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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."
Procreation is not the natural urge. It's just the side-effect of the natural urge.
On the individual level, yes. However, the individual urge is the side-effect of the species collective desire to procreate, which was selected for evolutionarily.
-Rob
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.
There is no ultimate goal, evolution does'nt plan ahead.
The reason why we feel an urge to procreate is because all the animals that did'nt feel like procreating died out and only the ones that did were left over to pass on their genes.
Consider it an axiom of existence if you like, everything else we want are derived from it (Freud), in the sense that you feel good when you see a nice girl becasue there is a chance you'll get to screw her, and then pass on your genes.You feel happy when you see food bcause eating sustains your life (genes) for a day more...
The question is, if I make a program which is intelligent except for a line which says "yuour aim is to serve humans" at the top (axiom) can I still consider it sentient? Or what if somebody modifies it to say "reproduce" and it turns to an intelligent virus?
.ACMD setaloiv siht gnidaeR
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.
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...
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.
Ha! Spoken like a true Slashdotter!
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.
Yes, but blacks didn't become intelligent. They were intelligent all along. Many (certainly not all) people simply believed that they weren't, which was incorrect.
No one considers a machine intelligent. The designer, the implementor, and the user all agree that it is not intelligent.
There is no way a machine that has to be programmed to do every task can ever be considered intelligent. This means that there is no program that can be written to make a machine be intelligent. While the programs may simulate intelligence, or feign intelligence, they will only be following a pre-determined path.
Mankind will never need intelligent machine slaves. We want full control over the processes that the machines use to do things. We will never surrender that.
And you are right. Intelligent beings make horrible slaves. If you want to "get the most" out of an intelligent being, it must be granted full rights and privileges and treated as an equal.
The radical sect of Islam would either see you dead or "reverted" to Islam.
- 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
(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"
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