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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.
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.
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.