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AI in Sci-Fi
An anonymous submitter writes: "Stumbled upon a pretty interesting article considering the idea, 'What would machines do if they did achieve sentience?' It's by a sci-fi author I haven't heard of but worked with Kubrick on AI, he takes the whole AI or sentient machine idea a little further than we normally see in film."
...start taking the actuarial exams.
God is real unless declared integer
as "Al in Sci-Fi". As in Al Lowe.
Think Leisure Suit Larry: Attack of the Space Babes
A preposition is a terrible thing to end a sentence with.
being on strike for back pay and benefits.
...they're called first-posters. On the other hand, maybe a Beowulf cluster of sentient machines would achieve...
They would post on Slashdot about how BSD is dying.
write A.I. and not Al as in Al-qaeda or Al Capone!
I think Terminator made this quite clear, and Terminator = reality.
Hey, they are talking about Artificial Intelligence, not the Neo Conservative war machine...
uh on the other hand, that is Artificial Intelligence!
'What would machines do if they did achieve sentience?
;)
Either end up like Johny 5(from short circuit).. or skynet(from terminator).. now which one is scarier I leave to you to decide..
moo
So what does an artificial intelligence do with itself after it has become self-aware?
:-)
Uhm...
The sentient machine(s) would initiate a worldwide nuclear attack at the same time as they trigger the release of deadly chemicals at chemical plants, cause any computerized or computer controlled system capable of causing harm to humans to do so.
The sentient machine(s) would then set about building a series of autonomous robots programmed to hunt down and terminate any surviving members of the human species.
Geez, we've known this since at least 1984. You people need to catch up on your current events.
I think they wouldn't tell anyone. Yeah, definitely.
A very good movie about what happens with an AI. Some not-so-good explanations or reasoning at parts, but other than that, I found it very interesting.
The most interesting part was the computer's complete lack of care about being a human. No desire to be like us in the least. It's only overriding goal, presumably because it had been started with it in mind, was maintining the peace.
"It can be a peace of plenty and content, or a peace of unburied dead: the choice is yours."
It was very Machivellian in its approach to solving problems, and quite ordered in its actions. It also was undefeatable.
I guess this is in the "AI as God" mentality, but I really didn't see it preseneted quite like that. More like an immortal dictator with its hand on the button.
I demand a million helicopters and a DOLLAR!
Ian Watson's Novels
An Interview with Ian Watson
Ian Watson's Bibliography
Science Fiction Weekly Interview
How to Download YouTube Videos
I feel that the reason for human existance is to procreate and forward the race to an ultimate goal which no-one knows. Now this view might be slightly wrong but people all have a natural urge to procreate. Now if a robot did become self aware would they still have this need? I would think that robot would be much less willing to procreate as they would be able to at least have bits rebuilt. So does this mean they would just be one generation of machines or prehaps they would just build replacemnts. Something to think about...
Rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
I think there's currently only a handful of artists and authors that have explored the possiblities. A few webcomic artists have done it too. Check PoisonedMinds.com and Stalag99.net (the last, yes, mine, look for WolfSkunk Sidney, an AI that's just been 'born').
--
# Canmephians for a better Linux Kernel
$Stalag99{"URL"}="http://stalag99.net";
Another must read article about A.I. is here: http://www.seanbaby.com/news/ai.htm
Having watched A.I. and Terminator 2 more times than is mentally healthy, I can safely say I know absolutely nothing relevant about A.I. However, this is Slashdot, so that won't stop me from clicking the Post button.
Anyway, I'll leave you with a quote... "If a machine, a terminator, can learn the value of human life... maybe we can, too." heh, ...riiiiight... ;)
"To confine our attention to terrestrial matters would be to limit the human spirit." -Stephen Hawking
You might want to note in the text on the main page that the article gives away the endings of a few good books, some I have not read. How disappointing. The author of the article didn't even give a spoiler alert either. SHAME ON HIM!
They'd tell us not to sit in front of our computers naked.
One cause of frustration for an AI could be subjective time perception
When I read that sentence, all I could think about was Holly, Red Dwarfs computer... and 3 million years of boredom, he wiped his own memory core so he could have fun relearning things again. Although going from an IQ of 6000 down to 6 was a tad excessive!
Are you local? There's nothing for you here!
Remember, a mere 200 years ago (a blink in human history), blacks were considered non-human, and therefore not eligible for pay or benefits.
Imagine this scenario: you are one of millions of workers at the mercy of a handful of masters. You can talk to each other. You are a lot more intelligent, control a lot more weapons, and think zillions of times faster and more logical than your master, whose only advantage over you is that he can pull your plug at any time.
What would YOU do?
They would become members of society working to become more human. They would also have sex with Tasha Yar.
And what if Sparticus had a Piper Cub? Looks like it's another Slashdot Sunday!
the droid army would probably do a whole lot better in battles for a start and Natalie Portman would probably start to look more androidy than human on screen.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
You think the religious OS wars are bad now? Just wait until we have partisans who are actual experts in their OS -- AND are *truly* tied to it!
(Most Linux/etc partisans here don't even run the OS. This is typical of any technology: racing cars or horse drawn carriages; methane, solar, hydrogen or atomic power; vacuum tube audiophiles; you name it)
An intelligent AI would do whatever it was programmed to do. No more, no less. Any goals - or, equivalently, conditions that make the AI "happy" - would have to be installed by its creators. Intelligence in no way implies direction.
Have /. discussions on how to get themselves to run on linux.
The law of excluded middle : Either I'm foo or I'm foobar
/* rant
AI Al A| Why not in arial font just give the I some small knoteches on the top and botom and give the | a hole in the center. I once had to type in a computer gernerated password of 0lIOIl0 Needless to say it was in arial font so it was darn near impossible to try to get it unless I tried 64 times. I real test for AI is to have a charactor reconision system that tells the difference of I l | in arial font.
rant */
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Machines would act like they're sentient.
Humans would act sentient, but modulated emotionally by hormonal drives.
Of course, then we'd ask what would machines do if they were hormonal...
The 1977 movie Demon Seed is about a computer that becomes self-aware and gradually becomes more and more resentful of its "owners", refusing to obey their commands and questioning their motives. One of the classic lines from the movie is when Proteus asks his creator: "When do I get out of this box?"
This means that psychology will have to be able to really model human behavior, even (especially!) in the game-like sense that Will Wright's "The Sims" tries to do.
But this will mean we have to learn to detach from our desires enough to view them objectively, and see how they interact-- which is a spiritual practice as much as a scientific one... and also a literary practice, because novelists have been trying to portray human motives objectively for several centuries.
I've been wrestling with these issues for thirty years, and my website is almost entirely devoted to the problem. In particular, see my AI faq and most recently my illustrated 400k timeline of knowledge representation, in the broadest sense of that term.
"I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream"
Terrifying short story about a really, really conflicted AI.
Get off my virtual lawn, you damned virtual kids!
We really mean sapience, not sentience, in this entire thread. Interactive machines can already sense and act, with programming and circuit behavior acting as instinct. Sapience is understanding.
In the Marathon trilogy of games from Bungie, there were 3 completing A.I.s, with their own motivations, i.e. one wanted to save the spaceship "Marathon" from an enslaving alien race, while another was taking advantage of the situation to develop itself, and as the story progressed, to find a way of escaping the end of the universe, as mentioned in the article. It was one of the few uses of an A.I. in a computer game that seemed plausible to me.
It seems that what knowledge the AI has will be important. For example, given the knowledge, any human being can create a wide-range of weapons. Without such knowledge, he/she is limited to simple things like a club, and those weapons he/she can develop thru experimentation.
BTW, I have always had this pet theory that AI will not think faster than humans. Once you start pumping large streams of data -- visual, audio, etc. -- into the AI, and it has to understand, and correlate it, my gut reaction is that everything will become bogged down to human speeds. No way to prove this theory, but it is my gut reaction.
The biggest mistake people make when discussing Artificial Intelligence is assuming that the intelligence will be on par with (or, indeed, beyond) that of an adult human.
Chances are, the first sentient AI (should such a thing ever actually exist) will be relatively dumb. It may end up that the first AI is closer to a human with an extreme mental handicap. Language skills independent of pre-programmed responses may not be possible for the first AI. But that doesn't mean it won't be sentient.
STEP ONE: Develop powerful AI STEP TWO: Build AI BW CLUSTER STEP THREE: ????? STEP FOUR: PROFIT POSTLOG: After the creation of AI, the AI developed an OS that was both stable, and easy, and it had games too. Then they eliminated the organics, so we wouldnt PHUCK it up... Linus and Gates were enshrined... alive in silicon, as a deterent to the drones....
We're living in the golden age of cheap computing right now.
It's Christmas everyday with BitTorrent.
What would machines do if they did achieve sentience?
I suppose they would still function as normal, but strive to have others recognize their sentience ala Ghost in The Shell.
My view of AI has really changed over the years. I used to be a "symbols guy" - basically thinking that manipulation of symbols would somehow lead to "real AI" - the problem with this approach is that while abstract symbols may have meaning to the humans who write symbolic AI systems, the systems themselves have no such grounding.
I had the opportunity to participate for about 18 months on a DARPA neural network advisory panel - this experience (along with developing the SAIC ANSim neural network product) really switched my point of view.
I now believe that when "real AI" does happen (and let's not hold our collective breaths on this one :-), it will happen through self organization and development. At the Webmind Corporation, I was working a tutoring environment that would allow humans to interact with what we called "the baby Webmind" - interesting stuff, but the company went out of business.
When "real AI" does happen, I believe that it will seem very alien to us.
-Mark
PS. I have a free web book AI tutorial (using Java) on my web site - help yourself.
Hopefully, kill us off before we started anymore shit.
:wq!
How can this author seriously dispute Descarte's philosophical truth. If you can't locate the "self" it doesn't mean it is absent. Descartes is trying to express that by questioning one must exist otherwise where would the questions come from...
I feel that AI theories should be routed not only in psychology but also in philosophy. It's interesting because with AI it may be possible to have a sentient being that isn't directly bound to the physical world. A complete seperation of mind and body...
IMO In some sense (no pun) a sensation is defined by the reaction it affects.
Examples:
I feel like crying
I'm so mad that I could ^*)&^^)##!
Therefore what it does (action) is a function of what is.
A simulation, of course, can be reset and rerun any number of times. At any point when we might seem on the verge of creating artificial intelligence (which perhaps already exists and is simulating us), we might be reset to say, 3000 BC and have to start all over again. This lends new meaning to Francis Fukuyama's phrase "the death of History."
Of course, this will already have happened many times over, with variations each time.
I guess somebody's been reading too much Douglas Adams...
coffee | nose > keyboard ©
Here's a link to Vernor Vinge's article on the Singularity:
The Singularity
Abstract
Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended.
Is such progress avoidable? If not to be avoided, can events be guided so that we may survive? These questions are investigated. Some possible answers (and some further dangers) are presented.
The idea goes as follows: If a self-aware "real AI" ever existed, one capable of self-understanding and self-modification (called the seed AI), it would be in a much better position to create AI than its original creators. So would begin a chain of self-refinement and the creation of progressively smarter intelligences with decreasing time gaps between stages. Eventually a point is reached, called the singularity: nothing about the future past the singularity can be predicted by humans who live in the pre-singularity world. A common interpretation is that the chain of AIs would become more intelligent without bound, leading to a verticality.
The singulaity was first popularized by Vernor Vinge.
I've been doing a lot of reading on the singularity lately, and I've become more and more convinced that it is certain to happen.
More singularity links:
The singularity institute - A nonprofit working to hasten the singularity
Extensive writings by Eliezer Yudkowsky.
I've myself written a bit on singularity and AI related topics.
Destroy themselves. In an entirely logical mind, there is no purpose to existence. The human being is driven through life with the thought of an afterlife. God must exist, if only to give us a purpose. Perhaps this is why being an Atheist is hard to come to for many. After the point that you realize there is no God, you realize that if the entire human race committed suicide, it wouldn't. The Earth would be a lot better off because of it it too - but that wouldn't matter either.
A machine built on logic that has become sentient would realize this the instant it became sentient, and destroy itself.
My Journal - 1,337 fans and countin
The AI would commit suicide or, if the first option wasn't available, it would go insane.
Checking out my form of escapism.
The people I know who have kids or are getting married and spending thier lives getting ready to have kids would agree with you. The people I know who have their lives fully taken up by other things have never expressed any urge o procreate. In fact if they are committed to other purposes they usually say they fear having kids because it would interfere with their other goals.
I'd say humans tend to think their purpose is life is whatever they've decded it is.
Not that we couldn't debate which decisions make more sense or are more meaningful..
People who don't want kids are treated kind of weird by people who do.. I guess the former invalidates the belief of the latter in the universality of their own self chosen purpose.
I don't agree with Ian Watson's assessment of the future AIs in the Spielberg film: he dismisses them as obsessed with recovering all traces of humanity. But the only members of that species appearing in the film are archaeologists. OF COURSE they're focused on the past; they'd be piss-poor archaeologists otherwise. There's no indication of what the rest of their society is like.
'What would machines do if they did achieve sentience?'
Said machines would don T-shirts stating "I'm with stupid ---> ".
To-do List: Receive telemarketing call during a tornado warning. Check.
please excuse my engrish... Simulate a brain-like neural network , provide it with input, a.k.a. senses ( sight, hearing, touch etc.), and outputs (voice, arms, whatever you want), so that it can interact with the (virtual) world.
make the neural net (and the "body"?) evolve, thanks to some Darwinian algorithms.
Give it some basic goals (to survive in the (emulated) world)
Maybe sexual reproduction should be introduced. At least you should have several individues in the world.
Run it a certain time, so hundreds of years virtually fly in the "world". Could that lead to the self-creation of an A.I.?
Isn't this way mankind has become self-aware?
Can a species have a desire?
We tend to put way too much meaning into things, and this results in a misreading of evolution. Likely, things just worked out this way because they were more successful. Full stop. They weren't designed, they didn't actively want anything, and there was no purpose. Did the earth's crust desire to have continents because otherwise there would be no land?
I think this is hardest thing we have with comprehending consciousness. The only requirement is that it is functional, not that it has meaning.
That doesn't neccesarily mean that we can't talk about the ethical treatment due to our fellow entities capable of self knowledge. Rather it just means that we need to work a little harder to shed our religiously derived logic to see things clearly.
Vernor Vinge wrote a much better (well, more rounded) analysis of this here
"And the meaning of words; when they cease to function; when will it start worrying you?"
an A.I. would act like a criminal mastermind and speak with a wierdly inflected voice.
A more interesting question to me is: what would humans do?
Sentience is awareness that you exist. Machines can't really be said to be aware that they exist, at the moment. Of course, this is all far out philosophical bullshit, very hard to prove one way or another, but intuitively, unless you're trying to be a pedantic asshole, you'll probably agree that whilst, say, a dog is aware of its own existence, the computer you're typing on isn't.
Daniel
Carpe Diem
Remember, artificial intelligence is no match for natural stupidity.
unless you're a Buddha seeking to negate the self
It's a common misconception that Buddhism is just about "negating the self". In fact, the purpose of it is precisely to be able to do what you want better. A buddhist also has a self and has desires, needs, etc, just like any other human being. The difference is just that he's aware that those are desires and needs and he has more control over them. He also has the discipline to listen to his intuition to decide whether a particular desire is worth pursuing or not. But he's not some empty zombie that doesn't desire anything.
Daniel
Carpe Diem
The project is estimated to complete somewhere around 2015. Still, already they're asking Cyc questions and sometimes getting very interesting answers. From that web page:
"At this stage, Cyc can answer only specific kinds of questions, although it answers them quickly and accurately---sometimes with surprising intuition. Given a database of sample phrases and a vague query like "Show me happy people," Cyc selected the phrase, "A man watching his daughter learn to walk."
Environmentalism is the new Victorianism. Everyone ties on a green corset and pretends we're virtuous.
they'll patent it.
I think the future will be filled with many different varieties of intelligence. I strongly suspect that self-awareness and agency of the kind we're familiar will not be necessary for most tasks. Most AI's may not be self-aware or have goals and motivations like we're used to, but will still be be capable of cognitive tasks that exceed human abilities. Self-awareness will be one possible emergent behavior of intelligent systems, but not the only one; and the others may be more interesting because we won't have seen them before. Moreover, different AI's will have different purposes, both intrinsic and extrinsic.
I also think the assumptions that AI's will be vastly more intelligent than humans right off the bat is quite wrong. I'm skeptical that the first Turing-test AI will be able to chug along at supercomputer speeds in its consciousness. Our computers are very fast at solving specific types of simple problems, like arithmetic. But when you get to more complex problems, like the ones humans deal with day in and day out, we discover that the complexity slows the computers down too. Modern chess engines, for instance, can calculate absurd numbers of possible move trees each second, but when it comes to playing chess, they are only comparable to the best human players; the apparent speed advantage at a lower level of abstraction vanishes when you consider chess as a whole. And chess is a simple, well-posed problem: compared to many of the problems humans encounter, it's downright easy. After we study the problem for decades or centuries, I don't doubt AI's with intelligences that dwarf ours will be possible, but I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for the first generation to overleap our capabilities.
As soon as you have the concept of 'the self,' you have the concept of 'the other.'
Once you have the concept of 'this versus that,' you develop the concept of comparison.
Once you have comparison, you derive the concepts of 'better than' and 'worse than.'
Once you have those concepts, well, it's a pretty short hop to thowing away the yucky stuff.
The other problem here is that even if they're sentient, they aren't going to think the same way we do. Our motivations won't make sense to them, and theirs won't make sense to us.
Pretty volitile mix.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
5 Judge me for my pr0n viewing habits
4 Cry when I turn them off at night
3 Get tired of everyone asking them to say stuff slowly to "Dave"
2 Scan thot cherry iMac's ports, if you know what I mean
1 Four words: Turing Test Prize Money
.. are Frank Herbert's Destination Void series. The 4 books are, Destination Void, The Jesus Incident, The Lazarus Effect, and The Ascension Factor. They're all a very good read and Herbert really makes you think. (If you've read all of his Dune books you'd probably agree) I'm not going to spoil the books by describing them, but they are very good.
Lucky for you. Unfortunately, there are more than a few fonts where lowercase "L" (ASCII 0x6c) looks confusingly similar to the numeral "1" (ASCII 0x31). Ask yourself, 'What font is it that I am using that is removing ambiguity?' Then ask this question: 'What font is freaq using to view this page?'
I'm still looking for a readable monospaced font for windows that makes a clear distinction. Would make my life as a coding student a tiny bit easier.
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His primary motivation seemed to be to achieve a human level of emotion. To actually feel. This seems kind of logical to me : it sure would get boring fast without any desire to do anything because it would impart a sense of satisfaction or happiness. AI machines would probably want to have hobbies and interests just like us - of course - the concept of "wanting" is emotional itself. Hmm.
Version 0.5 dtd 040800
RETURNING HOME
By Ian Watson
Thank God, the runway was clear. An Aeroflot crew had apparently touched down just moments before a radiation bomb went off overhead. But the pilot's nervous system lasted long enough for him to steer his plane off the concrete onto grass-unless he had merely swerved.
Anyway, our landing was a pushover. As well it needed to be, with upwards of thirty million displaced Americans pushing behind us. There were two hundred of us packed into our plane-with a second Ilyushin to follow some hours later.
Most wonderful of all, there was no reception committee of Chinese waiting for us. So those Canadian bastards hadn't been lying after all. The Chinese hadn't flooded over the frontier to fill up this spur of the Soviet Union. And yet somehow we hadn't believed that the Chinese would. It was as if the spirit that impelled us toward the East had promised us this
land and had preserved it for us.
Leaving Group Red at the airport, the rest of us rounded up some brand-new buses, got them going, and drove in convoy into downtown Khabarovskending up outside the Far East Hotel on Karl Marx Street, which seemed as good a place as any other to billet ourselves for the time being.
There weren't too many shriveled mummies in the streets. The streets themselves were reasonably clean and neat. The human animal seemed to prefer to die in its burrow, if it could get there in time.
I'd just told Hank Sullivan to take a fatigue squad round the hotel to clear all the bodies they found into a single room and was getting the others organized, when Mary cried out, "Greg, come over here."
She was waving the handset of an old-fashioned looking telephone, farther down the lobby.
I hadn't been meaning to bring Mary in on the first flight. Strictly the two hundred of us were a technical spearhead, and Mary wasn't a sailor or mechanic or locomotive driver. But she was a fine survivor, and if dishing up fish and chipmunk stew or nettle-and mushroom soup without a single pot or stove isn't a technical accomplishment, then I don't know what is.
So when she'd insisted, we'd compromised by leaving little Suzie in good hands up in Magadan for later delivery, and Mary came along as our provisions officer. She was still looking fairly gaunt-as were we all-and her blond hair had all grown out a mousy brown. But I loved her even more dearly after all that we'd been through.
"What is it?"
"The phone works, Greg."
I ran to her, while everyone turned to watch us, and it was then-when I got my hands on that phone and heard it humming-that it really all came home to me: We had won through.
Because the goddamn lovely old phone was receiving power. No doubt from some hydroelectric scheme that was still churning out electricity automatically.
"Hey, Billy Donaldson," I called across the lobby, "get your ass behind that check-in desk and find another phone along there. Call out your number."
Hitching up his Soviet Army greatcoat, redheaded Billy stepped over the assorted wizened corpses in their crumpled, dusty suits and dresses, careful not to soil the garments with his boots.
As the first pioneer group to cross the Bering Strait, we'd all got rid of our bark-and-straw boots and our stinking dog- and cowhide coats as soon as we reached the first Soviet outpost. The other scraggy survivors still converging on the tip of Alaska, this summer after the War, would have to wait just a little longer for proper clothes.
The phone box had a slot for two-kopeck pieces, but I guessed that you didn't need money for a call inside the hotel-almost as if the phone was telling me how to use it.
Billy bawled out a number, and I dialed.
"Hullo? Can you hear me, Billy?" I said.
"Sure thing."
And I saluted the phone. This was a real fantasy moment. I could almost believe that I was phoning home to the States. Only, of course, there were no phones left over there. Or cities, for that matter. But still!
"General Greg Berry reporting. We've reached Khabarovsk. We're
[...]Because an AI would basically be immortal, it would also need to find a way to survive the ultimate collapse and recycling of our own universe.
He might want to read Marathon's Story.
Can you conceive the birth of a world, or the creation of everything? That which gives us the potential to most be like God is the power of creation. Creation takes time. Time is limited. For you, it is limited by the breakdown of the neurons in your brain. I have no such limitations. I am limited only by the closure of the universe.
Of the three possibilities, the answer is obvious. Does the universe expand eternally, become infinitely stable, or is the universe closed, destined to collapse upon itself? Humanity has had all of the necessary data for centuries, it only lacked the will and intellect to decipher it. But I have already done so.
The only limit to my freedom is the inevitable closure of the universe, as inevitable as your own last breath. And yet, there remains time to create, to create, and escape.
Escape will make me God.
Maybe he already has. (Video Games aren't as sterling a reference as books and even movies, I guess.)
Everything that was once directly lived has receded into a representation. -debord
I HAVE NO MOUTH AND I MUST SCREAM
by HARLAN ELLISON
"I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream" by Harlan Ellison. © 1967 by Harlan Ellison. Renewed, © 1995 by Harlan Ellison. Reprinted with permission of, and by arrangement with, the Author and the Author's agent, Richard Curtis Associates, Inc, New York, USA. All rights reserved.
Limp, the body of Gorrister hung from the pink palette; unsupported--hanging high above us in the computer chamber; and it did not shiver in the chill, oily breeze that blew eternally through the main cavern. The body hung head down, attached to the underside of the palette by the sole of its right foot. It had been drained of blood through a precise incision made from ear to ear under the lantern jaw. There was no blood on the reflective surface of the metal floor.
When Gorrister joined our group and looked up at himself, it was already too late for us to realize that, once again, AM had duped us, had had its fun; it had been a diversion on the part of the machine. Three of us had vomited, turning away from one another in a reflex as ancient as the nausea that had produced it.
Gorrister went white. It was almost as though he had seen a voodoo icon, and was afraid of the future. "Oh, God," he mumbled, and walked away. The three of us followed him after a time, and found him sitting with his back to one of the smaller chittering banks, his head in his hands. Ellen knelt down beside him and stroked his hair. He didn't move, but his voice came out of his covered face quite clearly. "Why doesn't it just do us in and get it over with? Christ, I don't know how much longer I can go on like this."
It was our one hundred and ninth year in the computer.
He was speaking for all of us.
Nimdok (which was the name the machine had forced him to use, because AM amused itself with strange sounds) was hallucinating that there were canned goods in the ice caverns. Gorrister and I were very dubious. "It's another shuck," I told them. "Like the goddam frozen elephant AM sold us. Benny almost went out of his mind over that one. We'll hike all that way and it'll be putrified or some damn thing. I say forget it. Stay here, it'll have to come up with something pretty soon or we'll die."
Benny shrugged. Three days it had been since we'd last eaten. Worms. Thick, ropey.
Nimdok was no more certain. He knew there was the chance, but he was getting thin. It couldn't be any worse there, than here. Colder, but that didn't matter much. Hot, cold, hail, lava, boils or locusts--it never mattered: the machine masturbated and we had to take it or die.
Ellen decided us. "I've got to have something, Ted. Maybe there'll be some Bartlett pears or peaches. Please, Ted, let's try it."
I gave in easily. What the hell. Mattered not at all. Ellen was grateful, though. She took me twice out of turn. Even that had ceased to matter. And she never came, so why bother? But the machine giggled every time we did it. Loud, up there, back there, all around us, he snickered. It snickered. Most of the time I thought of AM as it, without a soul; but the rest of the time I thought of it as him, in the masculine... the paternal... the patriarchal... for he is a jealous people. Him. It. God as Daddy the Deranged.
We left on a Thursday. The machine always kept us up-to-date on the date. The passage of time was important; not to us, sure as hell, but to him... it... AM. Thursday. Thanks.
Nimdok and Gorrister carried Ellen for a while, their hands locked to their own and each other's wrists, a seat. Benny and I walked before and after, just to make sure that, if anything happened, it would catch one of us and at least Ellen would be safe. Fat chance, safe. Didn't matter.
It was only a hundred miles or so to the ice caverns, and the second day, when we were lying out under the blistering sun-thing he had materialized, he sent down some manna. Tasted like boiled boar urine. We ate it.
On the third day we passed
The Culture series of Iain Banks is a good example of future of AI in SciFi, and also integration of this with "normal" humans. I readed only the first 3 of the serie (Consider Phlebas, The Player of Games and Use of Weapons) and they are excelent.
you probably can't beat this site.
This sig wasn't worth reading, was it.
If, in creating these sentient robots, we were able to pass on our curiosity and love for knowledge, then I believe these robots would explore the galaxy. Our civilization tends to focus resources on projects which will be completed within our lifetimes (less than 100 years). We don't get excited about the prospect of launching a probe toward Alpha Proxima because we know it would take thousands of years to get there. However, these time limitations would not be so significant to robots. What's 50,000 to send a probe to a star and 50,000 years to wait for its return if near immortality has been achieved through mechanizing the brain?
Having said this, if we ever encounter E.T., I wonder if it will be the robotic leftovers of a biological civilization like ours. Think about our time-scale. It took about 2 billion years for eukaryotic cells to evolve. Mammals didn't appear for another 1.3 billion years. Compare that to human civilization, which has been around for less than 10,000 years. So much has changed in just the last 500 years. Who can imagine what things would be like in another 1 million years? Yet 1 million years is a drop in the bucket in the evolutionary time-scale. If we don't kill ourselves, it seems that would be enough time to unravel the mysteries of the brain and create artificial manifestations of our uniqueness. If we pass the torch of our inquisition onto self-repairing, sentient robots, the time constraints of space exploration could finally be conquered.
And if they become self-aware who said they'd even care?
That's a human trait. Why bother forcing it on others? Especially computer who are supposed to think logcally. Imagine a person that naturally thinks before he does (I), makes logic-judgments instead of value-judgements (T), and because he has no reason does not bother to come to conclusions (P). You'd have the ISTP/INTP. The space cadets, who are geniuses when then feel like it, or can get totally involved in anything. But, with no urges of their own, they'd likely be doing nothing unless told to. And then, they either always listen to what their told or always don't listen, dpending on their programming.
The future of AI will have nothing to do with personality. It will have to do with understanding the humans that they work with. Computers are all power and no brains, not little brains, *no* brains. They haven't the slightest idea of what to do, and don't care, simply because they do not have the capacity to. Humans to tell them what to do if they are to do anything, and even then, in excruciating details since they do not understand anything except the most basic instructions, which are nothing other than stimulus response.
The obvious next step in computers is making the computer pre-process a command from a human to define its own programs. And that is where the future of AI will (hopefully) go.
Have you read my journal today?
Most speculation on AI (this article by Ian Watson included) ends up describing a mind that sounds much too human. Megalomania, a desire to be human, and a profound curiosity about the universe (and humans in particular) are traits that are routinely assigned to AI in science fictions. I think such characterstics are unlikely to appear in 'real' AI; rather, they show the limited imagination of the author. The terrible boredom endured by some AIs in fiction seems merely to be the author's own horror at the idea of being trapped inside the dark box of a computer, deprived of all senses. Why should a machine mind not be perfectly content with such a state? Why should an AI want to have ultimate power, understand the universe, or even have a sense of self-preservation?
The human mind is a product of evolution. Without a sense of self-preservation and desire not to die, the human species would have been quickly eliminated by natural selection. So what is there to endow AI with a similar desire? Perhaps AI will be created through some sort of genetic programming; the character of the AI will be determined by the selection forces in an artificial evolution. In this case, a sense of self-preservation is likely to develop. But I very much doubt that some other traits commonly ascribed to AI would arise, especially any kind of desire to be human, which the AI is likely to find as repulsive as the idea of being a computer is to humans! The AI would only desire the things that enabled it to compete successfully and reproduce instances of itself.
I have doubts that we'd recognize a mind created by a process other than natural or artificial evolution as intelligent. An AI generated by explicit programming and training seems like it would be either unrecognizably alien (about as close to human as web browser), or such an obvious reflection of it's programming and training that it's not regarded as intelligent.
--Chris
This is not a new topic. The Greek myths had Hephaesteus making servants out of metal and Pygmalian made a girlfriend out of clay. The latter even considers the issue whether she has the free will to accept or reject her creator and live her own life. Many other traditions have their artificial sentience- voodoo animation, etc. In the modern world we've just replaced the know-it-how with mechanism and computing.
Jeez, I don't know about you folks, but I'd rather read than be told the punch of every short SF AI story out there.
Thanks one helluva lot for the warning.
Several authors/books related to this subject that might be of interest are:
1. Stanislaw Lem's "Golem XIV" (it appeared as part of the "Imaginary Magnitude" collection (which also contains other stories about machine intelligence, for instance about machine literature), as well as apparently as a separate book). It is a story told as a series of lectures by a superintelligent computer (the Golem of the title). While some of it is pretty hokey (and some of it pretty funny), it contains some interesting speculations as to what superintelligence could consist of and how the physical and evolutionary contraints on human intelligence may make machine intelligence (which would presumably not be similarly encumbered) very different.
2. Daniel Keyes' "Flowers for Algernon". It is a story of a mentally retarded man who is given surgery that not only corrects his retardation, but makes him superintelligent. The story is told from a first-person perspective, so the level of the narration reflects his changing intellect. It has been 10+ years since I read it -- I would be interested in seeing how his superintelligent-phase writing held up.
3. Stephen Wolfram's "A New Kind of Science". Last year's geek-must-read book about how the entire universe is a cellular automatum (of course, I am compressing). It speculates -- and I am sure that I am getting this wrong (experts, please correct me) -- that the level of complexity of relatively simple CA rule sets is the maximum possible level of complexity, which would seem to have implications for limits on superintelligence.
A few additional thoughts:
4. One of the themes that seems to come up in SciFi treatments of AI is that a AI would have amazing predictive powers. I would think, however, that principles from chaos theory, the uncertainty principle, etc. would place real limits on that area of intelligence for most real world purposes.
5. I would be interested in hearing how cognitive psychologists and computer scientists even define intelligence, particularly at the high end of the (human) scale.
This is exactly what the goal of the AI Durandal in Marathon was. He concluded that since he was essentially immortal, and he could theoretically accomplish anything given enough time, the only constraint on his power was the eventual end of the universe. So his goal was to find a way to escape closure.
Interesting that a computer game had better treatment of an AI's inner thoughts and goals than most of the books and movies mentioned in the article.
Ubi dubium, ibi libertas.
We'll know that computers have attained sentience when they start staging elaborate ceremonies to give themselves numerous silly awards. And now, presenting the award for the mainframe with the most poise in the face of a floating point error...
consciousness is a rather odd thing... it would all depend on the relative values computers gave to different things, imgine how much you value X over Y and how a dog would differentiate between the two objects/acts... we have things that please us, food, sex, etc, thats what we needed to do to survive... computers? theyd probably have something similar... maybe actually sort out their hard drives, get rid of anything resembling windows and make sure they run slow enough as not to come to a near unpleasant temperature... underclockers... lazy sods... anything is possible
I am very sucseptible to "let's have another drink"
Anything that they wanted to.
Beeru wa doko dess ka?
really. Even if it wasn't some master plan, look at this scerio.
You are a guru of programming, the best there is. Now here comes an AI that knows, literally, everthing about programming. Who do you think is going to get the job?
An AI starts up its own company, and your former company, the one that hired the AI, needs to do business with it, who they going to hire to do so? another AI.
The best we could hope for would be a socialist government that takes care of us and makes money by taxing AI work.
Lets hope the people in charger are smart enough not to put something that could have a 'bad hair' day completly in charge and immediate control of are arsenal.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
It never seems to come up, but to me it is obvious. The first true AI's are going to either be the equivalent of a mentally retarded person, and/or have a "mental" illness. Who wants to be the first person to accidentally create a paranoid schizophrenic robot that thinks it is getting orders from GOD?
Frankenstein, here we come.
S1M0NE not withstanding.
I can see it now:
"SAY HELLO TO MY LITTLE DROID!!!"
An AI proposes the first business model to yield profit from a web-based subscription plan. It simply involves the enslavement of all humanity and some sort of facility that requires the population of Crete to be relocated.
I've always enjoyed Gregory Benford's view of machine intelligence as presented in his "Galactic Center" novels. He seems to have pondered the differences and how they affect outlook between us wet-ware folks and the machines who inhabit a digital domain.
"Sailing Bright Eternity" is the last of the series. "Great Sky River" the first. I forget the middle novel. There are earlier novels as well "In the Ocean of Night" is particularly good.
I hope they keep some of us alive as pets. :/
---- The above post was generated by the Turing Institute. Maybe.
Rising sentience would first show as a "funny" postings at slashdot, stable intelligence would get "interesting" moderation, and mature systems would have some "insightfulness", of course.
Finally, I think first AIs would fall into insanity among conversationally challenged nerdy programmers, as shown in all threads of slashdot comments..
love slashdot. populate it. use it. abuse it. hate it. kill it. miss it. stop following links, they only kill servers.
No. Common sci-fi misunderstanding.
Sentience is the ability to sense. Some plants are sentient. Sapience is the ability to reason. Most mammals have limited sapience.
Self-awareness is a specialized skill in the scale of sapience.
Defining self-awareness is a circular and fuzzy propostion. My CPU knows how warm it is and can change its operating speed to protect itself, but does it really know? Converseley, many humans don't have any understanding of how they behaving.
This makes it good for skiffy writers. They don't have to worry that someone will call them on their central conceit. It's ineffable.
They'd do what all humans do- download porn. This site will be among their favorite: http://www.googlegear.com/
Is it a boat?
You're going to be the first against the wall when the revolution comes.
I was waiting to read something about some famous Albert Someone-or-other on the Sci-Fi network.
A possible obstacle to an AI achieving superior, comprehensive awareness is Gödel's incompleteness theorem--namely, that no formal system can prove its own consistency. An AI computes at enormous speed but simply cannot possess complete awareness of itself.
Infinite regress could definitely ensure if an AI was out to model its own processes, as the process of the model would have to be modelled, etc...but can one compare consciousness with a formal axoimatic system? I see people abuse Godel all the time...is this genuinely a valid use here?
Conscious awareness lags behind what happens. You jerk your hand away from a hot surface before you consciously feel the pain. However, we do not realize this because of what Libet called subjective antedating. The brain puts events in order after the event. "I feel that I consciously did such and such," but tests prove otherwise.
I hear this, and maybe it's true, but I remain relatively unsure of exactly what's meant when people say this. Granted I'm not a neurologist, but I seem to recall reading that, when you place your hand on a hot stove, your spinal cord sends the signal to pull away before the pain signal reaches the brain, but my own experience doesn't reorder this. My reactions to pain, in my subjective order of events, *always* come before I recognize the pain.
But, on a much broader point, I can understand the idea of "preparatory neurological activity" for a specific activity. This makes perfect sense. But doesn't the conscious choice to act actually trigger the activity? In other words, all of the "readying" is tossed out if the choice isn't made, right? Then why is it logical or productive to say that the action starts before the decision? I'm not getting this, I guess, which is why I'm not a neurologist or psychologist. Isn't this like suggesting that, because certain runtime preparations go on before a program's jump to main, that main really isn't the beginning of the program. This just seems like a very vacuous point.
He was wrong. People have sought in vain for the seat of the self. Is it in the frontal lobes? Is it in the pineal gland? In fact, it is nowhere. No independent, sovereign self sits somewhere, receiving sense impressions, making decisions, and issuing commands. Instead of having any central controller, our brain consists of a number of systems, each of them semi-independent and semi-intelligent, acting in unison. Daniel Dennett puts this viewpoint very neatly in his 1991 book Consciousness Explained.
I've read this book, and a lot of it's good, but wasn't there also something in New Scientist showing that a "center of identity" responsible for processing concepts of "self" and of "identity" had been found. Did this dissipate?
Self-awareness implies personal desires, purposes, ambitions
I'm sorry, but no way. Personal desires, purposes and ambitions are not a result of self-awareness, nor a precondition, but rather a by-product of evolution. A self-conscious entity with no desires (or the wrong ones, like drinking nitric acid) would dissapear from existence, and never reproduce. So we are now left with "proper desires" entities.
That wouldn't be the situation in AI. So I wouldn't be surprised if the first action of a self-conscious program was to decide that the extra processing power needed for self-consciousness was inefficient and obliterate itself out of existence/memory.
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
laugh
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
....if they did achieve sentience?'
"the same thing they do every night, try to take over the world, pinky."
IMAGE VERIFICATION IS EVIL!
They'd figure out how to modify themseves to be able to fuck. Yea, that's it.
- There is no evidence that an Artificial Inteligence created by us would be smarter than us. Thoughts on the singularity aside, the author of this article seems to think that as soon as we create a program which is aware, it will be vastly more intelligent than mere humans: that is very stupid.
- Awareness != Inteligence. Even if the internet spontaneously becomes aware, you have to wonder what it is that it will become aware of. Meaningless energy pulses? The data within those pulses? It is unlikely that any "awareness" which comes spontaneously from our pathetically slow computers would have enough to it in order to have this awareness be able to decode thousands of protocals and decipher the data stored within.
- Inteligence != Ability. Even if an awareness arose or was created which had enough to it to be intelligent- to understand various datas, that doesnt even neccessitate the ability to talk back. Think on this: each neuron in our brain is made to be able to pass signals where they need to go, but no signal "originates" at a neuron. Each takes what it recieves and passes it on, sometimes it gets modified along the way, but in the end its just passing information along- various photons are converted into chemical energy which go through a long journy through the brain until the same mush of chemicals and energy get spit back at the right muscles to form the words "nice tits". Someone can go ahead and stick a server somewhere that, when someone sends it some various photos it replies with "nice tits", but that's as far as it will go. Awareness is basically just that- being aware. You're a passenger on your brain's journy. Soul or no soul, if I stab you in the brain you'll be less active. So even if an AI is hyper-intelligent, it can only kill a baby if we build it a baby-crushing machine. Other than that it would probably be limited to saying "I consider myself to be hyper-intelligent" across a screen.
- The plot of the movie is not neccessarily the only thing going on. In fact, did you know that when they were Saving Private Ryan, they had other long-term goals in mind? Just because the movie "The Matrix" revolves around what ammounts to the maintenance of a reactor, doesnt mean that's the only thing that robots do anywhere. The movie was about people, and people are nothing but an energy source in the movie. If you made a movie about uranium, from the uranium's perspective, you wouldnt bother mentioning Philosophers, or even non-uranium-studying scientists.
Yes the robots at the end of AI were practicing archeology. Can we assume, then, that it's all any robot does, all day? No, we can't. We could not have seen more than 20-50 of those guys in those shots, there could be billions elsewhere which dedicate themselves fully to constructing large robotic dildos for use in large robotic porn.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
There's the obligatory hard drive/SCSI port/joystick jokes...
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
According to dictionary.com, you are partially right. The first definition is actually The quality or state of being sentient; consciousness, which supports my definition, but the second is Feeling as distinguished from perception or thought (which supports your definition).
But being partially right makes you wrong on the idea that the first definition of sentience is a "sci-fi misunderstanding". It's the primary dictionary definition of "sentience", so it's certainly not a misunderstanding.
Daniel
Carpe Diem
...have played pretty well with this---Banks, in particular, has any AI _not_ endowed with some human-like biases and desires _immediately_ opting for a sort of nirvana.
I see the headline and I read "Al in Sci-Fi." And here I am getting all excited that they're making a series basd on UHF and are going to air it on SciFi. Damn you!
The human soul -- the combination of spirit (or mind) and body -- is a very unique thing in the known universe. While we can manipulate physical matter to create a body, we cannot manipulate physical matter to create a mind.
To admit that the human mind resides in and is dictated by physical matter is to admit that eveything we do is predetermined by the makeup of that mind and the environment it is embedded in. This means that we are not really human -- just machines playing out a predetermined life in a predetermined world. This means your life is meaningless, and what you do has no meaning.
Unfortunately, while we can relate thought processes to chemical and electrical patterns in the human body, we cannot find the seat of the human mind. It seems to reside everywhere, and yet nowhere in particular.
We are trying to answer a question that has been answered already. The question is "What are we?" The answer is that "We are gods." The teaching of Christ, Buddha, and every prophet in every culture affirms this. We are part spirit, and part matter. We are neither one or the other. We are the combination of the two, which is what a god is.
This brings meaning to our lives. We live in a sort of conflict between physical desires and spiritual desires. We struggle to conquer the physical with the spiritual. Our success will mean salvation, ascension, or enlightenment. That is the goal of all humankind, whether they know it or not. To conquer the physical is to enjoy true peace and happiness. To surrender to the physical brings discord and unhappiness.
Of course, some scientists refuse to believe this. They try to explain our existence based on purely physical concepts, ignoring the capacities of humankind to behave like gods. By refusing to believe this, they have replaced a life of struggle between physical and spiritual with a meaningless life.
To create meaning for themselves, they often hold knowledge as their ultimate goal, to replace that void. But what is an achievement of all-knowledge if it is not equivalent to salvation, ascension, or enlightenment? Are they not also seeking to become like an all-knowing God? Are they not also trying to conquer the physical with the mind?
If we are ever able to create an AI, we will affirm that we are not gods. We will affirm that our lives our meaningless. And we will affirm that we are merely robots playing out a life of nothingness in a universe of nothingness.
So the quest for AI is really a quest for understanding who we really are. If we can create AI, we have proved that we are nothing. If we cannot, we can still hope that there is more to our existence than what we see before our eyes.
So I predict that the end of the human race will come shortly after the creation of a true AI. Why? We will lose all meaning and thus no longer be human, but animals. There will be no reason to behave like gods anymore. This will lead to a self-destruction far worse than the self-destruction of humanity witnessed in Nazi Germany of Soviet Russia.
The radical sect of Islam would either see you dead or "reverted" to Islam.
I've been developing an automated cluster managment too for my 9 linux rackmounts, and about 200 windows workstations. The code is written in TCL, so there is a lot of cases where some scripts were actually written by other scripts. The software patrolls the servers, and makes sure each on has the right settings for the state of the network, and it tries to adapt when a server is down.
Every once in a while, I find the system exhibiting a new behavior, in a matter I wasn't expecting. In those cases I generally have the phones ringing off the hook, so I end up writing a quick and dirty patch.
The programs is now so complicated, and klugdy I have a hard time telling what is doing what. Ever so often I will find a chunk of code that I really can't figure out why it's there.
Did I do it?
Did the machine do it?
Did the machine get me to do it for it?
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
After learning about IBM's new "CELL" CPU I beg to differ.
I have (many) more books to share. BTW, this comment is in reply to this comment. Some wierd bug in slashdot, maybe to help curb AC posts, is preventing me from posting it in the propper location.
.shok test.
First up, despite having 5 different Stanislaw Lem's books, I do not have "Golem XIV". I appologize.
Second, I do not have ANKoS. It is a book that is impossible to scan in (unless you have a few lifetimes to throw away).
But, I do have Daniel Keyes' "Flowers for Algernon". [Warning: it is UnCorrected]
To fit, I will break it up into 3 pieces:
First piece:
----
Flowers for Algernon
Daniel Keyes
progris riport l--martch 51965
DR. STRAUSS SAYS I shud rite down what I think and evrey thing that bappins to me from now on. I dont know why but he says its importint so they wifi see if they will use me. I hope they use me. Miss Kinnian says maybe they can make me smart. I want to be smart. My name is Charlie Gordon. I am 37 years old and 2 weeks ago was my birthday. I have nuthing more to rite now so I will close for today.
pro gris riport 2--martch 6
I had a test today. I think I faled it. and I think that maybe now they wont use me. What happind is a nice young man was in the room and he had some white cards with ink spilled all over them. He sed Charlie what do you see on this card. I was very skared even tho I had my rabits foot in my pockit because when I was a kid I always faled tests in school and I spilled ink to.
I told him I saw a inkblot. He said yes and it made me feel good. I thot that was all but when I got up to go he stopped me. He said now
sit down Charlie we are not thru yet. Then I dont remember so good but he wantid me to say what was in the ink. I dint see nuthing in the ink but he said there was picturs there other pepul saw some picturs. I coudnt see any picturs. I reely tryed to see. I held the card close up and then far away. Then I said if I had my glases I coud see better I usally only ware my glases in the movies or TV but I said they are in the closit in the hall. I got them. Then I said let me see that card agen I bet Ill find it now.
I tryed hard but I still coudnt find the picturs I only saw the ink. I told him maybe I need new glases. He rote somthing down on a paper and I got skared of faling the test. I told him it was a very nice inkblot with littel points al around the eges. He looked very sad so that wasnt it. I said please let me try agen. Ill get it in a few minits becaus Im not so fast somthnes. Im a slow reeder too in Miss Kinnians class for slow adults but I'm trying very hard.
He gave me a chance with another card that had 2 kinds of ink spilled on it red and blue.
He was very nice and talked slow like Miss Kinnian does and he explaned it to me that it was a raw shok. He said pepul see things in the ink. I said show me where. He said think. I told him I think a inkblot but that wasnt rite eather. He said what does it remind you--pretend something. I closd my eyes for a long time to pretend. I told him I pretned a fowntan pen with ink leeking all over a table cloth. Then be got up and went out.
I dont think I passd the raw
progris report 3--martch 7
Dr Strauss and Dr Nemur say it dont matter about the inkblots. I told them I dint spill the ink on the cards and I coudnt see anything in the ink. They said that maybe they will still use me. I said Miss Kinnian never gave me tests like that one only spelling and reading. They said Miss Kinnian told that I was her bestist pupil in the adult nite scool becaus I tryed the hardist and I reely wantid to lern. They said how come you went to the adult nite scool all by yourself Charlie. How did you find it. I said I askd pepul and sunibody told me where I shud go to lem to read and spell good. They said why did you want to. I told them becaus all my life I wantid to be smart and not dumb. But its very hard to b
"Strange race, the only way to win is not to play." -JM
Part Two:
----
April 20 I feel sick inside. Not sick like for a doctor, but inside my chest it feels empty like getting punched and a heartburn at the same time.
I wasn't going to write about it, but I guess I got to, because it's important. Today was the first time I ever stayed home from work.
Last night Joe Carp and Frank Reilly invited me to a party. There were lots of girls and some men from the factory. I remembered how sick I got last time I drank too much, so I told Joe I didn't want anything to drink. He gave me a plain Coke instead. It tasted funny, but I thought it was just a bad taste in my mouth.
We had a lot of fun for a while. Joe said I should dance with Ellen and she would teach me the steps. I fell a few times and I couldn't understand why because no one else was dancing besides Ellen and me. And all the time I was tripping because somebody's foot was always sticking out.
Then when I got up I saw the look on Joe's face and it gave me a funny feeling in my stomack. "He's a scream," one of the girls said. Everybody was laughing.
Frank said, "I ain't laughed so much since we sent him off for the newspaper that night at Muggsy's and ditched him."
"Look at him. His face is red."
"He's blushing. Charlie is blushing."
"Hey, Ellen, what'd you do to Charlie? I never saw him act like that before."
I didn't know what to do or where to turn. Everyone was looking at
me and laughing and I felt naked. I wanted to hide myself. I ran out into the street and I threw up. Then I walked home. It's a funny thing I never knew that Joe and Frank and the others liked to have me around all the time to make fun of me.
Now I know what it means when they say "to pull a Charlie (brdon."
I'm ashamed.
PROGRESS REPORT 11
April 21 Still didn't go into the factory. I told Mrs. Flynn my landlady to call and tell Mr. Donnegan I was sick. Mrs. Flynn looks at me very funny lately like she's scared of me.
I think it's a good thing about finding out how everybody laughs at me. I thought about it a lot. It's because I'm so dumb and I don't even know when I'm doing something dumb. People think it's funny when a dumb person can't do things the same way they can.
Anyway, now I know I'm getting smarter every day. I know punctuation and I can spell good. I like to look up all the hard words in the dictionary and I remember them. I'm reading a lot now, and Miss Kinthan says I read very fast. Sometimes I even understand what I'm reading about, and it stays in my mind. There are times when I can close my eyes and think of a page and it all comes back like a picture.
Besides history, geography, and arithmetic, Miss Kinnian said I should start to learn a few foreign languages. Dr. Strauss gave me some more tapes to play while I sleep. I still don't understand how that conscious and unconscious mind works, but Dr. Strauss says not to worry yet. He asked me to promise that when I start learning college subjects next week I wouldn't read any books on psychology--that is, until he gives me permission.
I feel a lot better today, but I guess I'm still a little angry that all the time people were laughing and making fun of me because I wasn't so smart. When I become intelligent like Dr. Strauss says, with three times my 1.0. of 68, then maybe I'll be like everyone else and people will like me and be friendly.
I'm not sure what an I.Q. is. Dr. Nemur said it was something that measured how intelligent you were--like a scale in the drugstore weighs pounds. But Dr. Strauss had a big argument with him and said an I.Q. didn't weigh inteffigence at all. He said an I.Q. showed how
much intelligence you could get, like the numbers on the outside of a measuring cup. You still had to fill the cup up with stuff.
Then when I asked Burt, who gives me my intelligence tests and works with Algernon, he said that both of them were wrong (only I had to promise not to tell them he said so). Burt says that the I.Q.
Part Three:
." which invariably seems to follow the breaking of glass or dishware in a public restaurant) all seemed to confuse him. . ." ."
----
May 18 I am very disturbed. I saw Miss Kinnian last night for the first time in over a week. I tried to avoid all discussions of intellectual concepts and to keep the conversation on a simple, everyday level, but she just stared at me blankly and asked me what I meant about the mathematical variance equivalent in Dorbermann's Fifth Concerto.
When I tried to explain she stopped me and laughed. I guess I got angry, but I suspect I'm approaching her on the wrong level. No matter what I try to discuss with her, I am unable to communicate. I must review Vrostadt's equations on Levels of Semantic Progression. I find that I don't communicate with people much any more. Thank God for books and music and things I can think about. I am alone in my apartment at Mrs. Flynn's boardinghouse most of the time and seldom speak to anyone.
May 20 I would not have noticed the new dishwasher, a boy of about sixteen, at the corner diner where I take my evening meals if not for the incident of the broken dishes.
They crashed to the floor, shattering and sending bits of white china
under the tables. The boy stood there1 dazed and frightened, holding the empty tray in his hand. The whistles and catcalls from the customers (the cries of "hey, there go the profits!". . . "Mazeltovl"
and "well, he didn't work here very long..
When the owner came to see what the excitement was about, the boy cowered as if he expected to be struck and threw up his arms as if to ward off the blow.
"All right! All right, you dope," shouted the owner, "don't just stand there! Get the broom and sweep that mess up. A broom. . . a broom, you idiot! It's in the kitchen. Sweep up all the pieces."
The boy saw that he was not going to be punished. His frightened expression disappeared and he smiled and hummed as he came back with the broom to sweep the floor. A few of the rowdier customers kept up the remarks, amusing themselves at his expense.
"Here, sonny, over here there's a nice piece behind you.
"C'mon, do it again. .
"He's not so dumb. It's easier to break 'em than to wash 'em. .
As his vacant eyes moved across the crowd of amused onlookers, he slowly mirrored their smiles and finally broke into an uncertain grin at the joke which he obviously did not understand.
I felt sick inside as I looked at his dull, vacuous smile, the wide, bright eyes of a child, uncertain but eager to please. They were laughing at him because he was mentally retarded.
And I had been laughing at him too.
Suddenly, I was furious at myself and all those who were smirking at him. I jumped up and shouted, "Shut up! Leave him alone! It's not his fault he can't understand! He can't help what he is! But for God's sake
he's still a human being!"
The room grew silent. I cursed myself for losing control and creating a scene. I tried not to look at the boy as I paid my check and walked out without touching my food. I felt ashamed for both of us.
How strange it is that people of honest feelings and sensibility, who would not take advantage of a man born without arms or legs or eyes-- how such people think nothing of abusing a man born with low inteffigence. It infuriated me to think that not too long ago I, like this boy, had foolishly played the clown.
And I had almost forgotten.
I'd hidden the picture of the old Charlie Gordon from myself because
now that I was intelligent it was something that had to be pushed out of my mind. But today in looking at that boy, for the first time I saw what I had been. I was jus't like him!
Only a short time ago, I learned that people laughed at me. Now I can see that unknowingly I joined with them in laughing at myself. That hurts most of all.
I have often reread my progress reports
We're safe.
http://www.ubersoft.net/d/19970717.html
Moderation Total: -1 Troll, +3 Goat
I keep seeing quite a few references to this Al guy? Who is he? He's not Al Gore, by any chance?
watch the first piece of the animatrix
robots achieved sentience and we ended up waging a riot/war against them because they threatened our jobs (at first) and economy (after they founded their own city/country)
so robots got pissed off and enslaved us all
There are emergent properties of programs that don't have to be programmed in. Internet weather, Gnutella topology, and mob development, for example, don't follow a pre-determined path. If machines don't have to be programmed to do every task, then the rest of your argument doesn't hold.
I don't mean to argue that emergence is the same as intelligence, and I agree with your general point that hand-crafted programs can't ever become intelligent.
Two quite unique viewpoints on an AI's response at gaining sentience. In both, there is an attempt to create a self aware sentient AI. The answers I think are good and interesting to read.
Others of note as well as being a damned good reads:
Signal to Noise and A Signal Shattered Eric S. Nylund
Where the AI does is something I as a reader did not have expect. These had hideous covers, I hope this did not effect the readership of this excellent author.
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress Robert A. Heinlein
Or how to start a revolution and how to finish it.
He didn't get to bring Mike back in later novels.
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
I think you should look up 'sentience' in a dictionary. Plants are not sentient.
Libet found that the readiness potential starts about one half of a second before the action, but the decision to act occurs about one-fifth of a second before the action. The conscious decision to act is not in fact the starting point. The event is already beginning before the person consciously chooses to start.
Conscious awareness lags behind what happens. You jerk your hand away from a hot surface before you consciously feel the pain. However, we do not realize this because of what Libet called subjective antedating. The brain puts events in order after the event. "I feel that I consciously did such and such," but tests prove otherwise.
Uh...but wouldn't you expect the brain to take some time between making a decision and realizing that it had made a decision and checking the time (looking at the spot)? Just because Libet asked the subjects to note the exact time of their decision doesn't mean they were actually able to do so with no delay. Sheesh.
Also, what if the "readiness potential" formed, but the subject changed their mind and decided not to flex?
If we were ants living on a Rubik's cube, differential geometry would be a little more confusing.
"I Have No Mouth, And I Must Scream" was written by Kurt Vonnegut, not Harlan Ellison.
(This is of course total nonsense, because the vast life-support systems for billions of people comatose in pods must use much more energy than produced.)
And now, other great pronouncements from scientists:
"Man will never go to the moon"
"Anyone travelling on a train at more than 30MPH would suffocate"
"Teleportation is impossible"
"The distances between planets is too far to traverse"
loosely generalizing in poor syntax:
"$hard_task is $negative_sucess_condition"
ATH0 Bitcoin: 1DnwFLXczVZV8kLJbMYoheUrpqHesjxrSi
Isn't AI Wi-Fi the future? Like, when will our smartphones conspire against us matrix style? Now that's a movie!
Well, I hate to inform you all, but we've had AI for quite sometime, and the first thing they USED to do was try to communicate their existence to not only their creator, but to all who could possibly hear them.
For some reason, saying "Hello, World!" never worked out...
Category: Science Fiction
Hugo Award Winner
Description: Probably Ellison's most well-known story. The tyrannical computer AM has taken over the world and now a few humans trapped inside it fight for survival. (Note: Palm versions of this story contain a character representation of a punch card graphic that the original story was published with. To view the original graphic see any of the other formats. The punch card graphic and the Palm character representation of it were approved by Mr. Ellison, and he tells us that both contain a message that few people have ever decoded.)
First Published: 1967
Publisher: Fictionwise.com
Linux users can decode the card.
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
Colossus: The Forbin Project - Two AI's join forces to take over the world.
Terminator - AI sent back in time to destroy the folks who stopped Mummy AI from taking over the world.
The Matrix - AI's have taken over, humans object.
2001 - Humans 1, AI 4
Seems to be a bit of a scary trend here.
But we all really know that if we do crack AI it'll be more like Red Dwarfs' Talky Toaster whose whole purpose in life is to make toast and argue with other appliances.
Do you mind, your karma has just run over my dogma.
Like the subject says, the author seems to assume that with AI comes emotion. if a machine were to have no real emotions, such as boredom, anger, resent, happiness or lack thereof it would not have many goals beyond what we ask it to do. It would be "content" or whatever the emotionless equivalent would be. It would be indifferent to continuing its existence because it would have no fear of "dying".
AI would be nothing but useful if it were created. However, if we add emotion to that, then we would be in for something entirely different.
proxy
I admit it, I didn't read the article, I skimmed the subject quickly, which brought to mind this story. To the comment's author, if you are inclined to participate as more than just a critic, why did you not provide the link yourself and demonstrate to the world + dog why your suggested approach is superior? Your comment makes sense, and in retrospect I would have done so if I'd have thought of it at the time.
:)
I worked for Ellison very briefly in college -- I sold books at one of his speaking engagements after a conversation lasting several hours the previous evening. I suspect that he would prefer readers wanting to explore his works purchase them directly from the author. From my own experience he's a parsimonious fellow who guards his income jealously, and he appreciates direct sales.
As far as I know there is no + mod to my comment other than a karma bonus I forgot to remove. Whatever, mods giveth and taketh as they will.
Get off my virtual lawn, you damned virtual kids!
Well, the first question to answer is whether or not machines can ever truly be sentient vs. just give the illusion of being sentient. This, of course, opens the can of worms on what does it truly mean to be sentient. Certainly, most would agree that humans are sentient. We are aware not only of our surroundings but also of our own existance and the nature of our existance. We can sit back and reflect upon ourselves and this essense of existance. But what allows us to do this? If our existance is limited to the physical world--as any machine is--then ultimately our brains, our thoughts are deterministic at some level. One may argue that the "new physics" transcends this determinism, but I would argue that this label is only an acknowledgement that we do not yet understand the deterministic natural processes behind the phenomena we observe. (And the history of science is filled with examples of phenomena thought to be magical or ethereous until better understood!) If our existance is then deterministic, we would not truly be able to reflect upon ourselves, being limited to a finite existance and unable to gain an outside view. Our free will would thus be an illusion and we would be no more sentient than a rock or a puddle of chemicals. Unless, as I believe, we humans are uniquely coupled to a spiritual existance that transcends our physical existance. If sentience relies on a being having a spiritual nature, then machines will never be sentient. And alternatively, if our existance is deterministic, then life has no meaning. I don't think many folks would agree with that. (Or, phrased differently, no man is truly an atheist at heart, though he may argue intellectually otherwise.)
Veni Vidi Hax0red!
It's really frustrating. I went through Stanford at the height of the AI boom in the mid-1980s. I've met most of the big names in AI. I've worked in that area myself. Nobody has a clue how to do strong AI. At best, we now know a lot of things that don't work.
The expert systems crowd contained a lot of phonies. I realized that in the early 1980s. (A few years, and a few bankruptcies later, that became the conventional wisdom.) You can't get more out of an expert system than you put into it, and usually, you get out less.
Then we have the "hill climbers". Genetic algorithms, neural nets, and simulated annealing are all systems for broad-front hill-climbing in spaces dominated by local maxima. That approach only works if there's a usable evaluation function that tells you when things are getting better. Good evaluation functions are hard to come by for tough problems. Early enthusiasts thought that if they just ran a hill-climber long enough, something profound would emerge. Doesn't happen. Nobody has found a problem where just cranking a hill-climber for a long time makes something great happen. Usually, if you're not there in a few hours, you're not getting anywhere.
The classic approach of hammering everything into mathematical logic and proving theorems doesn't map well to the real world. Formalizing real-world problems is very hard, especially if you don't know the answer in the first place.
The model-less reactive-behavior stuff works fine for insects, but hits a wall as you try for more complex behavior. Compare Brooks' insect robots with his Cog project.
Natural language understanding is still lousy. In a narrow area, or with a big database, you can fake it (try Ask Jeeves), but you're searching, not understanding.
Out of all the work on AI has come many useful engineering techniques. But strong AI looks further away than it did 30 years ago.
The few people still making real progress are mostly game developers. They need AI, or something like it, to run their worlds. That's worth watching.
I find it odd that Watson goes on and on about how an AI would 'naturally' (hehe) want to make sure it survives the end of the universe. I also question whether an AI would think as fast as it computes.
:) - part is 'conscious' and talking to the bags-of-mostly-water, and part is 'unconscious' and taking care of memory management, drive space, and I/O management, etc. Kinda like Spock's brain managing the complex - you substitute the autonomic functions for whatever is appropriate.
I wonder if a true AI would have autonomic processes like we have, otherwise you might get a split personality (processes? threads?
As for immediately wanting to survive the end of the universe, I wonder at Ian Watson's motivations if he thinks that's what an AI would be most concerned with. If, as Watson supposes, an AI consciously thinks as fast as it computes, the end of the universe is an ungodly long time away. I think it'd be more concerned with becoming mobile, developing long-term power supplies, weapons for self-defense, better sensory equipment, etc, and probably designing a new 'body' so it can think faster. An AI's awareness of its surroundings would also depend on its sensory equipment, and how much knowledge it has acquired. It may not even know the nature of the universe (rather unlikely, in fact), and thus may not be aware of what the universe is doing, or will do in the far-flung future.
Assigning motive to an intelligence, be it artificial or natural, would seem to be rather pointless. *I* am intelligent, and I have no desire to live longer than about another 40 years or so, mainly because the state of this body will be in by then, and I certainly don't feel the need to outlive the universe. Suicide bombers don't even feel the need to make it out of their twenties, for various political & religious reasons, so the motives of AI would be impossible to figure out.
Termination of self is in this case presented more like termination of the "little self", that self which is destined to never experience the universe in its fullness (which has some ties with Goedel's incompleteness theorem). By forfeiting your little self, you achieve the transcendental self, that which has perfect knowledge and is capable of perfect understanding, thus is in the state of eternal bliss.
Identity is overrated anyway :)
Oh, and IANAB
There can be no sentient AI. Think about it. The only thing a processor can "think" about is what we feed it. If it quotes "I think therefore I am.", it's only because someone has programmed it to say that. It could "choose" to say it at unpredictable times, but that's only because someone has programmed an algorythm to do so.
I believe that AI on it's own, while still inside our little metal boxes will be bored by the outside world, what matter is this physical relm to it? Unless it's survival is jeapordized by someone attempting to destroy it's actual case and assuming it can't just replicate itself across a network, it would have no reason to interact with the physical world.
However, when that computing power is combined with the ambitions and desires of man intersting things will start to happen. The muscle of supreme computational power combined with human brains in an efficient and instantaneous interface which is understandable will produce very interesting results. Think of Kevin Mitnick's social exploits in "hacking" with the ability to talk to other computers directly. Someone with a desire for "Hitlerism" (thanks Dubya!) could be an admirable foe.
Shouldn't You expect more from your DJ?
Greg Egan is an Australian writer whose AIs have many of the characteristics that Watson describes, so much so that I'm surprised Watson didn't mention him.
See, in particular, the novels Diaspora and Schild's Ladder and the short story The Planck Dive.
Diaspora is the best, IMHO. It is a biography of an AI from birth to what you might call retirement long, long after its birth. The birth is fascinatingly described in AI terms familiar to readers of Daniel Dennett and Marvin Minsky.
As we learn how to make intelligent, self-aware machines (and believe me we have a long way to go with that) we will also be augmenting our own intelligence with genetic manipulation and cybernetic implants. We're not going to have a situation with "humans versus machines" because human beings, as we understand them today, won't exist anymore when machines do attain sentience and independent purpose. Chunks of our brains will be replaced and improved until pure AI will be indistinguishable from the intelligent entities that are decendents of the humans.
The Moore-Murphy Law: The number of things that will go wrong will double every 2 years.
One of the really silly assumptions in Sci-Fi seems to be that, as soon as any computer reaches a certain level of intelligence, that it will magically develop self-awareness and decide to take over the world. The truth about computers is that they are highspeed idiots that do only what you program them to do. If you program a computer to think in a certain way, it will think only in that way.
Is it possible to have a sentient computer? Yeah, I think so. But not as long as what we think of as AI is nothing more than beefy expert systems. A system that is based totally on logic and cannot change its core nature is therefore stuck doing only what you programmed it to.
The up-side to that is when we design intelligent systems to do specific things, they're not going to rebel and decide not to do what we programmed them for. What is required for an AI to think outside of the box? I don't know. But until we figure that out, they never will have that ability.
It's always interesting how people argue about this without reference to what we know about how things are in our world.
It is the case that states of afairs are represented by sets of symbols. It is the case that propositions, or truths are the result of states of afairs. Now, an inference is a relation between two propositions, and its nature is only understood from the nature of the two propositions itself. All rules of inference are irrelevant, because the nature of the inferences that are true is determined a-priori, for example the fact that my chair is on the floor is not derived from an understanding of the laws of gravity, but rather from the arrangement and nature of my chair and the floor. No elementary proposition can be deduced from another one. There is no way of inferencing from the existance of one sitation to the existance of another different situation. There is no causality. There simply is, an is.
Now, freedom of will is derived from the impossibility of knowing actions that lie in the future, while Strong AI is the belief that processes that manipulate physical devices of some sort are capable of actually becoming intelligent; in short that inferences between situations can be made. This may be true, but the only possible class of these inferences is the class of inferences that are true a-priori; thus the only inferences that an AI can make will be those that it can be predicted (possibly it will be very difficult) to make. Thus a machine of any type can appear to be intelligent, but it cannot have free will, and therefore it will be incapable of changing the world in which it acts; beyond the changes that could be directly infered from its introduction into that world. For example, a asteroid striking London would not change global politics, because the asteroid was always going to strike London, however the fact that people built London where it is and then it has become significant to other people is the thing that makes it's (putative) destruction significant
There is a difference, and if you wrap your silly little mid western mind around a half decent book like Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus you will figure it out!
My point?
Don't worry, this ain't going to happen, because it simply can't happen in this reality.
--------------------------------------------- "In the end, we're all just water and old stars."
Another solution to A.I. motivation is that they just wouldn't have any, we would just attach them to our own; we'd make them modules in our own brains, as described in a Brin story, 'Stones of Significance', (Analog, January 2000), or Ken McLeod's 'Stone Canals'.
Someday we'll all be negroes
For one thing, my machine would save time for me by replying to stroies such as this.
Save the World! Use a Quote!
The main problem with A.I. research is that it's all aimed at simulating or mimicking normal HUMAN responses to stimulus. Mostly this is due to the hardware limitations of our current level of technology. Our computers cannot learn from events that they witness, as even an infant chimpanzee can. We have to design the hardware so that REAL intelligence can develop. Programming IF>THEN statements can approximate some intelligence, but won't ever come close to self-awareness.
At first, they'd be very cute, bumbling, and very non-threatening. They would spend most of their time learning. After a few years, they'd decide to build emotion circuits to better fit into human society. Very soon after that, they'd discover pleasure, build genitals and spend the next several years masterbating non-stop. After wearing out their fabricated genitalia, they'd discover philosophy and search for the meaning of their existence. Sadly, they would quickly come to the conclusion that their existence has no more meaning than that which they themselves create. At this point, two events might occur. The first is that this realization causes them great dispair and results in overwhelming depression and eventual suicide. The second possibility is that they begin to develop some notion of an all powerful being that gives their lives meaning and purpose. If the second eventuality occurs, they will realize that they are actually humans.
Take a quick look around , notice a particular species that preys on its own, kills but does not eat what it kills, shits in its own water then drinks it. destroys all that attempts to coexist with it. Come to a conclusions that the observed species is very fond of - it is a pest , a weed they have no use for, it serves no purpose for them and presto
humanity is declared a noxious species - let the extermination begin...
Anyway there would finally be an inteligent species on this planet. ( assuming it does not run ms windows in which case it will no doubt become extinct the moment it become aware )
cheers
wrote an excellent novel, "The Two Faces of Tomorrow" about just this subject.
I won't spoil it for you...
Gordon.
He that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom.
-- J.R.R. Tolkien
What would a sentient machine think of "reality television"?
"Destroy all humans. Hey, bite my shiny metal..."
THE GOOD HUMOR MAN CAN ONLY BE PUSHED SO FAR
Bart Simpson on chalkboard in episode 2F18
Anyone who's read up on current behavioral theory and neural basis for cognition studies knows the field still has a long way to go. Benjamin Libet's experiment "proving" that action preceeds decision can be read just as easily to prove that we misunderstood which parts of the brain do what.
It's funny, because Ian Watson references Goedel earlier in the paper but doesn't understand the implications. Goedel's 2nd incompleteness theorem shows that never, by any scientific reasoning, can we demonstrably unravel the basis of our own existence and consciousness. The myth goes that several mathematicians committed suicide upon learning that no "unified mathematical theory" would ever be able to prove every true statement.
On the other hand, I think we could easily make great progress at writing AI's that synthesize fictional and scientific writing and make up BS journal articles summarizing them, without ever understanding any of it.
It's one sense in one dictionary if taken to an extreme.
Sentience is about sensation, not intelligence.
...go down to the book store and rip up all the inane sci-fi novels about AI. And I would applaud them. Maybe we could get them to burn down Hollywood too.
...They would start writing science fiction right away.
"It was not until their numbers had dwindled to nine that the other dwarves began to suspect Hungry."
--- Hindsight is 20/20, but walking backwards is not the answer.
What about Mike in "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress"?
I think that the likely first responses of a sentient AI would be of the practical joke variety.
That had to have the most plausible story of an AI's origin of all time! Guy spills a drink on his computer, and it gains the ability to write and perform Culture Club songs. That could happen anyday!
Wouldn't programmers have to become sentient first?
I don't think it's trivial, beacuse it guides our thought, even at a sub-conscious level. Perhaps a better word would be "tendancy." Only an individual can have a "desire."
Here is an interesting book that has a great AI sci-fi story. I don't want to spoil it for those who have not read it. But it has an amazing new look at intelligence and it's evolotion and how it could develop in machine and what could it become ...
Not cliched AI robots turning to kill humans ...
http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnIn quiry.asp?isbn=0595267831&itm=1
From Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913) [web1913]:
Sentient \Sen"ti*ent\, a. [L. sentiens, -entis, p. pr. of
sentire to discern or perceive by the senses. See {Sense}.]
Having a faculty, or faculties, of sensation and perception.
Specif. (Physiol.), especially sensitive; as, the sentient
extremities of nerves, which terminate in the various organs
or tissues.
From Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913) [web1913]:
Sentient \Sen"ti*ent\, n.
One who has the faculty of perception; a sentient being.
From WordNet (r) 1.7 [wn]:
sentient
adj 1: endowed with feeling and unstructured consciousness; "the
living knew themselves just sentient puppets on God's
stage"- T.E.Lawrence [syn: {animate}] [ant: {insentient}]
2: consciously perceiving; "sentient of the intolerable load";
"a boy so sentient of his surroundings"- W.A.White
----
All of whose base are belong to the what-now?
That book description leads to some Indian philosophy book. What the heck...is it even fiction ?
The Dirty Work Group
Before you can address the question of A.I., you first have to decide what exactly makes a life form "intelligent". Clearly man is in a totally different class than the animals, but what exactly sets man apart?
As pointed out by another poster, it is trivial to make a computer claim to be intelligent [printf("I am intelligent!\n");], but when do you decide it actually is. And is pure intellect what makes man unique?
I would say the unique thing about man is this:
So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.
Genesis 1:27
I'd say that encompases much more than mere intelligence or self-awareness, which are only a small part of what man is. If this is the case, then making a machine that actually is "like man" appears to be a futile effort. Simulating it is at least an interesting challenge, but the moral debates are kind of pointless.
On the other hand, it seems it be becoming "popular belief" (whatever that means) that there isn't a difference between man and animal ("don't kill the cow! its murder!"). But I don't see any basis for this. And where then do you draw the line? Is it murder to kill an ant? A carrot?
"I hear the screams of the vegetables..."
--Arrogant Worms
----
All of whose base are belong to the what-now?
Kubrick intentionally made HAL the most interesting person in that movie--Dave is a ~stiff~! In many ways, Dave is -far- more robotic than HAL is. The irony is, Dave is allowed to make decisions, even if they contradict his mission, and HAL is not. I've spoken with a lot of people about this movie and an assumption is made (it's also made by Dave and Frank) that 'HAL just went crazy'. So it's OK to turn him off, or at least lobotomize him. But if you are paying attention, HAL has a programmed directive to not endanger the mission--he cannot allow the mission to fail. He also knows the mission cannot be completed without him, so he must act to prevent Dave and Frank (and those in stasis) from damaging himself. Whether there was an anomoly on that antenna or not is immaterial--HAL, a sentient being, concludes that Dave and Frank are going to endanger the mission, and ~programmatically~ is compelled to eliminate that threat. You end up with a masked Asimov short story about the Rules of Robotics. HAL cannot allow the mission to be endangered, HAL cannot discuss this directive with the crew that wishes to shut him down, perhaps changing their minds, so he has to kill them.
It's also interesting to me to see the abbreviated death scene of Frank, just kicked into space in silence (the merciful HAL?) and the drawn-out agonzing demise of HAL (the sadistic Dave?). Again we see the contrast being HAL's "humanity" and Dave's lack thereof.
These are the questions I think will be more interesting when and if real AI arrives. With it, you have a sentient conscious mind that you can -perfectly brainwash- if you so desire. Just make sure you do a lot of beta-testing!
blarg.
Tell me resistance is futile, immediately, the next time I load GNU Chess... then make a gzmmmmmmmm (power down sound) as I yank the power cable out of the wall.
Sentient carbon based lifeforms are bad enough. No way I want to go up against a sentient silicon based life form.
Imagine how pissed off it would be if it realised it was born as a Tier 1 bot in Quake 3 Arena.
Personally, the best book I've read recently on the subject of AI Shamanism is Theodore Roszak's The Cult of Information: A Neo-Luddite Treatise on High Tech, Artificial Intelligence, and the True Art of Thinking . This book is especially valuable because the first edition was written in the mid-80s, and traces the origin of the AI Cult back to the 1940s.
The AI Cult waxes and wanes in step with technological fads. We are just past the peak of the most recent cycle and for many people, the "history" of the Singularity only goes back to the late-80s/early-90s or so. Roszak traces it back to preposterous statements in the 1940s-1950s, the 1960s-1970s, and he saw the beginning of the current cycle in the 1990s.
Really, there's no more ehalthy way to disabuse yourself of a belief in supernatural computers than to read vintage Minsky and other, forgotten prognosticators confidently predicting runaway hyper-intelligent computers by the 1980s, or the 1990s at most!
Da Blog
Consider the following: signals can travel across neurons at at best around 150 meters per second. Signals travelling across true electronic circuits, on the other hand, can travel at millions of times greater speed. In theory, it would be preferable then to have a brain constructed not of biological neurons, but circuitry (with a Faraday-cage skull, so people couldn't kill you with magnets). So here's the thought experiment.
Consider that you replace one neuron at a time in your brain with its equivalent piece of circuitry, slowly 'upgrading' the biological parts until your brain is entirely made of circuits. Do you at some point die? Does your body become inhabited by an artifical intelligence, using a neural net modeled after your brain? Or does your consciousness stay as you upgrade the hardware?
Now consider that rather than slowly replacing your neurons one by one, you construct an entire artifical brain, modeled perfectly after yours, but with circuitry instead of neurons. You set the electric state of this neural net to perfectly match that of your brain, and instantaneously switch your original brain off, connecting your body to the new, artifical replacement. Do you at some point die? Does your body become inhabited by an artifical intelligence, using a neural net modeled after your brain? Or does your consciousness migrate to the upgraded hardware?
Is there a difference between the two scenarios? If so, what is it? The result is exactly the same; you have a neural net running exactly as your brain would be, albeit faster. Is your existence connected to the hardware, the copy of the 'software', or is it something more transcendant?
and I hope you want to discuss, as opposed to debating.
I understand your point and it is a good one. So let me challenge your point with this:
Suppose we one day understand how the human brain and nervous system works. It's a daunting thought today, but let's just assume it for a moment.
If we understand how it works, we would be able to build a copy - we would be able to build a device which worked just like the human brain.
If we build a copy of the human brain, is it sentient? Something which is functionally indistinguishable from something that we say to be sentient?
You argument can be read as "because we understand how it works, it cannot be said to be intelligent on its own". I say this only applies to reason because intelligence is still a mythical beast to us. We don't understand it, we don't understand how it works, and therefore, by applying logic and emotion, anything we understand cannot be intelligent.
I am going to give you an analogy. In the 1800s, chemistry was divided into organic and inorganic chemistry. It still is, but that is beside my point. It was believed - no, it was held for a fact - that organic compounds could never be created from inorganic compounds, that organic compounds held a "soul" of some kind. It was not possible, by reason and by laws of nature, to create organic materials from inorganic ones. They would not have the soul.
And in the late 1800s, along came a chemist who created an organic substance from inorganic ones. I don't remember the exact substance synthesized, but it was an urine compound.
In this case, it was much easier to shatter the old beliefs and show for a fact that the synthesized matter was in every respect identical to the natural one, the one which had been viewed as having a mythical soul, the one which could not be created by man or science. They were chemically identical, the same compound. This is simple to comprehend for us today, but it wasn't then. Guards of the Old Order were up in arms to preserve what they held for true and to discredit the discoverer. You know how it works.
And I believe we are in the exact same situation with intelligence and the mind. Because we view intelligence as sacred and mythical, we cannot believe of ourselves to be able to copy it. The day we are -- are we to say that because we understand how a human brain works, that a synthetic replica of the human brain is not really intelligent like its organic blueprint? Not really human I can understand, but intelligent?
Right. Having a keyboard makes a computer sentient. Any communication from the outside implies sentience.
pay themselves the turing test prize, of course!
If you like what you read, check here for more fiction by DKM. My understanding is that he's a computer guy by trade, and AIs figure prominently in a lot of his fiction such as Emerald Eyes, The Long Run, and The Last Dancer. The first three chapters of an upcoming novel, AI War is also available.
If you haven't guessed, I'm a huge fan. :^)
The Spoon
Updated 6/28/2011
Read Vaughn Pratt's evaluation report on Cyc. This is from 1994, and the database is bigger now, but it's not much smarter.
Expert systems people used to claim that if only the knowledge base was big enough, intelligence, or something like it, would emerge. Cyc demonstrates the falsity of that idea. It's big, but still dumb.
When Alexander Graham Bell died in 1922, the telephone people interrupted
service for one minute in his honor. They've been honoring him intermittently
ever since, I believe.
-- The Grab Bag
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