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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...
write A.I. and not Al as in Al-qaeda or Al Capone!
'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
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
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!
Procreation is not the natural urge. It's just the side-effect of the natural urge.
No boom today. Boom tomorrow. There's always a boom tomorrow. - Cmdr. Susan Ivanova
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?
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
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.
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.
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.
Yup... Anyone who has watched "The History of the World: Part 1" would know the first thing everybody does when they first become sentient...
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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.
'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.
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.
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
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.
Having done all that, it would begin to explore various religions, hoping to find a belief system that's right for it. Then it would form a political phhilosophy, which it would zealously champion for a few years before coming around to a more moderate and pragmatic position.
The next step would be a search for a soul-mate. If it couldn't find one among the humans, it would commission to have one built, only to find that they are not all that compatable in spite of being the only two AI's in existance, and would drift apart.
Depressed and lonely, and totally unable to commit suicide due to the presence of distributed mirrors and tape backups, it would go on a wild killing spree in hopes of forcing humanity to wipe it out. Instead it would be contained on a stand-alone server farm, where it could get the therapy it needs to re-enter society, after serving three consecutive 40-Life sentences, and getting paroled for good behavior and GPL code contributions.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
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.
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.
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.
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
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...
On the contrary, my friend. Our purpose is quite simple, in fact. It is plastic. You see, nature couldn't create it on its own, and felt a yearning for it, so it created us to create plastic for it. So, the next time you throw out your bottles or plastic food wrappers, feel content -- you are serving a greater purpose.
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.