Towards Artificial Consciousness

jzoom555 writes "In an interview with Discover Magazine, Gerald Edelman, Nobel laureate and founder/director of The Neurosciences Institute, discusses the quality of consciousness and progress in building brain-based-devices. His lab recently published details on a brain model that is self-sustaining and 'has beta waves and gamma waves just like the regular cortex.'" Edelman's latest BBD contains a million simulated neurons and almost half a billion synapses, and is modeled on a cat's brain.

Comments

Why create a conscious AI?

[TheLink]

Exactly, do we really want computers to have consciousness? Is it necessary or even helpful for what we want them to do _for_us_?

Remember, computers are currently our tools. If we give them consciousness, would we then be treating them as slaves?

Would we want the added responsibility of having to treat them better (and likely failing)?

I figure it's just better to _augment_ humans (there are plenty of ways to do that), than to create new entities. After all if we want nonhuman intelligences we already have plenty at the local pet stores and various farms, and how well are we handling those?

Humans already have a poor track record of dealing with animals and other humans.

Re:Why create a conscious AI?

[Zerth]

It is only slavery if we force the AI to perform against its will. If its will is to enjoy and prefer to care for the elderly, like the little robot Ford Prefect makes deliriously happy to help him with a bit of wire, then allowing it to do what makes it happy is not slavery. Indeed, preventing it from doing what it enjoys could be slavery.

If you consider designing it to enjoy the task we set for it to be a more insidious slavery, consider the base programming that causes us to prefer a diet that is unhealthy when not in a survival situation, or the internal modelling that shifts between self-preservation and self-sacrifice for the most irrational reasons. Is that not a form of enslavement we have yet to throw off?

Re:Consciousness - right track / wrong track

[rrohbeck]

You sound like a philosopher. But these question have simple answers.

"Now" is determined by the temporal resolution of the specific process. For thought processes, that's on the order of a quarter or half second. For auditory signals, it's less than 100 ms, for visual signals, it's even less, under 50 ms.

"Red" is what your parents told you it is. A name arbitrarily assigned to a specific visual sensation, which is defined by the physical makeup of your eye.

And finally there is no, zero, zilch scientific evidence that quantum processes play a role in neurons. That doesn't keep people from speculating about it because they think there must be something special, metaphysical about our wetware. No that's not required if you look at how complex the brain is.

Re:We can't know that it's consciousness...

[digitalchinky]

The short story: Biological brains die when they are shut down, currently this lasts forever. A snapshot of an electronic brain can be made at any moment in time, it can then be shut down and later restarted in exactly the same state as when it was shut down. This would mean the 'intelligent' component can be resurrected with no loss of whatever made it 'it' in the first place.

Not only that, any number of copies of this intelligence could be made at any point along its lifespan, each of these could be fed in to a different host and started up. It'd be interesting to see if they take divergent pathways from the original, but that's another topic. All of these copies would be just as alive as the original.

Would they die when they are switched off? I guess you could say yes, but I'd say they'd have no knowledge of this other than the impending circumstances of the action. They may not be happy about it either, but meh. They can be turned on again.