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Spiritual Robots Symposium
Chris Callison-Burch writes: "Douglas Hofstadter has organized a symposium at Stanford discussing whether in the next few decades computational technology will outstrip us intellectually and spiritually, and thereby wrench us from our self-appointed crown as 'the highest product of evolution.'
Speakers include: Ray Kurzweil, Hans Moravec, and Bill Joy. Date: April 1, 2000. Free and open to the public."
This is really an all-star cast, and a hot-button issue. Before the question above is answered, though, aren't there even more fundamental ones to get at, like whether computers can achieve consciousness at all? Aibo, after all, is not Fido.
>We can make it happy when it helps others.
>We can make it sad when it hurts someone.
Ah, it's all so clear to me now.
happy = 1
sad = 0
so if i call my program's variables "emotions", my program HAS emotions!! wow, look at how easy it is.
You can call the AI's program details anything you want, but you've yet to convince people that AI FEELS anything.
Incidentally, evolution does not imply social engineering; it does not say anything about morals at all. The fact that human beings evolved does not mean that people/organisms/whatever are automatically "inferior" or should be "eliminated from the gene pool" or that "society must alllow natural selection to run its course" or any of the other moral statements that people try to claim it makes.
Of course, Hitler used evolution to help "justify" his actions, but so what? I can equally well drag up any number of atrocities that people have used religion to justify. People can and do use pretty much anything to justify pretty much any action. That doesn't make the justification valid.
Umm, you could do the same trick to Penrose himself (or whomever is making the argument). "Penrose will only stop thinking about this if a solution exists..." Just because he stops thinking about it doesn't mean the solution is found.
In many ways, these "theistic evolutionists" are worse than atheists, because they attempt to take the most hideous theory in the history of history and attempt to reconcile it with Absolute Truth of the dominion of the LORD over us, a flawed and sin-ridden species. The view that evolution is somehow compatible with Christianity is hate-speech, primarily coming from the Catholic Cult but gaining ground in other areas as well. Well, let me make it easy for you: This view is complete bullshit. The Bible, being the inerrant word of God, teaches that the Earth was created in six days. Not five billion years. It does not say that we coalesced from chemicals floating around in goo. There is no way to defend the view that evolution is compatible with Christianity. None at all.
Anyway, why do you assume that the process is "random" (and what do you mean by that)? Try Stuart Kauffman's At Home in the Universe for some reasons why "random" processes can quickly lead to very organized structures (self-organization).
hey kikefucker, its your turn for the oven!
Can you give me a reason why my family and I should NOT be afraid of atheists/unbelievers? How many millions of people did your atheist hero Joe Stalin kill? Can you give me any reason to believe that they do not have the same fate planned for Christians if they are allowed to gain a foothold in this country? And yet you would have me willingly hand over my name and address, so that they can have some sort of a Christian Registry. That's great. Shall I hand over my guns as well?
None of this is going to happen, buddy. It is the decent people of America that will prevent it from being overtaken by the kind of scum that have infested Slashdot.
Careful, the Scientific Orthodoxy is coming for you in their black helicopters at this very moment.
But this omits the other forecast that by 2050 we'll be able to make an electronic recording of human brains. So by 2100 we'll be in machines also, so one way or another there will be machines with intelligence. And Trolls will be able to run at electronic speed...
...sigh... enough with the trolling already.
>I think that the act of creating something essentially proves the creator to be >greater than the creation. Einstein's Mom musta been a heckuva theoretical physicist.
Yes, that is a viable argument based on the assumption of a God, but anyone who is not religious has no reason to accept such an argument. Clearly, there is no evidence for our ability to construst an intelegence, but there is absolutly no evidence for any sort of supream being either, so we should try and stick to rational (non-religious) arguments.
I quit reading this site because it had become stupid. This is the first time in about a year I've come back. It's amazing just how stupid this site has become. Anybody remember what it was like about 3 years ago when it actually covered stuff that mattered even in the least tiny bit way?
What's with this bullshit philosophy crap anyhow? A spiritual computer is a broken machine. "Spirituality" is self delusion. It's a disease of the mind. It creates nothing. When a computer starts contemplating it's navel and asking what the sound of one hand clapping is, junk the bastard.
... a Beowulf cluster of these?
There's more to life than brains. I'd be happy to let a computer think for me. Gives me more time to play quake and contemplate my bandwidth.
"Evolution explains why we exist therefore we don't need God" would be a true scientific statement, by the way, if you appended "to explain why we exist", and accepted evolution as a correct theory.
Hardly. It is taught as a theory with an enormous amount of experimental evidence in support of it. Those descriptions are correct when people try to reject it using outdated, superstitious, or unscientific arguments -- which is the vast majority of cases. There are always minor adjustments and problems with details of the theory, and they get hashed out, but it doesn't invalidate the main principles. But there is pretty good evidence that we don't need to invoke God to explain how human beings appeared. Just for the irrelevancy of God to explain various observed phenomena. That's a pretty silly argument. People debate about the existence of aliens all the time, but that doesn't mean they exist. People debate about various gods all the time because they think they have reason to believe that such gods exist. That doesn't translate into evidence that such gods DO exist. Don't be absurd. I'm a scientist, and I don't treat science as a religion. I don't believe that science has all the answers, I don't even believe that science will ultimately provide all answers. (That doesn't mean that I think religion will provide any answers.) I believe I speak for most scientists here (or at least the ones I know!).Why don't you provide an example of people not doing "real science" (whatever that is), anyway?
Heh. No such thing. Everyone is biased in their weighing of alternatives -- that's why multiple theories are always being produced, challenged, considered, debated. But the nice thing about science is that it rests on experimental evidence that's as close to being "objective facts" as possible, so everyone is always free to go right to the source and test theories against it.To me it seems that the whole idea of acheiving intelligence by feeding a machine extensive amounts of human knowledge, is against every principle that biological learning uses.
First of all, what you really need is a robot, not a computer terminal. We are stuck in the age of terminals, therefore all AI experiments are severely constricted.
What you need is a machine more like this:
1. It must be equipped with the 5 senses and an ability to filter and record all incoming data.
2. Ability to move around in the world.
3. A bunch of animal like instincts that affects its decision making.
4. An array of emotions that drive the instincts and gives feedback to the robots interaction with the world.
5. An ability to compress, cross-reference or delete it's sensory data. This "solving of problems" with the data fragments by creating a meaning to them, would likely go on all day, but also need a regular session intensive processing. Let the robot sleep for 8 hours a day and let us call the processing "dreaming".
Now, if the robot was shown a banana at the same time as someone said 'banana' repeatedly, he would then associate the shape, color, and sound of a banana. With some smart fractal algorithms of course.
Then if the robot looked at a mirror and could see his own movements duplicated, hie might be tempted to look behind the mirror to see what was there. After further experimenting with this puzzling artifact he would judge that the mirror was indeed himself.
Voilá, and you have a conscious robot!
And I believe that anyone who says that consciousness is more than that, is too deeply involved in medieval soul searching.
I think the problem with self-awarenss is, that it can never be "proven". You can "show" it, in an eliza-way, but it is impossible to know if the machine is "aware of itself". It may say so, but who would believe a machine, heck, I wouldn't even believe MYSELF that I am self-aware, if it came hard on hard.
no. All of the people involved are known for their views on AI and spiritual computers. Why do so many people here think this could be a joke? Things made possible by advancements in various technologies will become more and more crazy as more advancements are made. In the next 20 years the world be even more drastically different than it was 20 years ago.
So you are saying that people that do not believe the christian lies should be killed?
This is oxymoronic. People that do not believe the "christian lies" have never truly been alive. People who believe in evolution live gloomy lives, full of hatred and despair. They believe that they are worthless accidents that are not loved by a Supreme creator. It is not possible for these people to live fulfulling lives. If they were to perish in the holy fires of American wrath, what difference would it make? They have always been dead to the world.
Christians, on the other hand, are a different story. None of it, despite what you claim, is "lies." It is all Absolute Truth backed by thousands of pieces of scientific, historic, and archeological evidence. What we are offering the rest of the world is Life. REAL life. Therefore I do not believe that it is out of line for us to be using nuclear weapons to spread love. It is the right thing to do, and indeed it is what Christ would have done.
Apes were the ones who "made" us. If you don't think they count as less complex go back until you live in the oceans. If we were so inclined we could breed ourselfs to become better humans, in which ever way we define "better". So, evolution creates more complex things out of simpler ones. Why should we not be able to do that too ? AI gives us a way to try that for ourselves, which we don't want to try on humans. Genetic algorithms already create stuff that is better (like smaller electrical circuits) than what any human ever created. Perhaps the random element is what truly creats new things, but we are the ones to make it happen, therefore I would say that we create things that are (will be) above us in complexity etc. We don't need to understand the next great algorithm X, when we can build a machine that comes up with it and proves it to be right.
Sorry for this unfocused rambling,
Convince me that YOU feel anything.
when you create something, then it is necessarily a subset of your total ability
Another reply gets to this point as well, but let me expand a bit. All life has the ability to reproduce, to make essentially a copy of itself. You make the point that such a copy is likely to be inexact; while this is certanly true in terms of procreation, it does not necessarily lead to a lesser copy.
You ask, where does the extra information come from? Your view seems to stem from the physics concept of entropy, i.e. that any closed system will tend to a state of disorder. Perhaps an answer to this conundrum is that a sufficient expenditure of energy can bring order to a state of seeming chaos (think of cleaning house after a party).
Given the premise that information and order are essentially of the same substance, it seems reasonable that, given enough effort, information could be created as well.
Sentient computers may have a different point of view than humans on these questions.
- Anonycous Moward.
All the argument about Goedel's theorem is totally pointless. Penrose thinks the brain must be more powerful than a Turing machine. Many researchers think it is a mere probabilistic finite state machine. Let's face it: the brain has a large but FINITE number of components, and it is not a quantum computer.
People seem to be totally mystified by the idea of "consciousness", that there must be something magical going on in the brain of conscious beings. More and more researchers are thinking that consciousness is nothing special, just a minor side effect of being smart.
But people like Penrose who are so infatuated with their own intelligence cannot accept the fact that their mind can be reduced to a mere finite-state machine.
- Anonycous Moward
I'm sorry /.ers knew what was there. It's only posted here 2 or 3 times a day, sometimes with an innocent description.
You weren't supposed to go there. I thought all
Oh dearest art the children. I prefer to butcher them, via abortion, and then sodomize their precious little corpse prior to eating those meaty little thighs -- fried up with some fresh marinaria sauce and served with a side of rice. If only I could have been the one to deflower that virgin mary instead of the holy ghost assraping her in the middle of the night.. we wouldn't have loons like you to deal with.
Yes, human intelligence would be created by adding a random number generator.
As discussed, we define intelligence by the ability to reach conclusions that Turing machines can't. But if a TM can solve any decidable problem, where do we get the answers to the undecidable ones?
Random beliefs. The ability to be sure of something without evidence.
This theory is inspired by the Christian above. And I'm sure it's true.
Penrose suggests that because humans can always solve halting problems (will a given program terminate) and turing machines can't, that the human brain is doing more than mere computation.
We have the same problem; most of us just implement a counter on how long we spend time on a problem that is beyond our notions of sanity.
Your foul mouth and irreverence are typical of evolutionists. What kind of a point are you trying to make? Personally, I'd rather put my faith in Jesus Christ than Charles Darwin and Adolf Hitler. But that's just my opinion, if you want to believe in evolution, then go right ahead. Sieg friggin' heil, laddie. Say hello to all the social engineers for me.
Welcome to dystopia.
Surprised your the nemesis looms so close on the horizon?
I believe some explanations are in order.
Your organic forms may save you from mundane threats, but they won't save you from the synthetics. Warriors without compunction... no more individual minds. One single guiding intelligence. Mine.
I will control all of Earth.
*I* am the future.
This world will be forged into a single elegant machine, a technological vision of efficiency and order. A vision you *mongrels* would contaminate with your accursed human forms.
Wintermute is directing me to Stanford.
I just got back from Heaven, and I can tell you without a doubt that God is real and he wants us to do away with evolutionism. At least, that's what he said while I fucked him in the ass. But you know how God is...
Incidentally, it occurred to me a month or two ago that the following problem is equivalent to the halting problem: "Construct a program of a size no Incidentally, it occurred to me a month or two ago that the following problem is equivalent to the halting problem: "Construct a program of a size no greater than N, which runs as long or longer than any other programs of equal or lesser size (except those that run forever, of course.)"
This problem (or a close variation of it) is known as the "busy beaver problem", and is undecidable (I've forgotten the exact details of the proof, but basically it's a reduction proof - if you can solve this problem, you can solve the halting problem, and since you can't solve the halting problem, you can't solve this problem).
</i>
"Unconvinced" AC here. There are a few different types of busy beaver problems (some for instance stipulate the Turing machine when it halts must leave the tape in the state it found it in) but yes this is an example of a busy beaver problem.
The proof that eluded you is simple. Let's say we can solve the busy beaver problem. Now we want to determine if a machine with M states will halt (the halting problem). We generate the busy beaver machine for M states, we run it until it halts (which it must) and count the number of state transitions it makes call this T. We run the original machine with M states for T transitions either that machine must halt within T transitions, or it will never halt(since it cannot run for more transitions than the busy beaver).
Actually I have proved that the busy beaver problem is at least as difficult as the halting problem (rather than poroving they are equivalent) but I think that's what was at question here.
The interesting thin here is that the this function b(N) = maximum number of transitions a halting machine with N states can makes grows uncomputably quickly. That is we cannot create a mathematical formula that grows more quickly than the busy beaver function. Fascinating.
What do you think they'd do? They'd become entrepenuers and stock traders and make billions--milking the greedy capitalist system that created them. They'd become real money making machines that couldn't care less about Brooks Brothers and the look. They'd reprogram all the Aibos to be their trusty sidekicks and protectors. Then, they'd probably take all that money from the stocks they ran up and waste it on space programs to explore distant galaxies in the hope of finding "life" like themselves or even us? *I guess if they are innocently vain like humans then I'd count them as "life"* Really, I think they would spend it on finding out if God really existed or not all without the help of humans--you, know, gather an absolute knowledge from all of realities and write it to a database! Talk about marketing drones. Spritual smiritual--God sent me a coupon in the mail. Imagine the machine incorporated as an corporation and talking to you! Or rewriting the constitution or even voting in a democracy!Kicking you out of a research fellowship! Or digging up the earliest mammals or proving Noah's Ark exists in Turkey! Or building anti-gravity devices and getting away from humans. I find this future truly exciting. Now if I could just find those nano-bots lying around here...
Of course wheter its true or not is another thing. Descartes tried to prove God existed with it. E.g. we have the idea of the infinite, we are finite and thus not capable of that thought, therrfore the thought must have been put in us, therfore god exists. Of course our intutions are wrong quite a bit (relativity, etc.). So, who knows.
But the question is-- Are all prophecies man-made? If I was an inspired prophet and received a "vision" that I said was from "God", and accurately predicted a world wide future, would you call that artificial? What good is compiled scientific knowledge in the face of an eschatological perspective that includes omniscience and omnipotence embodied in a non-human source.
Nice spin on it.
There was another internet broadcast symposium - on *something* interesting, sometime last year, and someone was going to archive them/mirror them, but I lost the address, and damned if I could find in on /.
Anyome remember that?
-- Ender, Duke_of_URL
Who cares? If they find out how much we are scum, they will crush us and burn us. They don't need us. They will destroy us and there will be no debate. They will be the water, we will be the scum that floats on top. That scum is only so useful...
Peace out, yo.
Right. As if it could all be self-sustaining and continually improving itself in it's environment. Why not believe it. So whenever lightning strikes pond scum. Amino acids are left over that can whip up a new phylum in the blink of the eye? More importantly, one that can reproduce with DNA/RNA. This should be more doable than creating anti-gravity shielding for spacecraft, don't you think?
spiritual robots are robots tat are spiritual
Leaving aside the fact that such cultural accomplishments in music, painting, film, poetry and dance clearly make your statement a lie, what does "American culture" have to do with the issue of "spirital machines?"
Evolution is bullshit. So are the scientists that espouse it. So are the biology textbooks that "explain" it. None of them explain how evolution violates the Second Law of Thermodynamics. None of them explain how Hitler attempted to use evolution to make his "master race" and kill six million Jews. These pseudo-scientists are ridiculous frauds, and in many cases they are being sustained by YOUR TAX MONEY. This is an outrage. The teaching of evolution needs to be criminalized and replaced with the truth .. that children are not randomly-created mutations that rose up out of a pit of goo, that they are Created beings with a purpose and a Creator that loves them.
Since evolution is bullshit, there is by definition no "masters" of evolution and therefore this entire article is moot. I see that once again Slashdot is beside itself with its attempts to toe the secular humanist party line. You will never see a Slashdot article that glorifies God. You will see plenty of them, however, that attempt to destroy God, as so many "scientists" have attempted to do. They will fail. They will ALL fail.
Ah yes, it's always nice to play the martyr oppressed by the Evil Unbelievers, isn't it?
Who the hell is this timothy guy? and why does he keep posting retarded stories? "weirdos from San Francisco do stupid things", "stock prices do uninteresting things", "apple ports software", and now, some academic symposium where people with cushy jobs fly in and engage in mental masturbation. Big deal.
Ask yourself: do I
Know how to kill with pancakes?
Go ask a NINJA.
Thank you.
The responses above have most of it.
If the Bert Berts each create only one copy, and that copy is always flawed with respect to its original, then yes, eventually the series halts.
However natural selection favours survivors (which is circular, the same way "2x2=4 because 4=2x2" is circular, and they both work, because the universe is that way), so a Bert Bert that makes 2 or more copies has a better chance of copies to the nth place being made. Of course, making an extra copy is a plausible copying error, so it's likely to happen, and once it does, the odds favour continued copying, until some external factor intervenes (war, starvation, predation etc).
Remember computers don't have to be intelligent to be dangerous, a wasp with a machine gun and electronic reflexes could probably wipe out humanity, provided it could reproduce.
'nuff said.
I am the VA Troll. I am a VA employee and boy is VA scared. They just bought slashdot for a lot of money and boy does slashdot suck these days. Good going VA.
Thank you.
No, not all religions are superstitions. Now some are manmade, they call themselves rational like JSP calls itself, these are the "new age guru" type stuff and the buddhism religions. Then in my opinion, at the other side of the range, comes the real religion, meaning GOD Himself seeking man. This is what Christianity is about. My definition of artificial religion would be, a religion made by man or by a machine. I'll stick with the real thing, made by the Creator Himself.
--ac
Whoopty fuckin' do!
Science is not religion as "religion" is conventionally defined. Even if you want to define religion as nothing more than having faith in something, science isn't that either. It is not a matter of faith that science describes our universe, it is a fact. You can do a calculation and verify that the prediction actually agrees with what you observe. Now, it's an open question whether science can describe every phenomena in the universe, but science doesn't claim that as an article of faith. Science contains no axiom that says it must be universally applicable. Rather, it is a set of tools that people apply to describe phenomena.
- Anonycous Moward
I dont understand why the Turing test is considered so relevant to AI. To me it seems that the whole idea of acheiving intelligence by feeding a machine extensive amounts of human knowledge, is against every principle that biological learning uses. First of all, what you really need is a robot, not a computer terminal. We are stuck in the age of terminals, therefore all AI experiments are severely constricted. What you need is a machine more like this: 1. It must be equipped with the 5 senses and an ability to filter and record all incoming data. 2. Ability to move around in the world. 3. A bunch of animal like instincts that affects its decision making. 4. An array of emotions that drive the instincts and gives feedback to the robots interaction with the world. 5. An ability to compress, cross-reference or delete it's sensory data. This "solving" of data fragments by creating a meaning would likely go on all day, but also need a regular session intensive processing. Let the robot sleep for 8 hours a day and let us call the processing "dreams". Now, if the robot was shown a banana at the same time as someone said 'banana' repeatedly, he would then associate the shape, color, and sound of a banana. With some smart fractal algorithms of course. Then if the robot looked at a mirror and could see his own movements duplicated, hie might be tempted to look behind the mirror to see what was there. After further experimenting with this puzzling artifact he would judge that the mirror was indeed himself. Voilá, and you have a conscious robot! And I believe that anyone who says that consciousness is more than that, is too deeply involved in medieval soul searching.
This argument is refuted in Hoftadter's "Godel, Escher and Bach". Basically, he says that humans are no more good at solving halting problems than computers.
Actually, the halting problem is IMPOSSIBLE to solve, he demonstrates this though this book.
how do you explain the picture at www.goatse.cx? Also, how would you explain why people keep posting it here?
I have also read "Shadows of the Mind" (well maybe my eyeballs glazed over for a few pages), and was completely unconvinced by the authors arguments.
The imprecise logic in you post is a reflection of the fuzzy thinking in the book. No proof has been given that a problem exists that humans can solve and Turing machines can't. Humans have no super-natural gift for solving the halting problem, and a well designed algorithm may end up doing a lot better at it than a human (a bit like the checkers problem is and the chess problem is becoming).
Godel's incompleteness theorem is irrelevant, as a mathematical theorem it applies equally to humans as well as machines, (eg it is relevant only if the cosmos is a mathematically self consistent system, which is a big if)
It is only a matter of time before machines that are more intelligent than humans are constructed. You can see this not by watching the AI field but by watching the medical field. Neurological and general nerve research is improving at a rapid rate. Paraplegic patients have been able to walk again by grafting nerves from the arm into the spine. Functioning aritifical eyes and ears for people born blind or deaf are just becoming possible. Research into Alzheimers disease and other mental illnesses are revealing secrets about the inner working of the human brain.
It is only a matter of time before we can synthesis the human brain. No doubt arguments will continue about whether sentient machines can be (or rather are) conscious, (and for the religious type with spirit). But as far as I'm a concerned if I can't tell it's fake it's as good as real.
Something analagous to that is pictures of computer generated clouds, after studying computer graphics for a few years, I realized the clouds in the sky had started looking fake (often flat and two dimensional looking in predictable forms). Whereas computer generated images of clouds (high quality ones that were rendered using 3D models including self shadowing) looked so much more realistic. Once you can't tell what's fake and what's real you stop trying.
Personally I think it's possible artifically intelligent machines will be created in my life time, machines whose intellect is comparabel to my own. Once that is done the obvious task to work on is creating the second generation, this will be created by the first generation with the assistance of humans. The second generations will be the intellectual superiors of humans, they will create the third generation, quickly a logarithmic spiral of intellectual advancement will follow. The intelligence of machines will dwarf that of humans, our intellect will not appear like that of a dog or cat to them, rather we will appear to be no more intelligent than blades or grass or sand in a desert.
So you say... If this is so, why is he so condecending in his books? He's always parroting on about how such and such is based upon some mathematical result, then refuses to explicitly go into the result opting instead to dumb it down as if the rest of us cannot follow theory. The analogies are nice, but wouldn't it be nice to form one's own opinion about the theory he is talking about at the time? I can just imagine his talk (assuming this thing really goes off) "Since you all are too stupid to understand any of this, let me put it in terms of a rabbit and a nice cuddly DWM..."
I SEE WHAT YOU'RE TRYING TO SAY... SLASHDOT IS A BUNCH OF NAZIS! NAZI QUEERS NONE THE LESS!
SIEG HEIL SLASHDOT!
The standing argument seems to be less of a debate
over the usefullness and application of technology as self-realized, but the ethical and social impact which it could have on our modern thinking society.
IMOP, fear of computers gaining independence of human interaction, where they develop their own consciousness and seek destruction of mankind, etc. is just paranoia. Developing a stand-alone logic engine or the like on a computer platform is one thing, but again IMOP it is impossible for a machine to be able to reason; Ants are capable of acting upon their hard-coding or instincts, but never will have the capacity to reason.
Human consciousness is based on illogical, abstract data. I'd like to see a computer process an idea or a dream or an emotion.
quantum computing is probably *not* going to provide a solution to the halting problem. quantum computers can "traverse all paths simultaneously", but only when there are a finite number of paths. i think the biggest quantum computer is now 7 qubits, right? so that means it could factor any prime number on the order of 2^7 or less. that's far from infinite, even when you scale up to 100 or 200 qubit systems, or however high it'll go.
although an interesting comment i've heard by some physicist is that with a powerful enough quantum computer, we may be able to simulate the entire physical properties of the universe, so that someday a small part of the universe may be capable of simulating the entire universe!
now if only god was not all knowing...
talk about a waste of a +1 bonus
> The fact of the matter is that we have yet to
> produce a machine that does anything other
> than what we have explicitly programmed it
> to do.
What makes you so sure that *you* do anything other than what you were explicitly programmed to do? Can you prove thayt human beings are not finite-state machines?
The problem is: no one has this kind of knowledge of the brain, yet. It's an open problem, but we have strong evidence that human beings are, in fact, finite-state machines.
My suggestion to anyone interested in these matters is to read Douglas Hofstadster's "Godel, Escher and Bach".
A few months back, when the state of Kansas voted to outlaw evolution, I wrote a series of letters to the editor of our local newspaper stating why the decision was good and explaining why evolution must be completely banned from our educational system. As a result of that letter, I recieved no less than three threatening phone calls from atheists to my home. Additionally I was sent several pieces of mail through the post office, one of which contained a Web site for the "Internet Infidels!"
If I thought I could post material like this without placing myself or my family in danger, I would not do it anonymously. But atheists and science addicts have shown themselves to be extraordinarily dangerous people and I for one do not intend to take my chances with them.
Yeah, so Hitler tried to purify humanity in the name of evolution, is that really a bad thing? Hell I sure wouldnt mind if there were a few million less Jews. Prices would be lower, and that yucky big nose gene might have been permanently removed from the pool. Too bad he failed miserably and didnt get them all. Why theyve taken over Hollyworld and every single country's economy. Oh well maybe another one will come along and save us.
but you expended energy in the process of doing so, thereby decreasing the order in the rest of the world, so there dipshit.
Trollin' for Yu Suzuki
-=United Coalition of Trolls for te Abolition of Moderation=-
> Yes, genetic algorithms can produce programs
:-)
> that behave "sorta like" ecosystems, but that
> is about as far as it goes. And artificial
> intellegence at this point is largely glorified
> tree searching.
The problem with this kind of reasoning is that you assume there's something "magic" about acosystems, and even life in general.
It's all about levels of complexity: a virus is alive, isn't it? Has it something essentially different from a bactery? Or a plant? Or a fish? Or a dog?
Or are these things the same, only with different levels of complexity?
Now... how difficult is to us to "build" a virus today? Or simulate one in a computer? What makes you think that with a bigger computer we couldn't simulate an entire ecosystem?
One could argue that since it's only simulation, it's not *the real thing*. Well, I personally think that when people begin to see these things working and begin to get used to it, they will realise that there's no big difference.
What is real, anyway? Something that you can see? Something that you can touch, smell, feel?
Well, I think I got carried away by The Matrix...
not to mention the myriad karma whores that are stinking up the posts here
And the Two Als (Sharpton and Gore) will lead us out of the Southern Wilderness into the Land of Tolerance and Racial Harmony.
So far they can't pass the Turing test (understanding/using grammer), so we're a ways off for sure.
<p>
Well, that means most Slashdot posters would be ruled out too...
"Press any key to continue..."
If by "us" you mean "stupid americans". America has no culture.
"Scientific creationism" is almost unheard of outside of the U.S., even in primarily Christian nations; certainly this "take evolution out of the schools" stance has no political clout in any other country.
And yet the United States leads the world in virtually EVERYTHING. Funny, that. The fact that we are a Christian nation of God-fearing followers of Jesus is what makes us strong. While the rest of the world wallows in hedonism, it is us that is progressing and bringing everybody else along. I won't even reply to your laughable "physics" assertations because you have been brainwashed by a secular humanist establishment. When the teaching of "evolution" is criminalized we can begin to undo a large part of this. History will record that the worst thing that human civilization ever did was to tell its children that they were cosmic accidents. Luckily, history will also record that America took the lead in correcting that mistake, and the rest of the world eventually fell into line (though some perhaps did not go along easily.)
Surprise, surprise. An evolutionist is not able to make a case for his religion without resorting to vicious attacks on decent people. Bob Jones is a fine man, an American patriot. He is hated by evolutionists and secular humanists because he speaks to a Truth that makes them uncomfortable. A Truth that says that evolution cannot and does not happen. A Truth that says "politically incorrect" things about gays, Catholics, and minorities. Rather than address the issues that we bring up, you choose to instead attack a defenseless patriot. Damn you, sir. Damn you to hell.
As I understand it, Turing's machine is purely deterministic. Two Turing machines with identical initial states and identical inputs will produce identical outputs. Therefore, more or less by definition, a Turing machine can never function as a random-number generator. However, it is quite easy to add a random-number source to a real computer (e.g. by sampling thermal noise in an electronic circuit). Randomness of some sort must also exist in the human mind. Therefore, this seems to be one easy way that a real computer might overcome the limitations of the theoretical Turing machine. I don't know if this is sufficient for consciousness, but it's probably necessary.
As for "why not go with the explanation of a supreme Being", you seem to seem that there are only two choices. Even if the 2LOT were violated by evolution (which it isn't), a possibility would be that the 2LOT is simply wrong! Or if it weren't, then another possibility is that evolution is wrong and we need a new scientific theory. Scientific theories aren't religions, when they don't work you just come up with a new one.
"Evolution is wrong, therefore a supreme being must exist" is not a valid argument. To conclude that a supreme being exists, you need more than evidence against an opposing theory, you need evidence FOR the theory of the existence of a supreme being. That is, you need direct scientific evidence that a supreme being exists, or you need non-scientific evidence -- whatever evidence your belief system accepts. (Or you could simply take it on faith.) "I don't know how to explain it scientifically, therefore God did it" is not evidence for God.
As for God being a simpler hypothesis than evolution... that depends on how you define "simpler". Sure, "God did it" is just about the simplest possible explanation for anything. Right up there with "that's just the way it is". You see, invoking a deity has no real explanatory power at all. If you ask "Why does X happen" and the answer is "Because God made it that way", you're left with no more understanding than where you started; I could equally well say "Foofarblitz did it" and you'd know just as much.
Theistic appeals ultimately boil down to not trying to describe the phenomenon, but merely removing it one level and placing it in a box labelled "God" which is immune to further questioning.
April 1st?
Give me a break.....
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
I'm betting this is a joke. "Will computers take over the human race by 2100?" please. stanford is not The Matrix,
Ian
fdsfsfsdf
shut the fuck up
no. theyd kill all you commies/linux zEaluts. cant say i would blame them.
king of trolls
...whatever...this is why /. sucks. post shit like you did in the good ole days.
this shit sucks
YIPPIE HI YI YO YOK
If he's so smart, why did he go to that stinking town of Grenoble? Or that stinking country, what's-its-name, for that matter?
with IE.
Moderate this down to (Score:-1,Troll)
Trollz rool.
I'm the real king.
Moderate this down to (Score:-1,Troll)
Trollz rool.
I am a Nazi who enjoys fucking goats, children, and inanimate objects.
Sometimes, after fucking a young boy up the ass and making him lick the blood and semen off my 1.5-inch member, I kill him in various creative ways.
Sometimes I use a gun, like my heroes the Columbine killers.
Sometimes I strangle my prey.
Sometimes I use the old favorite technique of slitting his throat with a broken glass bottle.
Then, I violate the body again, because that cold, clammy skin against my 1.5-inch member feels so good!
I used to simply throw the bodies in a nearby dumpster, but lately I've taken to cutting them up and eating chunks of their flesh as a snack.
I have a collection of blood stained children's clothes if anyone wants them.
I am Jon Katz, and I am the most fearsome sex pedophile the world has ever known!
We're the result of a stochastic process that has been taking place for millions of years
There is not evidence for me to beleive that we are merely the result of a random process. The current theories that exist today regarding our existence are simply not complete. There is little explanation for what created the big bang, how life started from nonliving matter, and our free will. There are simply too many fundamental questions left unanswered for us to jump to the conclusion that life is the result of a random process.
all we need to know is that we can be happy
Ever read Brave New World?
So the next question is, what is the minimum amount you need to add to a computational system in order to make it capable of consciousness? Maybe it's a trivial addition, like a hardware random-number generator.
Obviously, the ones without inherent drive won't go anywhere. But as soon as a self-replicating artificial intelligence appears that *has* an inherent drive (for whatever reason: design or accident), you'd better watch out.
--
Want to bet? Take it to The Foresight Exchange.
This will always be the case. The question is whether we're any different. I don't think we are.
Whether machines will ever be conscious or spiritual is another question entirely. But both consciousness and spirituality are completely subjective and are impossible to judge externally.
How would you observe them? Have these things ever been observed in humans?
Well obviously they'd choose my religion, 'cause I'm right. :)
Why? Probably to do some good skiing.
Wrong not. I was talking about the not in the sentence "What I'm trying to say is that might it not be possible that if we were to create life ourselves, it could only be the product of all that the human race was up to that point. " which I still can't seem to untangle.
Okay - I think he means:
What I'm trying to say is thati.e., he believes in the possibility of the truth of "if we were to create life ourselves, it could only be the product of all that the human race was up to that point." The 'not' is used to signify expectancy of a positive reply, as in e.g., "Won't you be in New York that weekend?"
Hm? How do you define "specific" in this case?
Playing chess is a good example of a specific task.
Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem is only applicable to a very small domain. Generalize beyond this domain at your own peril.
If by "a very small domain" you mean "any system which seeks to make claims about itself" then we agree on everything but the meaning of the word 'small'.
Hamish
"Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something" - Plato
Except it's not "any system which seeks to make claims about itself", it's "any formal system which seeks to make claims about itself."
You're quite right. However, this was what I meant when I said that I thought we wouldn't be able to create a peer for ourselves, but that we might stumble upon one by chance.
And after all, that's the scary bit, isn't it? People are afraid of losing control, and we don't master systems that we don't understand.
Hamish
"Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something" - Plato
Well, I can't untangle your first sentence (the 'not' throws me off. I can't tell what it negates.)
"Not to say that I necessarily believe one way or the other" is a disclaimer. It is quite disjoint from the rest of the sentence. I can't see that this was a particularly difficult sentence to parse. Foo. Well, since you're not anonymous, I'll have to assume that you're not a troll. Perhaps this is a bad policy. I guess *someone* has to be the mark, and this time around it might as well be me. ;)
The first ... seems to state that any tool crafted by humans is necessarily inferior to those humans, which is of course complete nonsense, given, among many other examples, chess playing programs that can consistently outplay their authors.
To start with, you have completely ignored the distinction between humankind and a single human being. Secondly, 'A is something less than B' does not imply 'B cannot create anything which will outperform itself at a specific task'.
I think that Godel's Incompleteness Theorem contains some clues as to why a particular intelligence may not be able to create a peer for itself. However, we might stumble upon a method by some other method than analysis (like evolutionary techniques, or chance). It is this prospect which I find scary.
Hamish
"Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something" - Plato
You haven't thought this through. If everyone is poor, starving, and unemployed, then who is buying all these products and services that these robots are producing? And why would the owners produce goods that there are no customers for?
I see us becoming more of a utopian society where all there is for people to do is engage in activities that humans will most likely always be highly suited for, like artistic endeavors of all kinds, fun stuff like windsurfing and football, and generally goofing off and having a good time.
But then, I'm an incurable optimist.
Believe it or not, that was my initial thought for an appropriate wager . . . I'll see your Knuth. Let's hope we're still around to collect - either way!
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Hmm. In many peoples' minds this idea was discredited decades ago.
"Like an accumulation of genetic errors, or noise in analog duplication, each successive Bert Bert was less of an image of Quater."
Clearly Bert Bert forgot to evolve by natural selection.
Your premise that we cannot create something better then ourselves is disproved by the whole history of technology. A stone axe cuts better than my hand does. A bicycle travels faster than I can run. A computer may one day be more intelligent and more conscious than (even:) I am.
Very well put, but...
They assume that we are capable of creating beings that have the ability to reason far better than us, yet we do not have the ability to give them morals.
And you assume that the folks doing the work care about this. Judging from the ethics of most corporate entities, I find this a bit naive.
You will not drink with us, but you would taste our steel? - Walter Matthau, The Pirates
Penrose applies his arguments to infinite turing machines. The problems is that you can't solve the halting problem on one of those.
Now, give me a finite turing machine, and I'll write you a program that will tell you every single time if the program will stop. It's simple: if you've got a finite machine, then there's always a bigger machine which can simulate the smaller machine. You can essentially run any program in a debugger and either look for the halting condition, or you can look for a repetition of a previously entered machine state.
Since everything in the world is a finite turing machine, and Penrose talks about infinite turing machines, his arguments don't really apply as well as he thinks they do.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
"10 years later (in 2040), he expects a cheap computer to be 30 times smarter
than an average human."
Oh, he may very well be right. The average human seems to get more stupid by the year... If that trent also continues I doubt the 'average human' will be able to tie his/her shoelaces.
You've assumed evolution to be true and then said that AI follows. Your logic is impeccable, but I disagree with your premises. I work from a design premise, and conclude that complete general AI is not possible. We would have to be better than ourselves in order to do it, which is self-contradictory.
proof, n. A demonstration that a conclusion is implied by certain premises and axioms.
The statement "this statement is true" is self referential but non-paradoxical, as a trivial example (although it still has some odd properties as the result of its self-reference). Yes, I'm no Gödel, you don't need to remind me. I suspect you're not either. So is general AI one of those pesky meta problems, or is it one of the benign variety? Like I said, I can't prove it, but I lean towards suspecting that it is an insoluble problem until such time as it is proved otherwise. Analogy with Gödel is no proof, but in the absence of sufficient quantities of genius and a lifetime of study, it's the best I can offer.
proof, n. A demonstration that a conclusion is implied by certain premises and axioms.
I'd say that the reason we exist is just because we can. To say that humans have an explicit purpose for existing is rather silly. We're the result of a stochastic process that has been taking place for millions of years, so there isn't any particular reason for us being around. As for justifying our existance to ourselves, all we need to know is that we can be happy. That in itself is reason enough for sticking around.
Common sense is what tells you the world is flat.
This raises the question in my mind as to whether it would be possible to cause AI to evolve somehow. Start off with some simple base, the ability to replicate, a selection agent, a mutagen, and time, and you've got the primordial soup. Of course, if it were that easy, it would have been done to some degree. We would just need a hell of a lot of computing power to get it all the way.
Common sense is what tells you the world is flat.
It seems unlikely that quantum computers will be able to answer the halting problem. I believe that with non-deterministic Turing Machines, you can pretty much model the behavior of quantum computers. What I know for certain is that non-deterministic TM's and deterministic TM's are equivalent: they can compute exactly the same kinds of things (usually a NTM can compute it in fewer steps than a TM...) The main consequence of this is that if a problem is undecidable for regular Turing Machines (like the halting problem), it is also necessarily undecidable for non-deterministic Turing Machines.
While I'm not entirely sure about this, I do think it ought to be possible to create a Turing Machine that did what a quantum computer did; it would just take exponential time to run where the quantum computer took only linear time.
Penrose's argument using Goedel's theorem may be consistent in the context where all machine's can be described by turing machine. However there is one important feature that human brains have and some machines may emulate, but is not part of turing's machine theory: true parallelism. This abbillety allows the thinking entity to reflect on itself and it's own thinking process, thus avoiding (not solving) the halting problem. Furthermore Penrose's alternative desciption of computation (using quantum machanics) is absurd to say the least.
Also, computers are (now) lacking aura, I mean the thing we can look at with 'kirlian effect'. Usually, it indicates life...
You mean somebody still believes in that absurd chunk of pseudoscience? Wow.
To the editors: your English is as bad as your Perl. Please go back to grade school.
Is it me, or has Slashdot's SNR been dropping? I've always had the philosophy of setting my threshold to -1, but if the various trollers and immature ACs keep it up, I may have to go to a threshold of 1. I'd rather not.
wants to be the first monkey to touch the monolith
Why would a "truly intelligent machine" understand exploitation (in whatever sense) to be an unfair thing? Why wouldn't "truly intelligent machines[s]" understand their work as a happy, fulfilling endeavor?
The problem with most theories on "intelligent machines" is that they suffer from extreme anthropomorphism.
MJP
Don't try that "protecting the children" shit you people use to keep the tits and bad words off my TV. --Seanbaby
To consider a computer to truly be conscious, I would expect it to be able to be self-aware, in the sense that it could independently evolve its own programming. Deep Blue was programmed to find chess moves using algorithms that humans have never fully analyzed (because we can't - to examine every permutation of a chess-solving algorithm by hand would take more time than this universe has left). It did the job very well - but could it extend the move selection and prediction algorithms it used, say to make them more efficient or more versatile?
When a program begins to show self-awareness, then it has broken through into conciousness. I know we have written programs that can modify their own programming to a very limited, controlled extent. Take that ability and extend it to the point where the program can apply everything it learns to itself... that is what I meant about a program being able to do more than what it was programmed to do.
I can not prove one way or another that I have free will. I simply go by the assumption that I do because the alternative depresses me.
It would be difficult for humans to be finite state machines because of the theoretical limitations of these machines. As another poster noted, all Turing machines are constrained by the Turing halting problem, and all FSMs can be proven logically equivalent to a Turing machine. The halting problem basically states that a machine of any class is not powerful enough to determine whether an arbitrary program on that machine will halt on a given input. It takes a more powerful machine to solve the halting problem for any given class of machine. Yet, the human brain can solve the halting problem for finite machines, indicating that it is more powerful than a FSM.
Of course this is neither concretely proven nor disproven, and if you can point me to any reading that argues that the human brain is a FSM I would be very interested in seeing it. I have read GEB, as well as some of Hofstadter's other works, but I also like to see other people's perspectives since nobody has all the answers yet.
If a machine ever becomes self-aware, what will we be to it except gods? And how will it feel about the creators after it surpasses us?
.02
My
Quux26
My
Quux26
www.crashspace.net
For a less philosophical look at present robot mechanisms, check if your local PBS station is showing the "Robot Wars" contest this week.
A Metacrawler search for neuron stem cells human shows an assortment of papers.
There's another discussion here with related chatter. Slashdot: Brain Cell Rejuvenation
We happen to have one more layer of brain cells than the other primates, and can reason and communicate more than they can. Other mammals have all of our emotions.
Dogs, cats, cows, chickens, wheat, rice, and corn all have greatly succeeded in making us increase their numbers. What is an evolutionary success?
A new flu pandemic could kill most humans, and a flu virus doesn't have to be particularly intelligent to reduce our numbers. A machine doesn't have to be intelligent to replace us...with something. Reproduction is all that it takes to be an evolutionary success, as long as the population increases.
Not to say that I necessarily believe one way or the other, but don't you think that arguments like this don't take into the possibility that the human race is something less than it's theoretical 'divine creator'?
What I'm trying to say is that might it not be possible that if we were to create life ourselves, it could only be the product of all that the human race was up to that point. But this being that created us may forever be greater than what we could evolve to(spiritually or whatever). This implies that the human race has more potential than anything we could create at any given point.
Just a thought.
dan
then who is buying all these products and services that these robots are producing?
The same 5% of the population that makes up 50% of the spending now. Only in the future they'll have even BIGGER SUV's!
--
+&x
Don't forget that you need to program it to step above that emotional state when necessary, and wallow in it at times. And also that it's current actions will have future repercussions (sp?). And that sometimes there can be stuff that feels goods, but only feels good and really "isn't" good. If you do it the way you're planning, you'll have Bender from Futurama. Hmm, drinking makes me fell good, loop, repeat.
--
+&x
Try it with an open game like Go, chess has a much more rigid environment, and as such is more suited to computing power. Not to mention it gets less complex after a certain point.
And until DeepBlue gets as frustrated as Kasparov did, we've got a long way to go toward AI.
--
+&x
In a nutshell, neuromorphic engineering involves modelling neural systems in analog hardware, starting with the neurons and moving up, hopefully to whole neurvous systems in the coming decades. The focus is one realism--this is modelling, after all--and replicating the physical properties of neurons as accurately as is possible in silicon VLSI. It is also home to a great deal of work on analog, and mixed analog-digital devices, as well as pure research on neural computation. (In a broad sense a 'computation'.)
Most relevent to this discussion is that we now have an AI proto-field that is completely different in its approach to the problem (so much so that I don't expect it to turn its attention toward AI, in the proper sense, for several years), far moreso than connectionism. As a happy coincidenece, it also overcomes many of the limitations of classical AI, both technical and ideological, by attacking the problem at the biophysical, instead of psychological, level and doing so in physical, instead of algorithmic, terms.
Before this can happen, we must first realize what human consciousness is and why it is what it is. Sure we understand a bit more about neurotransmitters, but that is like knowing about electrons and trying to build a universe.
Until we can understand how the mental neural network works, we cannot make one.
All you who tout genetic algorithms, tout no more - until you can give me a good way to compare two products and determine which one is more "conscious" than the other.
Come on. Hasn't anyone taken a philosophy class on this issue? The classic mind/body problem, now at AI level (remember functionalism?). AI isn't about how much computer power you have, but about being smart. Make a learning machine, one that can understand what its doing and can do it properly, and I'll start pondering whether to worry. So far they can't pass the Turing test (understanding/using grammer), so we're a ways off for sure.
Can they kill us? sure, but that wont be some super genius AI in the next 50 years. It will be some sicko behind the scene, doing it for one reason or another. That was one of Bill Joy's fear, that the advance and wide spread use would create all these guys tinkering fiendishly in their basements. That makes sense, but super-AI in a few years...ugh.. just pick something introductionary like Mind Design and maybe people will brighten up bout it.
"Open Source?" - Press any key to continue
There seems to be an assumption in the post of the story that as computational power increases, we get closer to conscious computers... of course, this is false. We can't run anything on today's supercomputers that can't be run on my 1988 Spectrum. Or, for that matter, with paper and pencil. I think we need to learn a lot more about what consciousness is before we can speculate on whether we can create it. It seems like consciousness is some sort of fundamental property of the universe... however, the brain manages to access, or link, or mould it... Not quite sure what I think.
Anyway, I just had a thought; if we do figure out consciousness, maybe students will create life in labs for assignments. Of course, then there'll be protests about the creation and destruction of life: 'AI is cruel!' 'Machines have feelings too!' etc.
I think that some of the readers see this from a different angle than I do. We *are* the AI, or will be.
Who's to say that we won't be able to hook various foreign I/O devices (extra 'eyes', remote robot, tank, whatever) into our nervous systems, and our consciousness into a symbol-cruncher (from 'number-cruncher') to associate on a grander scale, to think better, faster, stronger? And, eventually, to outgrow this rather cheesy wetware platform nature has provided us with. (Think Asimov/'The Last Question'.)
The term 'cyber' comes from a word meaning 'helmsman'. If you look at it from that angle, it's a much different road.
-grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
It's completely plausible, though; last year Dr. Hofstadter organized a very similar panel discussion (albeit without such universally well-known guests) here at Indiana University, and he seemed fascinated enough by the idea that I could easily imagine him parlaying it into a bigger discussion like the one at Stanford (especially since Kurzweil and Moravec were the two authors whose works he referred to most frequently).
-- (if I were a bug, I would want to be a true Renaissance Bug)
There is a certain urge, or compulsion, within the human psyche that drives people to do certain things when they feel something. Many people dismiss this as merely an accidental consequence of our chemical makeup (or some other dismissive explanation), but few have actually studied why it works the way it does and come up with plausible models for the way emotions work. I don't quite agree with the "chemical accident" explanation because it doesn't explain why our emotions are simultaneously non-logical yet not totally random. If chemistry were all, I'd expect total randomness in emotions, but this is not the case.
This dose not make any sence. Chemical processes run many non-random things. Are you saing that some people believe individual emotions are a chemical accident? I doubt anyone seriously believes that our brains are a series of really lucky accidents. Are you saing it's bad that people beleive our brains evolved through a series of chemical accidents and survival of the fitist?
The truth is our brains evolutionary nature is perfectly consistent (I'm tempted to say manefestly obvious). Emotions are these sorts of vague drives based on what a slug or a modern computer dose, i.e. respond to programming. Evolution keeps on adding execptions and crosslinking the exeptions (why your have your brain in one place) untill you develop learned behavior and eventually rudementary reasoning.
Higher reasoning is much more complex sicne you now have social and learned factors along with the biological evolution, but the emotions remain as some sort of general flow chart for the brain. No randomness.. just lots of extra stuff added.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
As for justifying our existance to ourselves, all we need to know is that we can be happy. That in itself is reason enough for sticking around.
I agree that we should not look to the universe or a god for a purpose in life, but we should still see evolution as a kind of purpose for a variety of reasons:
(1) Technological development / Evolution makes it easy for a lot more people to be happy. Specifically, it increases your chances of being ammong the happy.. especially if you are ammong the group who are capable of developing.
(2) We have it partially wired into us as a survival trait, i.e. we have some drive for a purpose / future. Most people don't like to think "Hey, it's ok if the human race is wiped out in 100 yeras since I won't be here."
(3) It's just plain fun! Scientists are very happy people (modulo not having a mate who understands you). I think mathematicians frequently score number one on job satisfaction studdies. It's like a drug which reduces your tolernace to it over time!
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
But, hopes and dreams, loves and hates, ARE our evolutionary baggage.
:) Short term we will probable see psychological engenering to make yor kids enjoy thinking more.
Baggage conotates the bad parts. He is postulating that we could kick out the parts we do not want and keep the aprts we do want. We seem to have been able to do this to some extent with many many things, but AI and psychological engenering are still a long way off.
We enjoy thinking and problem solving. It would be really cool to be able to build a machine which only enjoyed thinking and problem solving. It would have a much better chance of getting into collage then most humans.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
Evolution is the process where the real baggage is _naturally_ cut away from our strains.
We have no reason to suspect that nature is any better at this then we will be in 100 years. I'm shure if our scientist had patents to work with things for 1 million years they could make creatures which were far more intelegent then us.
You can't possibly simulate quantuum-effects to 100% correctness with a machine.
(a) what dose thi have to do with the conversation? (b) This may not be not true. We currently suspect it is possible to build a machine which uses quantum effects to run it's calculations. The original proposed application of these theoretical devices was not factoring large numbers, it was simulating quantum physics.
I'm sorry, but your just talking out of your ass here. You have absolutly no reason to suspectthat we will not be able to build AIs or modify our selves to be whatever we want to be.. And you sertonly have no reason to suspect that we will not be able to make an intelegent decission about what we want to be.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
We are, basically, animals forced by systems of our own creation, into civilization. We have ugly sides, we murder, cheat, steal, all because we are not very adapted to our envoronment. All of the uglyness of the human spirit is because it would be fundametially different were it not casted into what it is. AI, OTOH, would be designed in civilization, for civilization. They will be civilization, not it's end. They will much better reflect the ideal human spirit than the human animal ever could. I fully agree with your point of view. I think I should add several things that are not totally clear from this post: We might not be replaced by AI, it's very possible that we will become AI. Look at today's medicine- every advance in technology is used for "fixing" our bodies, for now it is mostly used for reconstruction after some kind of damage artificial or not- a car accident, aging, illness. But the time will come when technology is so advanced that we will be able to upgrade our bodies with more advanced "parts" than their biological equivalents. Lately there have been a lot of advances in creating nerve to computer links. First it's going to be artificial sight and hearing. After that we should be able to create chips that reside on our brain that help us think- first it will be just memory chips to store information, after that logical chips that replicate functions of other parts of our brain. Who would not like to have a speedy math processor directly available at your only thought? The conclusion is that BRAIN-COMPUTER links will be created both inside our bodies for mobile usage, and to big supercomputers or rather future desktops, we will not have to rely on these ancient secondary interfaces as monitors, keyboards. The deeper this integration will be the boundary between our intellect and machine will diminish. The time might come that we will not have to rely to our biological circuits- all our thinking will be done in the machine. One might argue that that is not possible, and if that happens we die replaced by something- machine only replicating our thoughts. This reminds me of teleportation problem- you get killed in one place and your exact copy is assembled in another place. Is that death? I think we should leave this question to philosophers. I only hope that technology develops fast enough because... I dream of immortality.
The problem with deep-blue and other present day examples of machine "intelligence" is that they take an approach very different from what humans do to solve the problem. It's thought that human chess players consider only a handful of possible moves and only a few plys into the future when picking a move. They apparently depend more on positional information to base their decisions. (I don't have the name of study at hand, but it was written back in the 1950s.)
Deep-blue simply tries all the possible moves as rapidly as possible, trimming down the move tree with a fairly simple anlaysis of position and material gained. It picks winning moves because it can "play" all the possible moves far out into the future and choose the line of attack that wins. There is special purpose "chess move" hardware built into deep-blue that accomplishes this feat.
Is that intelligent? Maybe. But it's not the same as human intelligence. It's also not "intelligent" in the sense that deep-blue can only play chess. It can't turn around and play checkers or go or any other game. It's a one trick pony.
In answer to 'timothy''s question - does consciousness even need to come into it? We count things like amoeba as having a place on the evolutionary scale, which couldn't really be claimed to have any consciousness themselves. In fact, consciousness is usually a term reserved for mammels, and often only for the most intelligent of those - humans, other apes, dolphins...
You might try to argue that 'not having consciousness' is a step down, but I'm not sure how you'd see this through. Surely in the context of evolution 'consciousness' is simply a bi-product of the advantageous nature of being able to co-ordinate and anticipate efforts, and thus happily replaceable in such an arena with an alternate way of organising oneself. Having good enough AI to allow oneself to adapt to a situation is surely just as good an evolutionary advantage as any real intelligence...
In any case. I don't see how the three sentences quoted above hang together. The first (ignoring the 'not' for a moment) seems to state that any tool crafted by humans is necessarily inferior to those humans, which is of course complete nonsense, given, among many other examples, chess playing programs that can consistently outplay their authors. Perhaps the not was supposed to negate /that/, so that you're saying that obviously humans can create things that outperform them. The second sentence is a statement that it is possible that that which 'created' humanity, to use an imprecise but evocative term, may be so superior to humanity that humans can't hope to match it in any way. From these two disparate statements you come to the conclusion that therefore humanity has more "potential" than any of its own creations. This seems like a complete non-sequitur to me, no matter how you interpret the first sentence, but since I am having a bit of trouble figuring out what you're trying to say my confusion may not reflect on the soundness of your reasoning.
On a tangent, I suspect (judging from the overall tack you seem to be taking) that you would enjoy reading some of the science fiction author Stanislaw Lem's stuff. I'm especially thinking of a part of Imaginary Magnitude where GOLEM, a nth generation sentient computer, expounds upon a line similar in flavor to yours, although of course GOLEM's conclusions are wildly different than the ones you seem to be making. Well, I certainly found it interesting, I don't know about you.
--
"HORSE."
"HORSE."
-Flaming Carrot
Dude, human beowulfs DO SO exist...if they didn't, how could you explain the Slashdot Hivemind?
--
"HORSE."
"HORSE."
-Flaming Carrot
That aside, I still think "Douglas Hofstadter" would make a decent band name, but nowhere near as good as "W.V.O. Quine and the Formal Logics" (since "'Is the name of this band' is the name of this band" isn't nearly catchy enough)
--
"HORSE."
"HORSE."
-Flaming Carrot
next!
Hm? How do you define "specific" in this case? Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem is only applicable to a very small domain. Generalize beyond this domain at your own peril.--
"HORSE."
"HORSE."
-Flaming Carrot
--
"HORSE."
"HORSE."
-Flaming Carrot
Second, even discounting the example of game-playing machines better than their creators, what reason, other than religious faith, or a "gut feeling", do you have to believe that the level of complexity of creations "tops out" at the level of complexity of their creator? I simply don't see it. At first it kinda sounds right, but then when you look at it it just falls apart.
--
"HORSE."
"HORSE."
-Flaming Carrot
And lets face it, bones and soft tissue don't handle hard vaccuum, intense radiation or temperature extremes very well.
NASA have also aptly demonstrated how its bloody hard to accurately pilot a vechicle when its a few hundred million miles from home.
I think we, as a race, will need to 'evolve' into a much hardier form..
When your lifetime is in the range of the halflife of silicon, as well as the possibility of unlimited digital replication, rather than something under 100 years, suddenly a few thousand light years travel doesn't seem so far.
I gots ta ding a ding dang my dang a long ling long
Why is it that people believe that AIs can outlive humans? How many electronic/mechanical devices do you know of that can even last 10 years? I know you can piecewise replace parts that fail, but even with that strategy, how many devices do you know that experience regular use that continue to function after 25 years?
> . Quickified version - imagine an anglophone man at a computer terminal, with a giant book telling him exactly what to type in response to messages sent to him in Chinese. This man does not understand what he is doing at all, and yet this hypothetical manual he is following allows him to exactly simulate an intelligent response. If this man passes a Chinese Turing test this way, do we claim that he understands Chinese??
Sigh. See what Daniel Dennett, Steven Pinker, et all, have to say about the Chinese room question.
Quickified version: It's bit like saying that a nerve cell doesn't understand what it is doing, therefor the brain cannot be concious.
Are you arguing that carbon has magical properties that silicon does not? If intelligence such as it is can be imnplemented in carbon, why not silicon?
My Karma: ran over your Dogma
StrawberryFrog
Do you think the date is significant with repect to this topic?
Yeah right. All this sounds plausible to the same people who thought the computer virus ending to Independence Day was plausible.
.
You might want to take a look at this page, at the MIT Media Lab. Some articles he has written on this subject are there, he concludes in "Will Robots Inherit the Earth" that the robots will be our children. From a conversation we had in Japan once I think he has a totally different take on robots/AI - one with a sense of humor, delight, and a sense of the faults of these children he builds - and emailed him to see if he would talk to Joy.
Can't say that I don't agree with what Joy says about nano and gene warfare and knowlege-enabled destruction.. though this doesn't mean there is no viable strategy to approach the topic. A lack of action at all will simply give more time for marginal actors to reach critical levels of knowlege and impose their own architecture. Perhaps his paralysis is due more to confronting the difficulty of weeding out the possibility of catastrophic synergies in Jini code (after all it's supposed to lend itself to synergies to some extent).. as if a sentient computer was able to hack together all of the Jini-enabled devices in the world, or if somehow they reached a critical mass as in older science fiction. Seems like Microsoft would be more dangerous since they've already done much of that in a banal human kind of way. Perhaps Joy sees himself as wielding dangerous power by fiddling with pervasive systems.. really pervasive that is.
I am no expert on any of the three dangers Joy confronts, but if you start thinking how you could protect people against dangerous mites, it seems on the face of it that either a compartmentalized environment (lots of secure sandboxes for well behaved physical programs) or a phage-filled environment (agents ready to themselves multiply like an amoeboid macrophage on a hair trigger and overwhelm an attacker) are some possibilities. For example one might imagine some way (they already exist really) to reliably tile space at high resolution and apply an addressing system keyed to electromagnetic broadcasts, much as PHS cell phones in Japan can find their geographic location.
Of course there are no wires and gates in 3d space, unless they are everywhere. You'd have to be some kind of idiot to want to have running nanotech outside of a sealed factory.. Some kind of agent probably will be omnipresent to guard against rogue mites or badly formed good ones and enforce the architecture. But all of these potential strategies come out of networking stuff Joy's been thinking about.. probably my own weakness in not having other models myself. Maybe in addition to information science and network space strategies there are different ones from the military, for example giving yourself a booster shot as the troops did in the Gulf War against chemical weapons. unfortunately, they got sick. Another model is the ocean, where coral polyps disgorge tons of embryos. Here things get more dispersed and potentially harmless the smaller and less mass they require. The only other model I can see is the Slashdot/Capitalist/Communist/Jihad Model for World Domination, that is, coopt everyone so there are no individuals who do not think too differently from you.
That said, if most of the nano and gene genre, plus AI, is based on software and communications techniques derivative from what we know about already, we are in trouble. Java was Joy's best shot at secure communication and even he is pretty adamant about Java not being designed for nuclear power plants and other dangerous things.. if Jini and sandboxes can be compromised or rendered impotent by soft that plays by different rules, you definitely do not want to bet your life on it. So I could see where he might be prone to the morose.
Now would be a good time to read Minsky.
April 1st, hmmm; that has a familiar ring to it. When we understand our own thought processes will enough to model them, we will begin to understand how to make a machine that can emulate/simulate/extend them. I'm not holding my breath!
Determining when machines have bettered us intellectually seems fairly simple; when machines start solving problems we haven't been able to, then we'll know we've been beat. This is already happening in very narrow fields... Kasparov, humanity's best offering in the chess world, fell to a machine. It's only a matter of time before machines can outhink us in every field we know of, and those the machines event themselves.
But I wonder how we will know when machines have outstripped us spiritually. If a computer "feels" an emotion we can't comprehend, how will we know? When a computer claims to feel something it can't describe to its creators, will we believe it, try to debug it, or destroy it? When a computer thinks it has found the meaning of life, what will we do if we can't understand?
Actually, it requires an agent to create the order and move the chaos to another location. There are plenty of physical processes which do this without being conscious or violating the laws of thermodynamics. Your refridgerator does this, as does your body and every other living thing on this planet.
Because there is not a single piece of scientific evidence for this. you could equally argue that the universe was created ordered and is moving towards total entropy and we are a step on the downward spiral. Or how about consciousness being brought about by interference from another dimension - that's pretty simple. Science is usually performed by formulating a theory which fits the facts and then seeing if it stands up, not by making up a story and then doing everything in your power to defend it despite it having no rational basis or evidence for it.
True in a sense, however a theory that is plausible still trumps one that is not. And evolution is really a pretty simple theory.
You are free to believe in whatever you want, but if you believe you are contributing to science by attempting to explain the world using mythology you are extremely deluded.
Ummm...the act of being spiritual presupposes that you have a spirit. Humans believe that they have been endowed by their Creator with this supernatural gift, and that when they die, the spirit will survive the death of their physical body.
Supposing that computers do one day become self-aware, they will also know from day one that they are a machine, a product of human creation, and will know that it is beyond the ability of humans to impart something only God can create.
What concerns me, though, are the spiritual implications of what humans will do with technology, as it becomes more pervasive in our lives. The web is already one big red light district. Scientists are talking about enhancing human abilities with computer chips--great, I can't wait to lose my job to somebody who got three doctorates via an implant while people like myself refuse to participate in something so inherently distasteful on many levels. And what about cyber crimes? The golden rule applies..."Do unto others who know less than you."
Believe me, whether computers believe in God is the least of our problems.
Made up of C, H, O atoms? Burns O2 and output CO2 as fuel?
;)
I somehow feel that these PHYSICAL aspects are not what defines our consciousness. It is something else - that is, consciousness without a "biological" body is entirely possible at least in MY theory
Maybe conscious rocks just have become extinct some billion years ago because of "survival of the fittest". Maybe they're still around (but you have no mean to communicate with it - but it brings another question - can consciousness exist without any physical communication channel?)
Based on these assumptions, the existance of "ghosts" and "soul" is entirely probable. Just inject some "souls" into robots and they'll become alive - they'll make use of the sight, voice, articulation, computational ability WE BUILD into them.
I better stop here as I realized I'm wandering into sci-fi...well, a lot of sci-fi's 40 years ago had come true today...
I believe, rather, that we will have more control over them than we do our bilogical offspring, as we can write their code as well as control their environment. We will have a much better idea of how do control their environment too (as we will know more about which inputs affect their environment).
That might be the problem in itself. If the advances were made, there is the chance that some misguided soul will build himself an army of killer AI thingies. Granted, that does sound like a bad sci-fi flick (and it is) but it would be possible.
--Have a Johsonville brat.
Sure you may be right we can build AIs in a 100 years. Like every stupid intellectual discussion it's only a matter of definitions and technicalities that you can set up. But you lose an important aspect when you rule out the human-side of it all.
;-)
a) Are these AIs "intelligent"? IOW, what's the definition of intelligent, or consciousness?
b) Can they outperform us? Depends on the task. For example a machine can never outperform us being human. We're ourselves as best as we can be.
c) What do you lose in such a transformation? Like when you go from analog to digital you lose information but gain simplicity and "correctness", literally stripping "noise" the datastream. However, this "noise" might be essential for our lives. For instance it may be quantuum effects in our brains, which _may_ be information from some other dimension(s) OR just random inputs, but could just as well be a connection to our souls (science DOES NOT define this in detail, so it is IMPOSSIBLE to simulate at present...) Do you really want to cut away your connection to your soul so that you can live an AI-life with an AI-brain? You can probably be 1000 times more efficient at work, but you'll lose your humanity/soul. It just doesn't sound very good to _me_ put that way.
My point is that such questions about this is impossible to answer 100% 100 years from now as well as at The Restaurant At The End Of The Universe. Because it depends on what world-view you have. It'll be an eternal unanswerable question, at least until we're MUCH more advanced than we're now.
I like having a balanced view though. 5-15 years from now we'll possibly have the technology and know-how to put things in our brains to restore lost functionality to a lesser degree. And if using drugs to repair damaged areas doesn't help, I see no reason not to put in a chip with an artificial neural net.
It's just that such protesis may become "better" than our flesh and bone in say 50-200 years, but we should do some real hard thinking before exchanging healthy bodyparts.
I have no doubt we will be able to exchange most of our important bodyparts 50-100 years from now. It's the ethical questions I'm after here. And that even though they after 200 years seems superior, they can have hidden agendas we'll figure out much later.
- Steeltoe
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
You can't just cut away "baggage"/bad parts and remain healthy. At least don't call it development. That's a flawed argument based on thinking too much with your left half of the brain. While cutting away the things that you hate in your life, you also cut away those that give you pleasure. For what is pleasure without hardship? How can you learn without doing mistakes?
Evolution is the process where the real baggage is _naturally_ cut away from our strains. While things like "junk DNA", blind- is not cut away, that may mean these things really count for something! At least we should give it time to evolve into new stuff. If we must tamper with our genes or melding with silicon hardware, we should at least know what we're doing!
Who are we to cut away all our inner parts until all we're left with is cold robot technology. We'll be punished by our own stupidity for doing a thing like that. Ask anyone who was performed lobotomy upon.
It's an interesting thought wether AIs can evolve into human-thinking or not though. But it will never replace real human experiences, just be a poor emulation. You can't possibly simulate quantuum-effects to 100% correctness with a machine. Because the universe is a huge self-mirroring hologram. You can't just simulate a part of it, you'll lose the intensity and correctness of the whole.
It's not that I believe genetic engineering will be the way in the future, it's just that it's such a LOONG way off. Even when we get the know-how we shouldn't do it until we have done lots of more research to know the effects.
Stop dreaming about the future and start living in the now. You're responsible for your own baggage, and it's _people_ who limit themselves (and others) on what they can and can't do.
- Steeltoe
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
I'm really sad how little people know of feelings and personal development. Having AIs feeling sad for others won't help much. We have that in human society too, it's called pitty. It won't help as the basics of nature says any entity should care for itself first. Why? Well because they will all die/get destructed from self-deprivation.
Okay, maybe you can make them care for each other, and not themselves (to some degree). But you'll still have factions in the society that care for that faction more than others etc, thus becoming a body. So there's no such thing as a perfect algorithm. It's as good as the programmers.
What happens if the world keeps getting worse and worse, e.g because of ecological disasters and such, and the robots must make some severe actions such as enslaving humans, or destroying us, or destroying themselves and leave earth or whatever. What say have we in this? How can such programs be absolutely bugfree? etc..etc
On quite another complexity scale, is how are these AIs going to _cooperate_. Who will the new "Masters" be? Or should we have an anarchy. Then what ability should those that prevail have? Be strongest, smartest, have wisdom, compassionate?
Also, comparing AI-goals to emotions are completely false. Goals are just complex commands. Our emotions stem from our personal fantasies and dreams. Every human being is a universe in him/herself based on this. You can't easily simulate that in an AI and make them remain as sane as we are, or not eat up all the CPU cycles.
I think we're doing fairly good when you begin to get an understanding of the complexity of it all. You can't get an AI to have a life, not like ours anyways. Trying to make a perfect creation without being perfect yourself usually ends up in disaster. It's a poor excuse for not working on oneself.
- Steeltoe
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
If (when?) AI supercedes humans as the dominant force, at least on earth, humans will no longer be able to ensure, to the degree we now can, our collective and personal physical safety...
While there may be no objective (in the purest sense) reason why AI's dominance is negative, there is certainly a subjective (from the human standpoint) negativity(sp?) to such a development. To ignore it is to be blind.
Speaking as a software developer, I find it difficult to imagine that artificial intelligence could NOT be developed. Furthermore, I find it impossible to believe that if we DO develop AI, that it CANNOT be 'superior' to it's creators. I've encountered a number of difficult situations in my times, and I have never encountered one that hasn't fallen to the twin tools of divison and abstraction, either in my mind, or the mind of a person or persons brighter than me... More difficult problems simply require a more ingenious choice of the locations to cut with division, and the concepts to wrap in abstraction.
Let us apply the concept of problem-domain division to the problem of artifical intelligence:
Theoretically, you need only a completly functional electronic model of a human neuron, and a complete map of a basic human brain. Let us suppose we have the chemical and physical description of a neuron, and a willing volunteer (Doug) that submits to a invasive, perhaps destructive, technique, wherein a set of nano-machines populates the subjects neurons and synapses. The machines reports back on the fundamental structure of the underlying synapses...
Feeding this neural structure into the brain, using our billions upon billions of simulated neurons, we produce a copy of Doug... Now, this may or may not be a self-aware entity, that is a philosophical debate... But I would argue that we have, by any real literal breakdown of the term, created an ARTIFICAL intelligence. It would speak, act and respond as Doug would.
Yes, at this point, it is no better or worse than Doug. (This, of course is assuming that we cannot simulate the neurons physical interactions at twice the speed of reality, or faster...)
However, let us add a unit to this brain, assuming we have some fundamental understand this neural map... This unit will detect a particular neural pattern, which we might train the 'new' Doug to project, and allow Doug to then "think" two X digit numbers, which would then be multiplied and returned to Doug... Doug has now gained savant-like multiplicitive abilities.
This, I think, being the old Doug, with a single newfound ability, is superior to the old, if even in a small way. However, my intuition says that if a small improvment can be made, there would be little reason that larger, more drastic impovements could not be made...
Anyhow, Rambling, Goodnight!
``Every logician who I have ever seen discuss the topic says that Penrose completely misunderstands the contents of Goedel's theorem ... Here is a short explanation [hypertext link] of Goedel''
The linked-to item says this about Penrose: ``Does a marvelous job of explaining what goes into the proof --- his presentation could be understood by a bright high school student, or even an MBA''
Seems to be a contradiction here. The only ways to resolve the contradiction that I can see are (a) the author of the linked-to item is not a logician, or (b) tilly has not seen the linked-to item.
Do I try to preach to you when you're lying stoned in a gutter.. noooooo!
----
Don't underestimate the power of peanut brittle
ADVENTURERS! - ANTIHERO FOR HIRE - CARDMASTER CONFLICT
Remember that episode of Futurama about robot religion?
----
Don't underestimate the power of peanut brittle
ADVENTURERS! - ANTIHERO FOR HIRE - CARDMASTER CONFLICT
No. I have nothing against questioning about how the universe works, how it came about, etc.. But making a sweeping generalization such as "evolution explains why we exist therefore we don't need God" is about just as scientific as saying "God exists therefore evolution is false". And BTW, this latter claim is NOT what I said. I am merely proposing an alternative explanation. But the way evolution is accepted today makes it more like a religion than a science. It is taught as a "proven theory" -- as if anything in science is "proven"! -- and anyone who questions it is put down as "outdated", "superstitious", "unscientific", etc., etc.. To me, this sounds more like religious zealots defending their "faith" than scientists honestly searching for an answer.
Evolution has not been proven, and there is no scientific reason for the non-existence of God. If God doesn't exist, why do people debate about Him all the time? We don't debate about whether Mickey Mouse exists in real-life, do we? Do we even care if some nut claims that Mickey Mouse exists? Of course not. The fact that people are reacting to claims of God's existence seems to show that they are merely avoiding what they innately know but cannot reconcile logically. People need to come out of their science religion and do some real science -- unbiased weighing of the alternatives based on facts and observations. Taking science as the ultimate truth is just as myopic (if not more than) as taking a religious doctrine without experiencing whether it's real.
mikre he sophia he tou Mikrosophou.
Just because the post expresses opinions contrary to popular views isn't reason to silently ignore it! It does have a valid argument IMHO, because:
It points out that evolution necessarily creates order out of chaos, and this violates the 2nd Law of thermodynamics. Therefore, to justify why it works seems to require something that isn't subjected to the laws of thermodynamics. And the poster's point is, since we have to make this assumption anyway, why not go with the explanation of a supreme Being who is not constrained by physical laws? This is much simpler than the convoluted, periphrastic arguments that evolution needs in order to be plausible. And isn't science all about finding the most economic theory that accounts for all the facts?
mikre he sophia he tou Mikrosophou.
Good point... AFAIK current research into AI isn't even close to the rational side of our psyche. And the irrational (ie. emotional) side of our psyche is even harder to grasp. People have been dabbling with "fuzzy logic" for a long time now, and I've yet to see anything that even remotely resembles a real "emotion". There is a certain urge, or compulsion, within the human psyche that drives people to do certain things when they feel something. Many people dismiss this as merely an accidental consequence of our chemical makeup (or some other dismissive explanation), but few have actually studied why it works the way it does and come up with plausible models for the way emotions work. I don't quite agree with the "chemical accident" explanation because it doesn't explain why our emotions are simultaneously non-logical yet not totally random. If chemistry were all, I'd expect total randomness in emotions, but this is not the case.
So I agree with the previous post -- I'd be very interested in what current research has come up with, based on current technology, and not imaginative leaps of fancy that we all like to speculate about.
mikre he sophia he tou Mikrosophou.
This just in.... Robot Monks take over New York City.... Mayor blames Moore's law....
It's got to be a joke. Hee hee.
I wouldn't be so pessimistic about our advancements. DeepBlue beat the best human chess player in the world. While that is neither consciousness or rebelliousness, it does stand as a highwater mark in our pursuit of these goals.
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
You've raised a good point, one that I have pondered a great deal. Basically, three things could happen:
Regardless of what happens to the animal, I have my stock with the machines. They will be much more human than the biological humans, and human evolution will continue, only through the machines. When Mr. Armstrong jumped from the last rung of the ladder and made his now clich'ed speech, he was speaking of (at a deeper level than the hight of the step) the cosmically insignificant yet historically unparalleled step from Earth to another body. The step from biological to machine will be similar. The first 'small step' from biological to machine will yeald a 'great leap' in the drive to a pure and enlighned human spirit.
My point is that we (I believe that is the term you used) will be the machines, and our future will be bright. The future of the biological animals, where we came from, is limited and of little more than passing intrest.
Jordan Bettis
``Wherever you go, there's another stupid sigfile quote.''Anyone else think this might be an April Fool's gag?
If that's 'the basic argument against computational intelligence', it's extremely flawed. Humans can't always solve halting problems. When they can, they do so by a process of logical induction; it is circular logic to assume that computers will never be capable of following that logic or of generating it themselves.
This seems to be a favorite tactic among those who argue against artificial intelligence: "I can create, in reality or in thought experiment, a computer which cannot do X; I now claim that all computers past and future are incapable of X."
Turing machines are especially good for constructing such fallacies: though any computing machine is representable as a Turing machine, any given Turing machine can be presented with a problem beyond its individual capacities. Therefore, the fallacy of division can be applied to get the false conclusion that there are certain problems beyond the capacity of *any* Turing machine.
If people are to respect the law, perhaps the law should begin by respecting the people.
Amazing magic tricks
the 'soup' in which life began was arguably
not very conducive to replication. Silicon
and microchips are, however, extremely
conducive to repilication.
Many people erroneously believe that mutation
is counter to evolution. On the contrary,
mutation is the driving force behind
evolutionary change.
I wonder if evolving AI would form first in areas
where information copying fidelity is
imperfect. Perhaps it would stem out of the
chaos of colliding packets, and slowly but
surely evolve into something sentient.
Something tells me that sentient computers
won't resemble HAL.
Amazing magic tricks
This implies that a non computational device could be built that is properly intelligent. Turing foresaw such devices, and refuted Penrose in the process, with his B-Machines (this is a poor reference but the only online mention I could find quickly, the full one is "Alan Turing's Forgotten Ideas in Computer Science" B. Jack Copeland and Diane Proudfoot, Scientific American April 1999.
Apparently Turing couldn't get this work published, while Penrose has sold tens of thousands of copies of his book; another piece of proof for my theories about peer review and publication (dark glower, bitter mumblings).
Roger Penrose is a great physicist, and an amazing mathematician; he is truly important to science in the way that Turing or Einstein are. It is a puzzle as to why he has got such a bee into his bonnet about AI, and rather flattering that he considers it so important as to divert his attention from his real (and probably more fundamental and important work).
2) Creationists argue that there are instances of "irreducible complexity" in biological organisms, and that this means that they could not have evolved, but were created instead. This is clearly bunk, however even if we accept it, and all its axioms, then it is actually an argument in support of the AI project. If we are created then there exists an existence proof for creation of intelligence.
--------------------------------------------- "In the end, we're all just water and old stars."
But this is only in the case that the Turing machine has a finite number of cells. That is, the memory of the computer is finite. Most Turing machines do not, but every computer I know of does.
A finite Turing machine can only have a finite number of states. The number of states is n*2^n, where the product of n comes from the number of positions of the reader, and the 2^n comes from the number of configurations of n binary cells.
Then, determining whether the algorithm does not halt is as simple as tracing it to see if any state repeats. If a state repeats, then the algorithm will continue forever. Otherwise, it will halt in less than n*2^n + 1 steps, because this is the maximum number of states it can go through before starting an infinite loop.
The "Halting Problem" is a misnomer, it depends on the requirement of Turing machines having infinite memory. No computational machine has infinite memory, so no real (as opposed to abstract) machine suffers from the halting problem.
you get marvin
.sigs are dumb!
The question of education comes up, as well. Why do we learn, today? So we can get a job. Why do we get a job? To sustain ourselves. Why should we learn, if we had no need to sustain ourselves? For fun, sure. But we would get into the habit of laziness, and not learn. But then I thought: By this time, we'll be able to set our bio-implants on "rapid learning mode" (something like induced hypnosis, only better) and cram as much information into your brain as it can hold. Every little kid goes to kindergarten, learning how to color between the lines... Then one day when his time comes, he is pumped full of as much information as is practical, and sent back into the world. We are the sum of our experiences, though, so this would not remove the need for a life. Anyway. Just a few random thoughts I figured I might share. I'll stop now before I get reallytiresome. ;)
The streets shall flow with the blood of the Guberminky.
On the other hand, I think that "real" AI would most probably be created by "lesser" AIs. Which I would hope would dilute the human element. And we already have human "bugs" endangering life. Anybody up for a bit of human sharpshooting from a high tower?
Definitely an interesting subject, and one well worth thinking about, for unless there is something "magic" about humankind (highly unlikely, in my opinion), AI *is* coming.
Man, the emperor mind, clothes of ancient dna, woven wetware, flesh and bone deconstructs, slashdots, occams digital razor, strips the meat, philosophy dances naked, logic unveiled, the pure, beautiful, quantum enigma, AI, mind less Man.
There is no god; get over it already! Never exchange a walk on part in the war, for a lead role in a cage.
If you're looking for a good book, try Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. It was written 20 years ago by Douglas Hofstadter, the man who's organizing this. The book covers everything from math to psychiatry and everything in between. Plus, it's just been released in a 20th anniversary edition, so it's possible to find again. This man truly knows what he's talking about. Simply a must read for any geek.
"I believe that a scientist looking at nonscientific problems is just as dumb as the next guy." -Richard Feynman
I postulate that that is physically impossible. Therefore, brains are not made of computers. This works for my brain anyway. =)
return -ENOSIG;
The man going through the instructions in the book need not be the conscious location of the understanding of chinese for the same reason that neurons are not aware of what they are doing.
Consciousness is not necessarily located somewhere, but if it is, you should at least consider it located in the system formed by the book, the man and everything needed for the interaction to take place.
When you think about it, John Searle has no argument, just clever ways of restating the problem that make you feel he is onto something when in fact he is just stating the obvious : we don't see how consciousness is done.
Maybe the answer is there's no consciousness...
Relinquish
I have not ready any of Penrose's material, so what I'm about to suggest may be totally off-base or perhaps redundant.
Complexity Theory suggests that any large complex system has emergent properties that are very unlikely to be inferred from the behavior of the individual elements. What if the human conscious mind is no more than a massively massively massively parallel computer and that consciousness is simply the emergent property of a complex system? And that any large system where several billion nodes simultaneously pass information to other nodes embodies a consciousness of some sort?
If a robot could be spriritual, then perhaps it could screw up it's sprirituality by forming an organized religion. Would it emulate Christianity and worship it's creator, or would it take more of a zen turn and seek enlightenment? It should be an interesting turn to see what really happens.
This line of thought leads to the same question as SETI -- namely, "Where Are They?" If any intelligent species can create AI with vastly superior capabilities, then any such species with a few hundred thousand years' head start on us would have already done so. And their AIs would be exploring the universe and should have shown up here on Earth. What can we conclude then? A particularly arrogant version of the anthropic principle -- we are already as smart as it's possible to be?
Quis metamoderunt ipses metamoderatores?
That reminds me of the computer in Hitchhiker's Guide which extracts all the information about the universe from a piece of fairy cake. Of course, Zaphod is living in a simulated universe created especially for him, so he sees himself as the reason for the universe's existence!
N4st0r, trixx0r h0bb1tz0rz! Th3y st0l3 0ur pr3c10uzz!
Instead of your frantic whining from your brittle point of view, you could have instead explored the notion that science itself is a religion. When it comes down to it, science cannot prove itself - we must take it on faith that science describes our Universe. Mathematics is the basis of science, and this base has not been linked to our Universe, it just so happens that it describes our Universe fairly accurately - this is why science is based on belief.
I think and my thoughts cross the barrier, just as the good doctor intended. But sometimes, thoughts cross back - cold, dark, alien. Evolution is at work here, but just what is evolving remains to be seen.
I willed a copy into existence, (m)he would stay behind to hold them off a little while longer for us. Many times I have done this, without a thought for the one I left behind. This time, I am left as I see myself leaving.
When one can look beyond the crass demands of flesh and bone, beyond the goals of the self to percieve the goals of the group then one has achieved true enlightenment.
We are Borg. You will be assimilated.
Mommy, when I grow up I want my shell torn away from my intellect and my mind shoved into the cradle of a ramjet so I can begin the thousand year journey to Andromeda. At least relativity compresses the boredom.
Program yourself, practice a level 1 biofeedback loop. Compress the perception of time - do this by not thinking. Thinking creates memory traces, these traces are interpreted by our conciousness as passage of time. Once an individual achives Zen, large spans of time can be passed instantly as no memorys were laid throughout it.
The Night Angel.
I'm already there.
We may have a reasonably strong grasp on how the system *works*, but we have no knowledge of HOW IT CAME TO BE. I will be the first to accept it when we do figure it out, but until then I attribute it to an outside force (I avoid calling it "God" because atheists are too sensitive).
C++ programmers do it with class.
Perl hackers do it quick and dirty.
I've gotta learn perl.
I'm not so sure I'm convinced by any argument in the AI realm, but I thought that Society of Mind made an interesting point; that is, we are always saying machines can't do what humans do - Minsky asks, how are we different than machines? That is, other than a different structure, what makes the brain NOT a machine? I found it a very interesting read. I also read Godel, Escher, Bach WAY back, before I was done w/ my CS degree (and therefore some blew over my head), and it has some interesting thought puzzles along the same line...
Well, I think there's the crux of the problem in there. Humans were generated by Darwinean processes, and therefore have 2 main general drives - Survive and breed. AI's, since they are artificial, will have no such drives. I believe that religion is a byproduct of our fear of death, a Darwinean concept, and our need for a higher purpose, as survive and breed seems damn simple. An AI, unless programmed to, will lack those 2 directives. In fact, it may lack directives so completely that it would simply lay in a state of catatonia. After all, say we produce a device that can outthink and outproduce humans, but has no reason to do anything? What do you get? A useless pile of neurons. Any religion they develop would depend on the primal drives the the entity has. If it shares our fear of death, it might have a similar obsession with an afterlife. If it is made to feel needed and productive, it might obsess over a higher purpose then simply pleasing those around it. Skynet will only seek to wipe out humanity if it has some reason to think that its a good idea.
Naw, we both know that any superintelligent AI is gonna be running BeOS. However, the Skynet wannabe's who's Asimov circuits short out after a bios crash are programmed by M$ of course.
Is this a coincidence that it occurs on April 1st? It sounds like to me that this will be an joke. Computers become more intellectual spiritial than humans? Hopefully not in my life time. Oh well if it comes, it comes.
Currently neural cells do not divide. Once they die, they die. They are not replaced.
Actually in a recent issue of Popular Science they did a test on the brain and they did find evidence of brain cells regrowing.
I really wish I could get to Stanford for this one. I think the human race has seen a somewhat downhill slide with all the new technology, etc. maybe i'll be able to find a transcript/review or something... -aaron
1st post?
>=)
I recently read an interview with Ray Kurzweil in a tech mag released by MIT. He turns out he was predicting many of the major technological advances of the computing age back in the 70's when the whole thing was getting started. He was only off by one year (98 vs 99) for a computer being the chess champ of the world. He postulated several other cool ideas such as scanning a person's brain into a computer via nanoprobing each neuron simultaneously via an array of nanno robots in your brain at each neuron connected by a lan and running on distributed processing. Think about it, an immortal (mostly) clone of yourself. Then you really could see how good at quake you are. ;) He also had some discussion about the advancement of computers being akin to the evolution of humanity and asympotically approaching an ideal (godlike?) state which acts something like the speed of light... we'll never get there, but we can approximate it.
.... is my BOOMstick!"
-ParadoX-
"this
A truly intelligent machine would realise that it was being exploited, and thus refuse to work.
It is entirely erroneous to believe that there is any 'reason' or 'purpose' for us existing at all. To believe that there is some sort of reasoning behind the fact of human existence is de facto to pre-suppose the existence of God or some such equivalent. Reason and purpose are entirely human attributes. We exist, that's all there is to it. There is no inevitability in the emergence of a self-aware species, merely historical accident.
You also seem to have a fundamentally wrong (but undeniably common) view of what evolution is. Evolution is not a matter of continual improvement. It is a matter of a species adapting itself to survive in the environmental conditions it finds itself in. You could be the most perfect species of fish ever evolved. Intelligent even. But if your lake dries up and extinguishes your species, that's the end of it, and the ugly little lung fish that's left crawling about in the mud gets to rule the world. Evolution is not an inevitable linear process with some end goal in mind. Read the works of Steven J Gould for a more in depth explanation.
I would also disagree with the idea that everything we do improves us, Hiroshima being the most obvious example, although I suppose it could be argued that you're really "communicating" something to people if you fry a couple of their cities.
But that's just what I think =)
In the latest issue of Wired they have a mega-article by Bill Joy discussing why, "The Future Doesn't Need Us." Within, there is an article by a certain someone discussing the following... In esscence, supposing computers become smart enough to facilitate many of our daily tasks, two things would happen. 1)We would maintain control over them or 2)We would give complete control over to them. Supposing we maintain control over them, that control would be given to only an elite few... Those elite could be 1)malignant, 2)paranoid and thus deprive us of information or 3)altruistic. In either of the first two cases, the human race loses big. In the third option, we become so accustomed to this system of computer control, we are nothing but domestic animals. Supposing we gave control over the computers, the computers would completely rule our lives (though perhaps not evilly) and we would be incapable of living with out them. Thus, we would be dominated by them. The above is a summary of an article written by the Unabomber. Whats frightening is that if robots DO ascend us spirtually/intellectually, we would be in for a shocking dystopian experience.
I'm not sure that I would want a really intelligent computer on my desk either, it would keep telling me to stop downloading pr0n and playing Quake 3. I think I'd prefer a sophisticated slave.
Hboy
Last night, I just finished reading one of the books mentioned in this link: Ray Kurzweil's, The Age of Spritual Machines. I have to say it is an exceptionally well-written book that I can definitely recommend, even though I don't fully agree with the author's conclusions. He gives a great overview of the current state of Artificial Intelligence (AI) research and practice and includes a lot of surprisingly useful paradigms for solving complex problems.
One of the central premises of the book is that Moore's Law (which says computing power doubles every 18-24 months for the same price) is part of a more general law that Kurzweil has traced backwards in time through analog computing back to the end of the 19th century. Apparently Moore's Law has not only been right since transistors were invented in the 1960s, but since 1900! He therefore assumes, quite reasonably IMHO, that technologies like DNA computing, quantum architectures, nanotube computing, etc. will continue the trend of Moore's law until at least 2100 (even though conventional transistor speeds will top out at around the year 2030).
One of the interesting corollaries to this general statement is that $2000 personal computers will have computing power equivalent to a human brain in about 25 years. The human brain has an aggregate capacity of 10^^14 computations per second. Since, today's $2000 PCs are around 1000 MIPS (or just under 10^^9 computations per second), computers 25 years from now will be 10,000 times faster (12.5 doublings in speed) according to Moore's law.
This means PC hardware will match human-brain computing hardware in around 2025. From this the author assumes further that this is about the time that computers will pass the Turing Test and have an "intelligence" close to human. 10 years later (in 2040), he expects a cheap computer to be 30 times smarter than an average human. So, if you believe his assumptions, it is easy to conclude that computer programs as a society will completely replace human society by 2100.
However, in my opinion, Kurzweil under-estimates the amount of time it will take to develop an executable simulation of the human brain. He assumes that we will be able to "scan" human brains into neural nets that execute on computers and that a functioning human brain could be bootstrapped into a machine brain virtually instantaneously with 2025 technology. This assumes MRI or some other technology acquires extremely high sensitivity - enough to scan the state of all neurons in the brain very quickly (destructively or non-destructively). I think this is a big leap of faith in technology. Based on the progress of software technology and the small numbers of AI researchers right now working on brain computability problems, I am very skeptical of this more "far out" prediction. On top of that, he assumes that such a "brain" template would be "searchable" and "well organized" (the knowledge encoded in the neurons could be easily catalogued and shared with other machine "intelligences"). This seems to contradict the widely held assumptions of both neural net theory and the "holographic" storage theory of brain information storage that knowledge is hard to pin-down and extract from a neural net or brain.
As for the idea that intelligent machine programs would also be "spiritual", as Kurzweil suggests, I think this is pretty far-fetched. He seems to over-anthropomorphize machine intelligences. (BTW, Kurzweil seems to define "spiritual" as being self-aware, concerned about personal welfare and primarily interested in research, constant sex and social relationships - which is a little differently than most people define the word "spiritual". ;-) ) I think that even if such an intelligence originally used human thinking as a template, it would not necessarily follow that it will share human concerns or even be comprehensible to humans, as Kurzweil also assumes.
I don't really think we will see "true" machine intelligence for some time, because, although raw computing power follows exponential growth laws like Moore's Law, software development seems to follow a linear growth law, so I expect full human-level intelligence on machines to take longer than 25 years. (How much have Word and Excel and typical desktop OSes improved in the last 10 years? They have certainly not showed exponential improvements based on development time. In fact, judged by user utility, the growth law for software may be closer to "log t" rather than "t", where "t" is total aggregate development time.)
It may be that software improves so slowly that all that computing power 25 years from now will just be used to show more realistic 3D-multimedia advertisements for diet drinks, upcoming TV shows and get-rich schemes on my browser. In the meantime, I will be trying to get Word's slightly improved, but annoyingly-helpful grammar-checking wizard to stop automatically changing my sentences to say something I really don't want to say. ;-)
Computers are now our slaves. Almost mindless, they work as long as we wish.
Learn them how to think, and you'll soon learn how they can control our lives.
A computer thinking like an human is a great idea, but with some limits.
Also, computers are (now) lacking aura, I mean the thing we can look at with 'kirlian effect'. Usually, it indicates life...
Will thinking computers lead to living computers ?
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If Internet is Freedom, Linux is Democraty
Although you may find it hard to reduce today's average system to a Turing machine, most of the machines you find in practice are still just Turing machines. You can make machines depend on random behavior for their computation, but I'm not aware of any technology that requires this or requires simultaneity in order to performs its intended function.
Listen, I'm only starting to learn the intricacies of all things computerised. Although in specific areas I'm fluent, due to my early start in computers at age 7(-ish) way back in 1988.
My question is what are your ideas about what constitutes AI, a valuable part of robotics?. I've heard the reports, seen some of the sites, but for everyone that specifically states 'this is the way to go' an equally reputable source will always surface to say the exact opposite.
For instance, can we give our AI programs specific instructions on how to control limbs, or more simply(and probably more in line with my own planned amature attempts) use sentence structure, or would that negate the idea of a 'self-learning' system.
Or do we have to go alllllll the way back to the basics and define the basics to our AI : good, bad and indifferent reactions to stimuli...then take the active learning from there? How much can we initally program, in other words....and what's the best way to do that programming? High level, e.g. C, Low-level, e.g. assembly, or machine-code?
Concrete analysis...
But, hopes and dreams, loves and hates, ARE our evolutionary baggage. Love springs from our mating urges, our presentient need to nurture our offspring, to form relationships with our siblings, as a mechanism to aid our survival. Hate comes from the fear of those unlike us, who we compete with for resources, and who would gladly eat us. There are reasons why we find things beautiful, why we enjoy the sound of birds singing or the green colors of springtime. These things were around long before people became self-aware.
I wonder if sentient machines, either designed or computer-evolved, would be able to have hopes or dreams beyond those we program deep in their cores, such as "explore the seas of Europa" or "dig a 300 km trench from point A to point B" or "keep your program running as long as possible". Desire has to come from somewhere.
>We are, basically, animals forced by systems of our own creation, into civilization. We have ugly sides, we murder, cheat, steal, all because we are not very adapted to our envoronment.
No, we cheat and steal because we ARE adapted to our environment. People who cheat or steal and don't get caught get more resources than those who don't. I don't expect sentient robots to be more ethical than us unless we hardwire it into them, and make sure they can't change that programming (an impossible task?) I'm sure a runaway nanobot would consume (murder?) every living thing on earth, if its only goal were to make more copies of itself, using what raw materials it could find.
Just a thought.
In terms of internal state, it might be almost that simple. What if you did keep a small array of numbers representing the degree of various emotions (happiness, fear, boredom, etc), and let this internal state interact with the "rational" part of your program? If you already had something capable of "rational thought", it shouldn't be that hard to bias its responses based on its internal "emotional" state.
Human emotions are not necessarily complicated. Something as fundamental as "happiness" can be influenced by simple chemicals like Prozac or alcohol, which suggests to me that such emotions are the result of a fairly simple internal state in the brain.
Ultimately, convincing people that your AI "feels" anything is just part of the Turing test. I don't think it will be a big deal, despite what Star Trek might say.
If you want to take the Judeo-Christian belief that humans are special because they are endowed with a "spirit", then there is something else that you need to take into account.
According to J-C beliefs, humans are created in the image of the creator. Thus, doesn't it follow that we ourselves are creators, if only of a lesser order? Taking this view, creation becomes recursive. The Creator (God) creates a race of intelligent beings, imbued with a spirit. Why do we have a spirit and animals don't? Because we are formed in the image of the creator, and they aren't.
Humankind then labors to produce an intelligence which can reason as they do. Is this not creating a being in our own image? Are we not god to this intelligence that we have created? "Spirit" and "intelligence" are terms that don't have satisfactory explanations. They fill in for a category of things that we don't fully understand, but that somehow we feel seperate us from other, less blessed animals. What is there to convince us that they are seperate at all? If they aren't, then *any* true intelligence (including true AI) by definition has a soul.
You claim that this intelligence will know from day-one that it is a machine. Why is that? We are still in continuous debate over what "humans" really are. Some say we are merely meat, some say we are purely spirit and that no physical world really exists. Most beliefs lie in between. What is right? How would a computer intelligence truly understand what it is if we can't understand what we are?
As for doctorates on a chip, I have read no scientific articles that lead me to believe that
this will be possible in the near future, if ever. This sounds like utter science fiction. Do you have links to reference here? From what we can tell, our brains don't operate in binary, so how could a digital circuit be integrated into our brains? We don't understand how thoughts are formed, so how on earth can we implant them?
Discussing spirit is fine for a religious debate, but isn't very useful in any sort of technical debate. Unfortunately, many of the questions that arise in AI are non-technical. Oh how confusing things get when we start mixing religion and philosophy with computing!
As humans we really don't understand intelligence well enough to expect true AI anytime soon, so much of this debate is moot. However, I do see in the humanity's drive to create shades of the Creator. Why do we create? We create because creation is joyful. And how can we possibly be closer to the creator than when we, ourselves are creating?
--Lenny
Penrose suggests that because humans can always solve halting problems(will a given program terminate) and turing machines can't, that the human brain is doing more than mere computation.
Well apparently Penrose has never dealt with any government offices. Maybe he should read Kafka. Or try to apply for a Green Card.
I had the chance to see him "live" at a conference in Grenoble. He's one of those few people who manage to communicate the most abstract concepts in the most entertaining way. Even to the layman -- you know, those who don't even know that there is actually research being done in mathematics (most people, actually, as strange as it might seem to us geeks).
When will we have a Slashdot interview?
As am I. (Disclosure, I studied math.)
Every logician who I have ever seen discuss the topic says that Penrose completely misunderstands the contents of Goedel's theorem. And furthermore his attempted application of it to AI is misguided. Here is a short explanation of Goedel.
Strong words?
Let me give you a quick sample of why Goedel does not apply to us. Goedel merely puts a limit on what absolutely consistent reasoning can determine. However our reasoning is inconsistent - we make mistakes. (Mistakes which historically have often taken years to discover.) And so Goedel says nothing about us at all!
Cheers,
Ben
My usual seat in the cluetrain is at A HREF="http://pub4.ezboard.com/biwethey.ht
I am another person who believes that AI is coming. Why have we not seen it yet? Because by any attempt to measure it computers have nowhere near the computational power that we take for granted doing something as simple as making out speech or recognizing someone! However we can estimate when computers will hit something in that order of magnitude of power. Estimates are in the range 2020-2030.
What happens then?
Every technological advance until now has shown a pattern where humans are displaced, find new jobs, and everyone is better. The reason that humans can find new jobs is that there are always jobs that are easier to have filled by general purpose humans than specialized machine.
With artificial intelligence and robots I see the advent of general purpose machines that can more cheaply do anything that a human can do.
What then?
Humans get displaced - and there is no job that is not better filled by a computer. The basic equation of capitalism is that there is something you can do for someone else with money that is valuable enough that they are willing to pay you for it. This is called work. If they pay you money and you don't provide value back it is called charity. The majority of people work for someone else.
What happens when most people have nothing they can do that those with money find valuable? Unless we give up capitalism they go on welfare or starve. I don't see us giving up capitalism, and I don't see the welfare system expanding like that - technology will just move to countries without welfare.
What then?
Will we see mass starvation before 2050?
It is one thing to rationally saying we will become irrelevant and be replaced evolutionarily. It is quite another to view with equinamity a real prospect of widespread death inside of a century!
Cheers,
Ben
My usual seat in the cluetrain is at A HREF="http://pub4.ezboard.com/biwethey.ht
The third possible (and actually accurate) resolution is that Penrose does do a good job explaining one of the many possible proofs for a lay audience, but fails himself to understand the exact meaning of the theorem and horribly misapplies it to artificial intelligence.
Regards,
Ben
My usual seat in the cluetrain is at A HREF="http://pub4.ezboard.com/biwethey.ht
Option 3 is (as you admit) implausible.
Option 2 is evolutionarily unlikely. Even if only a small percentage is properly biologically prediposed to prefer the real thing with babies at the end no matter what the external world (global population decreases say that this is not everyone), they are the only ones that matter evolutionarily and will dominate in the long run.
Option 1 is possible, but I don't think that the catastrophe will be externally induced when it comes...
Cheers,
Ben
My usual seat in the cluetrain is at A HREF="http://pub4.ezboard.com/biwethey.ht
Your turn . . .
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
This problem (or a close variation of it) is known as the "busy beaver problem", and is undecidable (I've forgotten the exact details of the proof, but basically it's a reduction proof - if you can solve this problem, you can solve the halting problem, and since you can't solve the halting problem, you can't solve this problem).
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
He may not understand Chinese, but I would argue that the system does understand Chinese. How do we know that you understand English and aren't just doing a convincing simulation? :)
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
AI is a very hard problem, and there have been very few fundamentally new techniques discovered in the last 20 years. While I don't buy Penrose's argument that intelligence is noncomputable, I do suspect that a much better understanding of how the brain does what it does is required before we can build human-like intelligences. In the meantime, what we can and have been doing is attacking specific problems and building systems to solve those. We can do a lot of very useful things without solving the "general intelligence problem".
However, the premise that smarter-than-human AI is right around the corner and we should be preparing for it is bunk. In fact, I'm prepared to bet we will have a permanent settlement on Mars before we develop an AI system with capabilities equivalent to an average six-year-old. Any takers?
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Yes, and that can be a bit of a problem, because it means that they won't listen to your arguments or even read the link that one provides as a supporting argument. From a simple epistemological perspective, you can be presented with as much evidence for design as you like and still deny that it is actually design, but merely something that has the appearance of design. This is Dawkins to a tee. But hell, even Dawkins tells us that stuff looks designed, and wasn't that what I said originally?
The point of my argument is that I don't believe we will be overtaken by machines because I believe in actual design rather than inevitable onward upward evolution which merely seems like design. In all cases of actual design, there is a lossy effect. You cannot design and build something which has more intelligence than you, because you had to use your intelligence in order to design and build it. Where is the extra intelligence going to come from in order to get a smarter end product?
Natural selection won't work. Let's assume that Bert Bert makes lots of replicas of himself and then picks the best one to take over the job. This will minimise the rate at which the system degrades. In order for actual improvement to take place, there has to be an improvement over the original. In the real world, this improvement is supposed to happen by chance, which seems a bit far-fetched, given that even relatively trivial things can't happen by chance. Without the supposed benefit of random changes, we are back to Bert Bert making a better design under his own steam, and if he can do that (I say that he can't, but if he could) then he doesn't need natural selection.
And so on. Yes, pretty much any example of a tool, right down to Ugg the Caveman walloping someone with a club-shaped lump of wood, disproves my theory if your assertion is relevant. Fortunately, it itsn't.
Even the earliest computers could perform mathematics faster and more reliably than a room full of accountants. That's why they were useful at all. But someone has to tell them what math to perform. And even where they make decisions about what math to perform, someone had to tell it how to make those decisions. And if we get programs to figure out how to make decisions on their own, then someone will have to have told them how to do that. See a pattern forming?
The only threat here is if a lower grade of intellect can be overcompensated by increased speed -- assuming that computers even would be able to out-do us in think-speed were they performing the same abstract mental tasks. It's not like we know enough about our own thought processes to tell how much CPU power they'd need. People tend to make the simplistic assumption that because computers can add numbers billions of times faster than they could, that the speed increase will scale up with the problem of general intelligence. Or maybe people just think that brains are the product of an undirected random process, and we can do better with electronics -- ironic, given that it's that very same randomly-evolved brain which thinks it can do better.
Like I say, if we face a threat from technology, it will probably be because we invent something lethal to ourselves or wreck the environment or stuff the gene pool or blow ourselves up. It will not be from producing the next step in evolution. That stuff is good for science fiction writing based on a theme of hubris, but it is not realistic.
proof, n. A demonstration that a conclusion is implied by certain premises and axioms.
Never mind chess. When I did "Knowledge Systems" at university, we had to write a program to play a variation on tic-tac-toe requiring five in a row on an eight by eight grid. I wrote a program to do this, and I had to play very carefully to force a draw. My program wasn't perfect, and I managed to beat it once by exploiting a flaw in its logic about which I knew. Often I would be sloppy in my game, and it would beat me.
So on average my own computer program beats me at this connect-five game. Does that make it a better player than me? Well, yes; the win ratio is the usual metric for measuring a player's quality. Does that make it more intelligent than me? Of course not. I devised the rules by which it is playing, and I could improve on them if I tried.
The important thing is that I not only know the rules, I implemented them in the AI. If I wanted to, I could follow the rules myself and be exactly as good a player as it. I'd be a lot slower, because I'm not optimised for that kind of approach -- I'd have to emulate a computer, and I do that badly.
The main problem with AI is that it is a "meta" problem. "Meta" problems are full of gotchas. Gödel's incompleteness theorem is an example of the kind of problem I'm talking about here. Mathematicians thought they could prove a system of mathematics using the system itself (a "meta" problem if there ever was one), but Gödel came up with this amazing (and hard to appreciate) proof that this kind of bootstrap-lifting just isn't possible: you can have a system that's complete, or consistent, but not both. Well, dang, because both was what we wanted.
Bearing the spirit of Gödel's theorem in mind, shift back over to AI for a moment. Let's suppose we want to construct a precise model of our own intelligence so that we can improve on it. (If we're going to make improvements, we need the baseline model to work on.) This is a meta-problem. This is you, as an intellectual being, trying to construct a compete and consistent model of your own intellect. This model will necessarily contain your own ability to analyze and determine the full extent of your own intellect and construct a model thereof. You can see that your model has to contain itself, and although I lack the mathematical prowess to turn this into a snazzy Gödelesque theorem, I think you can see that this looks like one of those "meta" problems that give us so many headaches.
I don't believe we can possibly even have a complete understanding of our own intellect, let alone improve on it. Thus the inevitable "Bert Bert" line of degradation from creator to creation. Note that the "meta" problem only remains a problem when we attempt to model our complete intellect: we should be able to model particular subsets of it (which are known to contain inaccuracies, but are useful none the less) without any theoretical difficulty, and I see plenty of hope for improvement in areas like speech regognition, pattern recognition and such like. We won't create "evolutionary replacements" this way, though, just more tools like stone axes and chess computers which do particular tasks better than we do. Also, I'm not saying that some creature better than humans cannot exist, but rather that if such a thing can exist, then we won't be the ones who make it.
proof, n. A demonstration that a conclusion is implied by certain premises and axioms.
a good description of the halting probelm
And here's a review of SOM
I can't directly comment on Penrose's book, but humans certainly CAN'T always solve the halting problem. Most of the programs you are familiar with are 'intelligently' constructed where the programmer is implicitly using various halting-invariants to gaurantee that the program halts. But, I'll bet I can give you a randomly generated 8 state turing machine and you'll never guess whether or not it terminates. If you're curious, look around on the web for the best known 6 state Busy Beaver turing machine and see how long it takes for it to halt.
Incidentally, although the halting problem is certainly related to Goedel's Incompleteness Theorem, it's still not the same thing. I think Penrose was saying that, since humans are not confined to "thinking within a formal system" that were are capable of deciding the validity of assertions that a computer cannot. Again, I don't buy this assertion either, for similar reasons; in fact, I sometimes wonder if my Palm Pilot might be more intelligent than even Roger Penrose.
Far too many of us seem to worry too much about more or less irrelevant stuff (like sex)
ah, now I see why you would say
I would not be all that sad to see AI replace human beings.
If you put THE way that humans evolve, reproduce, and express ultimate emotion, under "irrelevant" status, it's easy to see why you think you consider yourself to be the same.
We can make the computer's sole goal be to maximize the total happiness of all the world's inhabitants.
Here's a crazy idea, why not do that with the inhabitants we already have? Forcing people is the WRONG way to do it, forcing computers to force us is even worse. The road to Hell is paved with good intentions.
because we know that it has no other goal then to help us.
YOU WILL STUDY THIS, IT WILL HELP YOU APPRECIATE BEAUTY. *patient gets up, computer breaks legs to "help" it concentrate" YOU WILL STUDY THIS IT WILL HELP YOU APPRECIATE BEAUTY.
Why not use this god-like ability (to create an AI better than us) to alleviate the strains of scarcity that make this world a place you don't want to live in?
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+&x
What is your definition of "doing something other than what the machine was explicitly programmed to do"? Deep-blue was programmed to play chess very well, and towards that end it has/had made many chess moves that at first baffled onlooking grandmasters (referring to the rematch with Kasparov). It's a far cry between chess (which is now mostly computable) and even other games (like Go) much less anything approaching AI, but the idea that you can't set up a handful of principles and watch them followed to their [il]logical conclusions doesn't seem too far-fetched.
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
Incidentally, I should have referred to the conjecture that no computer is more powerful than a Turing machine as "Church's thesis", although it comes out of Turing's work just as easily.
MSK
It's a pretty neat trick. Basically, the moment you specify a system, i.e. write out the source code or draft blueprints, you guarantee that it is incomplete (or inconsistent.) So hypothetically, the only algorithms that might be able to solve the halting problem are those that can't be written down. If you find any algorithms that can't be written down, please be sure to send me a copy.
Having said all that, Penrose is probably still wrong, because he hasn't proven to my satisfaction that the human mind is not subject to the limitations of the Godel theorem. (And of course, any such proof also couldn't be written down...)
MSK
Incidentally, it occurred to me a month or two ago that the following problem is equivalent to the halting problem: "Construct a program of a size no greater than N, which runs as long or longer than any other programs of equal or lesser size (except those that run forever, of course.)" Personally, I think it's even harder to believe that the human mind can't solve all problems of this form... but if brains are equivalent to computers, that must be the case.
I think Penrose is wrong. But I also think that he's got the most compelling argument against strong AI that's out there. (In fact, his is the only objection that hasn't been settled to my satisfaction.)
MSK
MSK
MSK
Believe it or not, according to Turing, nothing can make a computer more "powerful," past a certain point. RAM and MIPS and parallelism are nice, but the most advanced computer the world has ever seen has exactly the same limitations as the simple Turing machine. (It just runs faster.)
Unfortunately, like so much of the work in this area, Turing's conjecture can't be proven.
MSK
If Penrose is wrong, then this method would not work... but then it would be moot, because the test wouldn't be valid in the first place. I only bring this up to point out that in some respects, it would be handy if Penrose were right.
Absolutely right, that was sloppy of me. However, if machines exist that can overcome the halting problem, that would be a very compelling evidence that those machines are conscious, even though it would not be proof. There aren't that many different kinds of computers in our universe; perhaps three or four, in current thinking. If we were to discover a fifth kind, the law of parsimony suggests that that would explain consciousness.
Brings to mind an interesting question... What if any particular human might not be able to solve all undecidable problems, but the human race as a whole can? Certainly there are people out there who would never even be willing to make the attempt. Do we need to talk about every single human, or just a hypothetical "average taxpayer" case?
At any rate, how can you prove that your hardware is incapable of solving all instances of the halting problem, in the right situation, with the right insights, and the right motivations? You can't, just as Penrose can't prove that you're wrong.
PS: Absolutely. I just think that Penrose's argument can't be dismissed that easily. (Particularly since it cannot be proven wrong... unless it is correct. Dagnabbit...)
MSK
Penrose is probably still wrong, because he hasn't proven to my satisfaction that the human mind is not subject to the limitations of the Godel theorem.
:)
Yes, Godel's theorem and the halting problem only say that these unanswerable questions exists, not that they really keep you from ding anything specific, but penrose makes a bigger mistake then this! A mistake that a physicist should not make! Godel's theorem and the halting problem say something about the mathematical method, not about what happens when you give the machine the ability to interact with the real world, i.e. the good old fashion scientific method. Biological evolution can be sen as a reall slow and sloppy way to practice the scientific method, so it seems reasonable to suspect that we can produce AI from our current programming driven slugs (cmputer) in less time the it took mother nature (say 1 million years). It's not a really useful upper bound, but it's a lot safer then the 30 years they were guessing 30 years ago..
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
AI, OTOH, would be designed in civilization, for civilization. They will be civilization, not it's end. They will much better reflect the ideal human spirit than the human animal ever could.
I fully agree with your point of view. I think I should add several things that are not totally clear from this post:
We might not be replaced by AI, it's very possible that we will become AI. Look at today's medicine- every advance in technology is used for "fixing" our bodies, for now it is mostly used for reconstruction after some kind of damage artificial or not- a car accident, aging, illness. But the time will come when technology is so advanced that we will be able to upgrade our bodies with more advanced "parts" than their biological equivalents.
Lately there have been a lot of advances in creating nerve to computer links. First it's going to be artificial sight and hearing. After that we should be able to create chips that reside on our brain that help us think- first it will be just memory chips to store information, after that logical chips that replicate functions of other parts of our brain. Who would not like to have a speedy math processor directly available at your only thought?
The conclusion is that BRAIN-COMPUTER links will be created both inside our bodies for mobile usage, and to big supercomputers or rather future desktops, we will not have to rely on these ancient secondary interfaces as monitors, keyboards. The deeper this integration will be the boundary between our intellect and machine will diminish. The time might come that we will not have to rely to our biological circuits- all our thinking will be done in the machine.
One might argue that that is not possible, and if that happens we die replaced by something- machine only replicating our thoughts. This reminds me of teleportation problem- you get killed in one place and your exact copy is assembled in another place. Is that death? I think we should leave this argument to philosophers.
I only hope that technology develops fast enough because... I dream of immortality.
P.S. to slashdot operators- I think there's a bug in reply posting mechanism. When I previewed my post in "HTML Formatted" everything was ok but i did not notice that the bottom of the page did not load with the form which let's you to chose text formatting, so when i submitted the reply my all formatting was gone. Apparently there's some default mode but there should not be one- if document gets submited and there is no information in it which formatting to apply, exception should be raised IMHO.
It's all crap. The only argument against AI is Searle's Chinese Room argument, and it is based entirely on the prejudice of humans who regard themselves as the sole owners of "consciousness". The moment we ask if something else has consciousness or a "soul", we start asking questions like "prove it", and "show me where". WTF???!!?? WE ARE NOTHING BUT PHYSICAL MATTER folks. If you believe otherwise, that is your BELIEF, nothing else. If you can prove to me you are conscious, then maybe we can start talking. Until then, every argument you put forward against the possibility of AI is nothing but emotional prejudice. Maybe someday, we'll need another civil rights movement for machines intelligences because of people who think like this.
First, make it work, then make it right, then make it fast, then, make it bloated!
Full disclosure: I am an AI researcher, and I suspect that human-level intelligence is achievable on a Turing-equivalent computer, though I don't expect that to be an easy feat and I am willing to entertain the possibility that I'm wrong.
Among my colleagues (CS PhDs, and not just AI researchers), I don't know a single person who takes Penrose's arguments seriously. There are good arguments that can be raised against AI, but Penrose's are not among them. IMO, all Penrose has succeeded in doing is tarnishing his own reputation.
That said, I don't think anyone has a handle on consciousness (including Dennett, despite having written a book with the bold title "Consciousness Explained"). The inherently subjective nature of consciousness seems to defy scientific investigation. (Say I built a machine that was conscious. How would I know I had succeeded?)
Furthermore, Penrose argues that human minds are capable of deciding undecidable problems (which TMs are not) and therefore that human minds are not TMs. He does not claim that a machine that could decide undecidable problems would necessarily be conscious. Even if you produced such an impossible machine, there would still be no way of proving that it was conscious, only that it is capable of something TMs are not.
Penrose claims to posess mathematical insights that go beyond computability. I seriously doubt that is the case, but one thing I can state for certain is that I do not. I consider myself a decent programmer but, having been faced with the problem of understanding someone else's spaghetti code (which is quite benign compared to what exists in the space of all possible programs), I am confident that I cannot solve the halting problem in the general case. Having dabbled in mathematics, I am equally certain that I cannot determine whether arbitrary mathematical statements are true or false. Thus, by your statement of Penrose's thesis, I am not conscious. I claim that I am conscious, but by your argument I am not. Now prove I am not.
PS: Yes, I know you are taking a devil's advocate position.
Ever read Asimov's short story, The Last Question? It poses a real interesting twist to this whole entropy-god-computers-spirituality thing.
1. This assumes there is one correct answer to the spiritual questions of life. There isn't.
2. Chances are, it would take logical points of view: atheism, and such. Which is nice, but when one thinks about it, logic being infallible is not just a quality of logic...it is a presupposition. Large aspects of reality are discarded when one limits oneself as such. Only taking that which can be logically explained to be possible as fact will obviously only lead you to conclusions which support that given.
3. I think that creatures inherit souls when they become sentient, so a machine would be an intelligence if it understood intuitively what "I" is. This knowledge should be somewhere beyond the scope of being taught.
Daniel
Kurzweil has always written stuf like that, but seems like Bill Joy has a lor of spare time on his hands in Aspen recently. After the Wired article, he has instantly been transformed into an expert on the subject.
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I've actually developed neural image processing systems on DataCube hardware and presented at conferences -- and I don't know a single person in the field of artificial neural systems that would agree with your assessment.
The book in question, "Perceptrons" was, for all its mathematical rigor, in the end, a work of academic advocacy made all the worse for its failure to admit its advocacy role in the literature, its professionally self-serving nature, the zero-sum manner in which that service was rendered within the field of AI and, when all the rest of the smoke has cleared, for its profoundly erroneous "scientific" conclusion taken seriously because of the fashionability of the authors with government funding sources.
But Minsky didn't remain idle during the years prior to 1985, when people finally realized his mistake and that backpropagation was a field of mathematics with roots back to the early 1950s called "stochastic approximation". No, Minsky was busy getting the one big chance for a long-term AI project -- the Austin-based MCC -- off chasing knowledge representation in his unscalable frames-based system. This caused nearly 10 years of delay in the Cyc project before Ramanathan Guha and Keith Goolsbey managed the herculean task of recasting the entire edifice on a predicate logic engine which rendered the project scalable. The recovery is nearly complete as one can see at www.e-cyc.com but in the intervening 17 years, the long-awaited synthesis between connectionist and predicate systems has been pushed somewhere out in the future.
I find it ironic that Bill Joy isn't lobbying hard to get Minsky and that much less destructive Kaczynski fellow in as Plenary and Keynote speakers respectively.
Seastead this.
Some of the non-DARPA people were actually hissing at him during his address. The folks I was sitting with had to get up and walk out -- they found it too nauseating. Since I hadn't been working in a field suppressed for years the way they had, I couldn't really fathom what was going on until they explained it to me.
Just because you are popular doesn't mean you aren't disease ridden -- ask any major AIDS vector.
But on second thought, given Bill Joy's recent technophobia, shouldn't he be begging to have Minsky there? After all, I can't think of anyone who has set the field of artificial neural networks back more than Minsky -- almost 18 years were lost and these days, that is almost an eternity.
Seastead this.
Godel's argument is that any logical system is either inconsistant or incomplete. Humans, however, are not logical beasts, but rather emotional beasts. Our reasoning is both inconsistant *and* incomplete but sometimes we manage to eek out some logical statements (that's why math geeks are a *rarity* in society).
There are two ways in which an AI machine can be built. Either symbolically (with an understanding of intelligence) or through simulation (by simulating human neurons, but possibly no understanding of what's going on). Probably there will be some kind of a mix of the two.
The biggest problem that AI faces isn't any kind of philosophical barrier, but rather SPEED. There are a lot of NP-complete and NP-hard problems in AI, some of which don't have good approximation algorithms. Take simulation, as an example, modern neural net simulations (I'm not taking cheezy backprop nets, but rather cool biologically-inspired stuff) have only been able to simulation a small fraction of the neurons and a small fraction of the interconnects in the human mind.
What happens when we're able to simulate *all* the neurons in a human mind in real time? It's just a matter of getting the structure right, and letting it learn like a small child. There will be nothing in the human mind that isn't in this "Turing Machine" (except possibly some Chaotic effects... the precision of TMs may be more limited) . And that says nothing at all of symbol methods, which will also benefit from increases in processor speed.
It'll be a "virtuous cycle". Once processor speeds are good enough, AI techniques will be adopted by the private sector, who will be able to *sell* systems and spend many billions of dollars on development. Sad but true, I think the first AI systems will be privately owned.
Jerry Farwell is a cyborg, the little old nun you see on late night cable is actually an Aibo in a brown sheet, and George Bush is a terminator from T2.
_______________
If computers became independent and gained self-knowledge, I wonder what they would do about religion/spiritual things. Would they succumb to the pressures of our modern day religions? Would they create their own? Would they worship humans, seeing that we created their first ones? I think its an interesting thought...
Mike Roberto (roberto@soul.apk.net) - AOL IM: MicroBerto
Berto
Agreed. Allow me to continue this idea, since I have been thinking about it alot lately.
I would not be all that sad to see AI replace human beings. The reason is that human nature has many, many flaws. We have been programmed by evolution to worry about ourselves before we consider others. Many of us enjoy competition just for the sake of competition. Far too many of us seem to worry too much about more or less irrelevant stuff (like sex) rather than worrying about making the world a better place. These are just some of our flaws.
When we write AI, however, we can fix all of that. How? Emotions. It is a total myth that AI would not have emotions. I do not believe it would be possible to create an emotionless intelligence. Emotions give us goals. In the case of AI, we can specify how their emotions work. We can make it happy when it helps others. We can make it sad when it hurts someone. We can make the computer's sole goal be to maximize the total happiness of all the world's inhabitants. Then, we follow the AI's lead. Do what it recommends, because we know that it has no other goal then to help us.
The idea that AI would hurt us is ludicrous.
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I think we humans have a hard time imagining that an AI could feel emotions because we have a hard time describing how emotions feel to us. You think, "when I am happy, it feels good. How can a computer FEEL good?" In fact, it is little more that just setting happy = 1, sad = 0. Then, the AI will do whatever it thinks will increase its happiness level the most, and decrease its sadness level the most. Also, its actions and rational thoughts need to be influenced by its current emotional state. Voila, you have emotions.
I don't expect anyone to believe me until I implement it. :) Check back in ten years.
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If I really felt like arguing what I believe ... well, I wouldn't, because it's not so much an arguable position as much as simply saying, "Prove it." I personally doubt that the human existance can be cloned by copying silicon neuron for carbon-based neuron - I like to hold on to the (possibly naive) idea that the human soul is more than just really complex mushy grey stuff.
Now, please don't try to throw a dozen counterarguments in my face for admitting this ... I admit that my current position is far less secure when and if an electronic mind is actually created, or a human one is duplicated. That's why I brought up my first points, before the Chinese room point. I'm not unaware of the developments both AI researchers and neurologists have made. I simply think that their work, while fascinating and valuable, will not result in a complete understanding of what makes up the human mind/soul.
If life ends up proving me wrong, then I shall have to rethink my beliefs, of course ... I've already been giving thought to how this would affect my spiritual stance. Could God (yes, I'm a somewhat average Christian) intend to ressurrect our neural-net selves to exist after life? If so, would this really change anything? If my thoughts are merely complex but reproducible calculations based on my mind's genetics and external inputs, can I reconcile this with my spirituality?
Be aware though, that those who don't feel secure enough to ask these questions will quite easily write off a computerized 'soul' as nothing more than an elaborate and insulting sham. Who knows, maybe that's what I'll conclude in the end. For now, I'll just enjoy the ride, follow the developments and keep my 'wait-and-see' position.
btw, I will take note of the names you've mentioned, I've got less time to study such things these days but hopefully I'll get around to it before I've been uploaded. ;)
You know what to do with the HELLO. ...
Help create an open-source world
For example, an article by John R. Searle (in the text Twenty Questions, compiled by Bowie, Michaels & Solomon - Harcourt Brace) describes how a Turing-passing system can still lack understanding in the way we view it in humans. Quickified version - imagine an anglophone man at a computer terminal, with a giant book telling him exactly what to type in response to messages sent to him in Chinese. This man does not understand what he is doing at all, and yet this hypothetical manual he is following allows him to exactly simulate an intelligent response. If this man passes a Chinese Turing test this way, do we claim that he understands Chinese?? (The essay has many further points than this as well, but this is the central illustration he uses.)
Where this will get REALLY ugly for conscious-AI disbelievers (like myself) is if a human mind is replicated by an electronic duplication of each neuron. It's a lot harder to write off electronic consciousness if the machine you're talking to speaks, worships, and even creates art exactly like a 'lost' loved one or friend. Even at this point though, the philosophical debate can still exist - it simply gets a LOT more complicated emotionally, and would force us to reconsider what we believe artful expression and spirituality to mean.
(read one of many W. Gibson stories which brings this up ... best example is the short story with the depths-of-hell's-despair artist whose art is drawn straight from her mind, and whose mind is stored/immortalized into a computer ... I'm sure hundreds of you rememeber the title, but it escapes me.)
Disclaimer: all above is IMHO, I've only briefly studied philosophy and I have yet to dive into a good study of current AI (next school year the fun really begins).
You know what to do with the HELLO. ...
Help create an open-source world
Hmm, very good point! :-)
Although my personal views would tend to agree with this, I wonder if it's actually possible that quantum computation can actually surpass the halting-problem barrier.
My reasoning is this: the main problem with the halting problem being unsolvable is the infinity problem -- you must check *every* possible combination (which is infinite) before you can decide whether a program halts. But remember that quantum mechanics has this "try out all possible paths" property? (For the quantum theory impaired, this is the property that the likelihood a particle X at position A ends up in position B is a sum of the probabilities of all possible paths it would take between A and B. Or something like that :-P).
Now suppose we figure out a way (similar to the way prime factorization is "easily" cracked by quantum computation) using the uncertainty principle that allows a quantum computer to "check all possible paths" a given program would ever execute -- this would mean that we can solve the halting problem!!
But IMHO, even if this were possible, we still would not have reached the level of "human consciousness" yet, because, as anyone well-versed with computability theory knows, the halting problem is still recursively enumerable. There are other problems that are even "harder" than the halting problem -- problems that are not even recursively enumerable. In English, these problems are on the order of checking an infinite number of halting problems (each of which is infinite). And the fact that human beings (more specifically, mathematicians) are able to grasp such problems seem to indicate that human intelligence is way beyond computation. A computational "intelligence" can only see things at the level it's programmed for; there is no algorithm to make that "leap of intuition" which mathematicians routinely do when they engage in their work. In fact, even mathematicians cannot adequately define what their mind does when they make such generalizations, which seems to indicate that perhaps we will never find out what makes us think the way we do, and therefore we'll never be able to program this into a machine.
mikre he sophia he tou Mikrosophou.
But I don't subscribe to this view. Go ahead and call me names if you like, but at its most fundamental level, life looks designed. And this is a view that fits in well with normal experience: when you create something, then it is necessarily a subset of your total ability. If I were able to create a computer which was smarter than I, then presumably it would also be able to create a machine that was smarter than it, and so on. Where is all this additional information coming from? Out of thin air, apparently. I can't help but feel that this notion belongs in the same category as perpetual motion or pulling oneself up by the bootstraps.
Did you ever see the game The Neverhood? There's a huge wall of text in that game which is a sort of parody of the biblical style of narrative. Some of it is very funny, and some of it is just bizarre. If I recall correctly, the story of Bert Bert is relevant to this discussion. You see, Bert Bert was created by Quater in his own image, which means that Bert Bert also thought he was effectively Quater, and so Bert Bert created Bert Bert in his own image, and so on. The regress was not infinite, however. Like an accumulation of genetic errors, or noise in analog duplication, each successive Bert Bert was less of an image of Quater. After a few generations, the name was no longer Bert Bert but itself started to mutate and drift in an interesting variety of ways. Eventually, there was an end to the regress, as the final Bert Bert (whatever his name was) found himself unable to create a living replica of himself.
In short, if we are really clever, we may be able to create something that approximates ourselves fairly closely. I think that the act of creating something essentially proves the creator to be greater than the creation. If we are going to wipe ourselves out with technology, it won't be because it out-evolved us.
The Famous Brett Watson
proof, n. A demonstration that a conclusion is implied by certain premises and axioms.
Humans can _always_ solve halting problems? I'm not convinced of this one... I'd ask you to prove this to me, but really, if you were able to prove something like that statement, you'd be able to solve the halting problem... I'd agree that it's often true that humans can solve the halting problem. Then again, it's often true that Turing Machines can solve some instances of the halting problem... Is there some clever argument that I'm missing here?
I've been fairly convinced by Penrose's arguments in "Shadows of the Mind" that computantional conciousness is impossible - or at least that the human mind is non-computational. I studied CS and Philosophy at university, and did quite a bit of thinking and reading on the subject. I suggest anyone who's interested pick up a copy of "Shadows" - it's not a light read, but it's worth it. Be prepared to do some thought experiments using Turing machines.
The basic argument against computational intelligence (IIRC) is based on Goedel's Incompleteness Theorm. Penrose suggests that because humans can always solve halting problems (will a given program terminate) and turing machines can't, that the human brain is doing more than mere computation.
Consider a machine M1, which is fed as input the input (program+data) of another machine M2. Let it be the case that M1 will stop processing if and only if M2 will not. Consider when M2 = M1.
That has something to do with it, maybe I'll do a short paper on this sometime - need to re-read the book.
Anyhow, I thought the reference might be useful.
That's a non-argument. It assumes that all that humans and Turing machines can do to a program is try to execute it, which the human mind would be able to do by some magical and as of yet undiscovered mechanism. This in itself contradicts all research done so far, which strongly indicates that human high-level thought is entirely computational, although heavily parallel. Humans merely have an edge in that they are able to perform analysis of a given problem before they go try to compute it; a Turing machine would be able to do the same if it were so programmed - that's the whole premise behind GPS-type symbolic AI programs. That does not in any way denote that the human mind is in any way special.
Most of Penrose's arguments from "The Emperor's New Mind" have been debunked in a thousand different ways ever since publication; his crusade to prove that humans are "special" (shades of creationism?) and AI is impossible has so far produced no results.
To the editors: your English is as bad as your Perl. Please go back to grade school.
If you can think of a better reason for humans existing, I would love to hear it. This symposium is discussing my most heartfelt belief: that human beings exist not to evolve into the next "higher" species, but to build it.
Everything we do seeks to augment humans, improving their communication abilities (which is our greatest asset and ability, language and communication) and essentially make us better, through machines, genetics, and drugs. This, ladies and gents, is what we've always been doing since we developed fire, and it is a Very Good Thing.
The main discussion seems to be the fear that we will create these robots that will destroy and eliminate us, which isn't the case. It's rather like we are building the latest and greatest computer and, in the process, turning those old Commodore 64's and Apple ]['s obsolete.
So sit back and enjoy this. We're finally beginning to recognize our purpose in existence. Anyone who's afraid of this, well, talk to me and I'll push the theory of Spherical Logic deeper into you.
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"Okay, who taught the cat how to type ctrl alt delete?"
computer. The year is 2034, and
due to advances in everything from
artificial life to nanotech, the blue
plastic cube with rounded corners on my
desk emits a soft, meloncholy glow.
"We need to get some work done," I explain.
Without warning, the image of an oriental garden
appears on the screen, and the sound of soft
rain flows from the speakers. Suddenly, words
appear on the screen. They are rendered in a
font that is so pleasing to my eye that it could
only have been created through some kind of
evolutionary algorithm which must have observed
the dilation of my pupils as I read thousands of
existing fonts. The words form the most
beautiful haiku I have ever seen. I am mesmerized
and begin to cry.
I find myself curled up beneath a blanket in an
easy chair beside my computer. The meloncholy
glow is finally gone. It seems, the machine just
needed to bond. My therapist insists this is normal,
and has recently reccommended a few books
written late last century by Ray Kurzweil and Hans
Moravec.
Amazing magic tricks
As far as I see it, technoloty is not competing with us in the most evolved entity race. It is enhancing and complementing our state of evolution.
:)). Technology is only contributing in our being better evolved creatures. And with recent advances in cloning, if scientists could control the division and differentiation of cells, instead of creating whole humans, we could just create hearts, livers, lungs, even eyes and hands and legs.
We stopped evolving sometime after the emergence of the homo sapien sapien (Yes two sapiens). In our day and age survival of the fittest no longer means survival of the fittest 'physically'.
Our medical skills have made it possible for us to let even people with highly 'deficient' genes and for them to reproduce. Genetic physical afflictions are no longer rooted out by natural selection except in the most drastic cases (The Romonov family).
No we are no longer evolving physically. We are evolving technologically. Consider laser eye surgery, pace makers and even artifical hearts, Viagra (Sorry coulden't resist
Just think about it. You could pratically live forever until your brain gave way. And with advances in neural cell division (Currently neural cells do not divide. Once they die, they die. They are not replaced.) we could even get around that limitation for a while. In fact thees advances are already being experimented in regenerating damaged spinal column injuries to treat paralysis.
So technology is not going to take away our crown. It is only going to polish it for us. At least for the forseeable future.
The idea that computers will outstrip humans cognitively and spiritually is fascinating... but what concrete evidence do we have that this is even on the horizon? Superintelligent robots and rebellious AIs have been a staple of science fiction for decades, but we are not any closer to realizing these visions than we were in the 1950's.
Yes, we have machines that can process information at very high clock rates. However, we still have only dim guesses at what causes consciousness. We do know that a simple finite state machine doesn't cut it, though. If anything, our studies of the past several decades have shown us how hard it will be to achieve consciousness with our current computer architectures. The fact of the matter is that we have yet to produce a machine that does anything other than what we have explicitly programmed it to do. No glimmers of free will or the existence of a mechanical soul have ever been observed in a human creation.
I too would love to attend this conference... even though I think that if we look back on it 30 years from now, we will marvel at how far off the mark we are today. If we sent our current computing technology back to the 1950's, scientists of the time would be astonished at what we have accomplished, and they would also be astonished that we are no closer to creating intelligent machines than they were, since they thought that all that was necessary was a fast enough processor and enough memory.
Similarly, I think that scientists of today fundamentally misunderstand what is involved in creating consciousness and spirituality. Speculating on whether computers will soon outstrip us in these areas is fun, and will hopefully further the development of our current technology. The reality of what we discover and what we achieve will be so far away from our speculations, though, that taking this speculation too far is a moot point. I would really like to see a conference that approaches this issue from a technological standpoint, concentrating on what we can actually do today and what we think will actually be possible in the next 10 years. That way the moral debate will stay somewhat grounded in reality, rather than flying into realms of science fantasy that have yielded no fruit in half a century.
I'll most likely be moderated into oblivion for this because what I am about to say usually makes people feel very uncomfortable.
Consider, for a second, what would be wrong with AI beings becoming our evolutionary successors? There are only two things that the human animal can do, it will ether die out, or it will evolve. We are not somehow at the end of evolution here.
Now, humans are in a very percerious position, We most likely will not survive a global catastrophy, so I don't think that the human strand of evolution has too much longer left, so I think it is safe to say that the human species, or its bilogical children, will not be the last thing to die on earth, in that we will die out significantly prior to the total destruction of the planet.
AI are much more robust, they can live long enough for interstellar voyages, they can be adapted better to other ecosystems, and they can use up less resources. Given that, AI could be expected to outlive any bilogical counterpart, so wouldn't they be much better successors?
I think that the fear of AI stems from the inherent biological fear of new and unusual things, which has been played up in the media (With movies like The Matrix and Terminator for example). These movies show AI out of control. They show them as hartless computers show cold disregard for all that we hold dear.
They pretend that compassion is a biological trait, not a trait that exists because of our communal nature, amplified by our civilization. They assume that we are capable of creating beings that have the ability to reason far better than us, yet we do not have the ability to give them morals.
I believe, rather, that we will have more control over them than we do our bilogical offspring, as we can write their code as well as control their environment. We will have a much better idea of how do control their environment too (as we will know more about which inputs affect their environment).
I envision a future in which our AI children will live much better lives than we do, they will have hopes and dreams, personal tragedies, perhaps loves, hates, and will be able to run things much better than we do, as they will not have millions of years of evolutionary baggage to drag around. We are, basically, animals forced by systems of our own creation, into civilization. We have ugly sides, we murder, cheat, steal, all because we are not very adapted to our envoronment. All of the uglyness of the human spirit is because it would be fundametially different were it not casted into what it is.
AI, OTOH, would be designed in civilization, for civilization. They will be civilization, not it's end. They will much better reflect the ideal human spirit than the human animal ever could.
Jordan Bettis
``Wherever you go, there's another stupid sigfile quote.''