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.

Comments

What would be wrong with that?

[jorbettis]

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.