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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."
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.
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?
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.
Yes, not everyone knows what an actuary does. An actuary is a statistician who computes insurance risks and premiums (usually they advise management on other issues too - for instance how an increasing life expectancy will affect how much the company pays out in pensions). It wouldn't be very difficult to write a computer program to answer an actuarial exam correctly as maths is the one thing computers are very good at. However you would end up with the computer getting 100% in a nanosecond - then twiddling its thumbs for the next two hours - waiting for the humans to catch up with it. ;o)
Video Game cheats, hints a
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