Indoors, cleaning robots can estimate where they are
  and which part of the floor they’re cleaning, but they still can’t do it as well as a person can do.
  Outdoors, where the ground isn’t flat and landmarks aren’t reliable, they can’t do it.
  Vision systems have gotten very good at detecting motion, tracking things and even picking out faces
  from other objects. But there’s no artificial-vision system that can say, ‘Oh, that’s a cell phone,
  that’s a small clock and that’s a piece of sushi.’ We still don’t have general ‘object recognition.’
  Not only don’t we have it solved – I don’t think anyone has a clue. I don’t think you can even get
  funding to work on that, because it is just so far off. It’s waiting for an Einstein – or three –
  to come along with a different way of thinking about the problem. But meantime, there are a lot of
  robots that can do without it. The trick is finding places where robots can be useful, like oil wells,
  WITHOUT BEING ABLE TO DO VISUAL OBJECT RECOGNITION.”
 
It is amusing that the Director of MIT’s Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory frankly admits that the
field of Robotics is hoping and praying for “AN EINSTEIN OR THREE” to arrive in order to solve the problem of Perception,
thereby crowning it as perhaps the toughest problem in all of Science and Technology – the solution of which may be well-nigh
impossible (using only physical entities)!
 
A recent article on Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning concurs with Brooks’ assessment:
 
  https://www.quantamagazine.org/machine-learning-confronts-the-elephant-in-the-room-20180920/
 
  "Machine Learning Confronts the Elephant in the Room", by Kevin Hartnett, September 20, 2018
 
  “In a new study, computer scientists found that artificial intelligence systems fail
  a vision test a child could accomplish with ease. “It’s a clever and important study
  that reminds us that ‘deep learning’ isn’t really that deep,” said Gary Marcus,
  a neuroscientist at New York University who was not affiliated with the work...
  The new work accentuates the sophistication of human vision – and the challenge
  of building systems that mimic it...The result takes place in the field of
  computer vision, where artificial intelligence systems attempt to detect and
  categorize objects...In the study, the researchers presented a computer vision
  system with a living room scene...It correctly identified a chair, a person,
  books on a shelf. Then the researchers introduced an anomalous object into the scene
  – an image of an elephant. The elephant’s mere presence caused the system to forget
  itself: Suddenly it started calling a chair a couch and the elephant a chair, while
  turning completely blind to other objects it had previously seen.”
 
 
(To be Continued)