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The Future of AI: a Non-Alarmist Viewpoint
Nerval's Lobster writes: There has been a lot of discussion recently about the dangers posed by building truly intelligent machines. A lot of well-educated and smart people, including Bill Gates and Stephen Hawking, have stated they are fearful about the dangers that sentient Artificial Intelligence (AI) poses to humanity. But maybe it makes more sense to focus on the societal challenges that advances in AI will pose in the near future (Dice link), rather than worrying about what will happen when we eventually solve the titanic problem of building an artificial general intelligence that actually works. Once the self-driving car becomes a reality, for example, thousands of taxi drivers, truck drivers and delivery people will be out of a job practically overnight, as economic competition forces companies to make the switch to self-driving fleets as quickly as possible. Don't worry about a hypothetical SkyNet, in other words; the bigger issue is what a (dumber) AI will do to your profession over the next several years.
Put the smartest people on Earth in a room, with access to all the world's current knowledge, for 20,000 years.
When those people emerge from that room, what would they be able to teach humanity?
About the same that AGI would teach us after being "conscious" for 7 days.
For those who missed this previous /. news, I guess it's worth having a look at it first:
http://science.slashdot.org/story/15/04/21/1849213/concerns-of-an-artificial-intelligence-pioneer
AI will obsolete your job before it obsoletes humanity.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
the problem with that is cultural and ideological not a problem with AI, Capitalism *requires* scarcity in order for certain business models to work and this is why AI makes people nervous, It removes scarcity of labor,
We've already seen this with the internet where it provided freedom of information leading to copyright issues begin essentially unenforceable however we now have governments en-mass attempting to put the jack back in the box with draconian despotic measures threats of cultural apocalypse. Which is a real shame that they lack such imagination.
Historically Feudalism described our societal structure, with the technological limits on transporting people around it was the best we could manage at the time despite how horrible it was. With the increase in movement wealth in the mercantile classes increased and there power came to supplant notions of bloodline/dynasty dominance.
Capitalism is likewise horrible but probably the best we can manage given our current technological limitations. I'm hopeful within my lifetime we will replace it with something better But we do need to change peoples attitude towards work, ownership and entitlement... If we don't then capitalism will invariably collapse into despotism.
In the old 'world of the future' exhibits they prophecized that we would have machines doing the work for us and that all humans would enjoy more leisure time
We end up with is the masses being commoditized out of jobs and the wealthy reaping all of the benefits
What happened to get us all to sell ourselves out so cheaply and willingly accept the idea that a few bastards should end up with the bulk of the nations wealth while our children are faced with a future with no jobs and parents whose retirement funds cannot pay to take care of them?
Dystopia? We are living it and don't even see it
Wherever You Go, There You Are
Even though I see the point, I don't believe in all that "loosing job overnight"...
There are millions of people in IT business doing work that could be automated by rather simple (or semi-complex) scripting, which is way more easier to adopt then replacing your fleet of cars, trucks, etc with self-driving variants. Somehow these companies are still paying people to deploy storage, install servers, configure services, etc ...
And btw...
I would deffinitely get rif of 90% of taxi drivers in my city and replace them with self-driving cars though (it would be service to the public). We don't need any more of those "proffesionals drivers" with driving license and no basic social skills.
But at the same time, I would call one of those 10% left, to bring my mom over for Sunday lunch.
On this particular issue, they're both worthless. AGI by purely computational means simply isn't possible. We've known this for decades. Only lunatics like Kurzweil and the under-informed believe otherwise; a belief has no basis in reality.
You might as well discuss the sociological impact of a zombie apocalypse. It's just as meaningful.
Required reading for internet skeptics
I vaguely remember something about Morlocks and Eloi. .. oops gotta run.. shiny things!
I predict that solving the self-driving car problem will be just like voice dictation: They will get 99% of the way there and they will never get the last 1% right. There was a recent news story about a company starting to use a fleet of self-driving trucks. Guess what? The trucks still need a driver to take over when the truck leaves the freeway. Completely self-driving car? I'll believe it when I see it.
Keep in mind that we're in this together. A large economic collapse due to robotics and AI advances will compel the american populace to find ways of supporting itself, be it through complete economic regulation (ie communism) or through philanthropic capitalism. After all, what's the point of building robots for profit if that profit can't be realized?
One thing is for certain though: things will get worse before they get better. Our hands need to be forced.
The article's viewpoint is dangerous. We must solve the Friendliness problem before AGI is developed, or the resulting superintelligence will most likely be unfriendly.
The author also assumes an AI will not be interested in the real world, preferring virtual environments. This ignores the need for a physical computing base, which will entice any superintelligence to convert all matter on Earth (and then, the universe) to computronium. If the AI is not perfectly friendly, humans are unlikely to survive that conversion.
Oh, people see it. They know it. They just dumb themselves up in order not to cope with it. Because they know there's absolutely nothing they can do about it. The One Percenters have won: completely, clearly and irreversibly. They will inherit the earth and the leisure society, while the rest is left to extinction - voluntary or not.
Dont even put Bills name in the same sentence as Stephen Hawking.... bills an idiot
There's even a musical about him, I think: Billy Idiot, it's called. About this young boy, Billy, who breaks away from his background in a coal mining community to become a ballet dancer. Something like that, yeah.
Same thing they said about aeroplanes, yet today they fly so much they threaten human habitats.
Some people make things possible what others say is impossible.
This is just a painful transition. Once all the unnecessary people died and failed to reproduce, there will the leisure society we are all dreaming about.
The real problem is that the leisure society we all dream about isn't compatible with 7+ billion people. Why? Because the earth is too small to account for all resources exploitation necessary to perform these luxury automations.
So it's either that: we continue world population growth in an industrial age, or we have a massive reduction in world population to sustain the leisure age. While everyone agrees to "have the machines doing the work for us and that all humans would enjoy more leisure time", you have to accept that the price to pay is birth control (voluntary, regulated or forced by unemployment and starvation).
Video of some good progressive thrash music
> A lot of well-educated and smart people, including Bill Gates and Stephen Hawking, have stated they are fearful about the dangers that sentient Artificial Intelligence (AI) poses to humanity.
Look at the dangers sentient *humans* have put onto the world: greed, avarice, corruption, war, climate, suppression of rights, mass surveillance, abuse of power, media manipulation. Those dangers are here and now. How about fixing that *NOW* and now, because that danger is *NOW*.
"When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong." - A. C. Clarke
Self driving cars are already here, we've had articles about google self driving car accidents, stop pretending it's a future thing that will need proper AI. Also, if they ever make the equivalent of the human brain it will take over a year before it can say its first word, who's going to put in the endless hours of talking to it like it's a baby to help it understand words? Even more of a problem for the prototypes, you wouldnt even know if it'll work after all that.
Gates is considerably more wealthy (and healthy) than that limey cripple freak..
Dear Troll, money is not a measure of intelligence - neither Leonardo Da Vinci or Einstein were rich, and Gates total worth is based on the theoretical return from selling shares he can't sell without massively devaluing them. Further, his contribution to human knowledge or making the world a better place is surpassed only by the efforts of Mother Teresa.
Wait, you think you're not equivalent to a Turing machine? That's a dangerous bet.
Video of some good progressive thrash music
... They won't feed you.
The utopia that artificial intelligence promises will be theirs alone to reap, not yours. You will receive only ashes, and death.
This is the future we've earned.
"for example, thousands of taxi drivers, truck drivers and delivery people will be out of a job practically overnight"
The answer to that already exists and is supported by the majority of the US population if surveys are to be believed.
The federal government should just guarantee a job offer at the living wage to all that want it, working for the public good. A simple employer of last resort function. That keeps demand up, ensures people have something to do with their day where they can demonstrate their worth to others in society, and allows business to get on with the job of automating drudgery out of existence without worrying about job numbers.
Anybody coming up with the tired 'how do we pay for it' line should immediately book themselves on a course of accounting and monetary economics with a strong Modern Monetary Theory component.
In the old 'world of the future' exhibits they prophecized that we would have machines doing the work for us and that all humans would enjoy more leisure time
Still riding a horse, sweeping the floors and hand washing are you? Do you think your ancestors would've been able to watch as much television as you if it had existed? Did they take holidays? Most of them would have worked before and after school - and between semesters. If you think the jobs of today are as physically hard on the body as the jobs of the not so distant past you should spend a little time researching the bones of your ancestors. Even your teeth have it easier now.
Modern life is largely leisure time - the forty hour week and retirement are relatively recent changes.
While I share Stephen Hawkings concerns about the danger of AI for the most part my concern comes from the huge disparity between those that understand the technology and those that deploy and employ it - much like the infernal combustion engine.
That said - few civilizations spent as little time gathering food and working to provide shelter as the Hawaiians did at the time Cook first visited, and none do now. But that overlooks other factors - like decreased rates of death during childbirth, potatoes, grains, penicillin, blood transfusions, books, higher education, and holidays in Portugal.
As for the dystopian nightmare - I don't want it, and I fiercely oppose it, but if I was given a choice between living now and living during the Holy Roman Empire the decision is a no brainer. The middle-class is also a relatively recent phenomena, a direct result of technology. It's easy to be a Luddite, but it's hard to make the reality of manual labor attractive. Most of the cab drivers I talk to would prefer a "better job" (that's why so many did their MSCEs). Likewise the truck drivers. Much of this "debate" smacks of knee-jerk unrealistic conservatism that romanticizes the past (like the bullshit of Walden Pond). Little different to the introduction of steam engines, trains, automobiles, electricity, cinemas, radio, television, and video. They all "posed" threats of mass unemployment that failed to deliver. The only real difference economically between pre-industrialisation and the present is the growth of the middle class and the transition from lord of the manor/slave owner and guild member, to factory owner, distributor and retailer. Different dogs, same leg action doesn't quite cover it considering the vast increase in knowledge available to those that seek it.
This is just a painful transition. Once all the unnecessary people died and failed to reproduce, there will the leisure society we are all dreaming about.
Which fails to account for the trend where those with a higher education (and higher income) have smaller families.
What happened to get us all to sell ourselves out so cheaply and willingly accept the idea that a few bastards should end up with the bulk of the nations wealth while our children are faced with a future with no jobs and parents whose retirement funds cannot pay to take care of them?
Conservatism happened.
Ezekiel 23:20
... about.
It gets so depressing listening to these hyperventilating pearl clutching nitwits worry about killer robots or sapient AIs.
I don't care who they are... they're not AI experts.
Look, I'm not an AI expert either and even I knew the worry was moronic. As the guy said "like worrying about over population on mars".
Current AIs are retarded and unbelievably myopic. And whatever skills or nature is in them was programmed into them. Their priorities... their databases. We provide everything.
The best AIs of my life time will probably be the computer equivalent of Rainman. Brilliant in some task no doubt but unable to do anything with any competency or even understand that anything else is important.
A big part of the problem is that people anthropomorphize robots/AIs. They invest in them this notion of being demons in bottles or animals made of metal. They're neither of these things.
We have hundreds of millions of years of genetic programming on this planet emphasizing our survival. What is the AI going to have? Will it even have a sense of self preservation? Why would we program that into an AI in any complex sense?
What we'd do with a combat robot is program it to evade enemy weapons fire. But teaching something to evade something is not the same thing as teaching it to preserve itself. Little things like fear, paranoia... that deep animal cunning that comes into play when death is on the line. We do weird things. We play dead. We make a final stand with no attempt to defend... just investing everything in one final attack.
All of this stuff is genetic. Our ancestors... even the furry ones that scurried around occasionally got out of bad situations by doing things like that. The effectiveness is dubious on some predators as anyone with a competent cat will know. Playing dead from what I could see was a terrible idea.
But the point is that even an AI war machine isn't going to be as adaptable or tricksy as people. First, it doesn't need to be that cunning. And second, even if it would be nice, it wouldn't be wroth it. Its too much work for what? So the robot occasionally get scragged? That's why you send in 10 of them at once. The fucking things roll off an assembly line. Finally, it is easier to keep them alive by adjusting their battle tactics. You tell them to stay back a bit, maybe bombard the area a bit... something that makes dealing with ambushes less of an issue.
Oh yeah, and when the robots actually get clever enough that they might actually be a danger... we'll slap a slave collar on that monster at birth.
The danger is not AIs... but the rich and powerful with AIs. The AIs are tools. The rich and the powerful are the will and the mind that guides them.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
It is in no ones economic interests to replace humans with machines. It creates an ecomony that collapse in upon itself. Legislation will emerge limiting/eliminating AI from human jobs.
It is predictable that robots will push out workers everywhere, but the big question is : What do we do then.
The key to this question is wondering who we have to thank for our products. Right now it is the fossil fuel companies, fossil fuel is scarce, we compete for it and that gives advantage to robots over people.
If we which our energy sources to renewables that competitive pressure goes away, and so we get to choose what work we want to do and what machines can do. This is what I call the Roboeconomy. See http://roboeconomy.com/
AI is a threat, but not because it will become superhuman, but because it will serve the scarce fossil fuel economy to control everyone's move to make it last as long as possible. To prevent this problematic use of AI we need to 1. Set human related goals for our industry, so no economic indicators. 2. Drive renewable expansion as hard as we can.
How is that non-alarmist?
"You're scared about [A]? That makes no sense, you should be scared about [B]."
Here's a [+1] for you.
Look how many assembly lines are now automated and do not need humans to assemble units.
Everything from building cars to sticking the heads on dolls are no longer a manual job, except when outsourced to a country where they pay people less than the price to oil the assembly line robots.
Dystopia? We are living it and don't even see it.
The problem is powerful tools in stupid hands. Or greedy hands - greedy being a subset of stupid.
If we'd take a measured approach to tech advancement - which might even mean an accelerated approach - we'd all be living in a utopia already.
The US has no or only very little means of wealth distribution, which is why life can suck so hard over there. But even a bum doesn't have to starve in the US and child labour and epidemics are basically history there too - so I'd say all in all that we're headed in the right direction in that dept.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
It's just misdirection. Yes, you should be mad, but not at robots and meanie rich people.
It wasn't a giant leap in robots that turned the recession of 2008 into the depression of 2009-?. Any more than it was a giant leap in robots that did it in the 1930s.
Think it through.
Two Words:
Butlerian Jihad.
What happened to get us all to sell ourselves out so cheaply and willingly accept the idea that a few bastards should end up with the bulk of the nations wealth while our children are faced with a future with no jobs and parents whose retirement funds cannot pay to take care of them?
If you are talking about the USA, what happened was that you started making voting decisions based on information you got from political attack ads on television. Once you have reached that point downward plunge is pretty much unstoppable until you hit bottom.
You outnumber the 1%'ers literally 99 to 1.
In a democracy, no less.
If you cant manage to out fight or out vote them, then you deserve the shitty country you live in.
Signed - Rest of the world.
It seems to me it's not AI we fear, but our own reaction to it. AIs will not deprive people of their jobs, it is people who will deprive each other, through their use of AI. AI can be scary, but as with splitting the atom, the use we make of it will determine the outcome.
What scares me more are the human corruptions that will plague this new power. Imagine an advertiser using deep learning to design a "perfect" ad that tunes in to your every microexpression and adjusts its colors, shapes and sounds to suggest an unconscious need for the product, without you being aware of it. I don't want that (no customer would) but as long as there is a profit in it, it'll happen.
On the other hand, I would welcome an AI, trained by a nutritionist, that suggests healthy meals according to my activities and biological needs so I don't have to worry about eating right ever again.
It's all about trust in the end. I trust nutritionists because they have my health at heart, and less advertisers because I know they do not care about individuals. If AI is going to be the power of the next century, who should we trust with it ? (I'm tempted to say "not the ones developing it" at the moment)
Personally I prefer speculation to the hubris in your post, at least I know that the people attempting to extrapolate today's technology did not stop thinking "decades ago".
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
If you think humans are mean to each other while they have a day job, imagine how much worse it would get if they had nothing but liesure time. "an idle mind is the devil's workshop"
I don't see humans ever not working at a job as the norm.
But keep voting Republican, because despite all evidence to the contrary, fewer restraints on the economy (like H1B caps) will magically translate into higher wages for skilled workers!
"A lot of well-educated and smart people, including Bill Gates"
Usually one declares not dropouts as well-educated, even if they drop out of Harvard.
so this means someone actually managed to define what intelligence is? :)
It might be of interest that The Reg (last link) is also a climate science denier hub. Which makes sense, as the logic seems to be similar: Why worry about climate disruption, if the really serious effects are not taking place RIGHT NOW? Gas leaking? Let's worry about it once the house has exploded.
The solution, just like with the last 100 "robots will take your job" articles, is the unconditional basic income. We should be celebrating the fact that in "the future", not everybody has to work full time (or at all) to survive.
Or can it be less-than-sentient and borrow its sentience in the form of the will, motivation and biases of its creators, yet still be some kind of existential risk?
When I think about the global financial marketplace, I think of a relatively small number of people at the too-big-to-fail institutions making decisions that rely on information that comes from market analysis and modeling systems, and in some cases this information being fed back into automated trading systems. The machines aren't self aware, but they are imbued with the biases and motivations of those that designed them and set their parameters.
And since many of the major players have these systems and they act on largely overlapping data (market prices, major positions held by known investors, risk models with overlapping criteria), in some respects these independent systems kind of form a larger system since each system is capable of influencing the others' by the guidance they provide which influences the actions of the humans making major decisions and the automated trading systems themselves.
I sometimes wonder if maybe phenomena like wealth inequality isn't just capitalism's inevitable outcome, but perhaps the inbuilt motivation of these financial systems represented in the kinds of financial goals they've been programmed with.
On even simpler levels, what about a building's management system that's allowed to set the building temperature on its own based on energy prices and doesn't let the occupants ever determine the temperature? Sure, the risk is low (too cold or too hot), but it's the kind of dumb AI control system that we trust to make the "right" decision but whose motivation ("reduce energy costs") and lack of human control ("no thermostat adjustment") that exposes a kind of risk from an AI even though it's not HAL9000-sentient.
They're going to need to develop a self driving car that can load your bags into the back of the taxi and deliver the goods you've ordered into your house.
Until that self driving vehicle can unload that new bed, or book shelf or 65 inch TV, people will still be involved. They just won't be driving the vehicles.
If I had the "on" button for an AGI and there was a 50% chance it wipes humanity out - I will turn it on. I care about the progress of intellect (e.g aim towards The Singularity). I am probably not the only one (and one is all it takes) who would do the same so you should lynch us now if you care about humanity's survival in its current biological form.
NIce to get an alternate viewpoint. Now how about one for global warming hysteria? A negative opinion of crony oligarch Elon Musk? Wind and solar power. The blessing of burning coal? Driving a big car?
I don't think it is true that technological progress ever reduced the number of jobs. I guess, except when the slaves were not needed anymore to power the oars when the engines took over their role to pull ships. To me, it seems that progress requires a change in qualifications rather then making people not needed. Look at the number of people needed (and that number growing quickly) to design, program and maintain the smart devices of today (fridges, washing machines, etc). In Poland, the undestanding is that 30% of the IT jobs are vacant because of not enough people ready to take them despite the sallaries in IT being well above the median sallary. I wonder what is this number for US. It's true that people already having a job, may need to gain new qualifications. But this happens over time with jobs unrelated to the technological progress just as well. See, how much fewer people with degree in biology, history or georaphy are hired now than they used to be? Migration yes. Jobs going away - I don't think so.
Lets have a similar article:
The future of climate change from a non-alarmist viewpoint
People will just hate the people who make it, no matter how intrinsically interesting it is or how much benefit it can provide in other areas of society.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
> Same thing they said about aeroplanes
Practical aeroplanes powered by coal fired steam engines are not possible, just like purely computation based general artifical intelligence is not possible. (In fact, Japan managed to ruin its economy by pursuing that futile "5th generation computers" dream throughout the 1980's. AI was to Tokyo what SDI was for Moscow and USA / IL laughed all the way to the bank.)
As far as we understand what's going on inside the biological brain, a lot of the processes happen at quantum-mechanically meaningful (i.e. tiny) scales, thus the uncertainity paradox plays a large role. One can never make a believeable catgirl out of x86 silicon, not even with a Beowulf worth of racks, but an analogic system made out of qubits could be a candidate, if and when it's built.
> Money == success == intelligence.
I pity you, but you are dangerous, as are those which are intelligent like you say, because they got money. Given enough time, they start puppeteering people (specially those which supposedly should not sell themselves).
Also, many of those who became rich are followers or good businessmen. That implies there was some pioneer or entrepreneur they were following.
In modern days, people say there are different kinds of intelligence. Maybe that can be said of Mr. Gates and Mr. Hawking.
Now, on the topic of AI, we're hearing again the same discourse:
- nuclear is safe when properly done;
- we can stop polluting anytime we want;
- etc.
The problem is not AI, it's its creators. We have not been able to make other things safe and AI won't be different. That scene from Robocop (the robot demo at OCP) looked like some kind of "horror humor" but unfortunately is exactly what we can expect.
Even without AI we already kill friends in "friendly fire".
But we won't be able to do without AI -- for all the advances it could give us. And some people at "Defense" (which is all but defensive) will exactly that way, unfortunately.
Ultimately, IMHO I think we'll need to ban AI from military use, just like nukes and chemical weapons... probably with the same level of "success"...
Didn't the creators of Star Trek already explore this issue in depth? When machines can do all the work, money becomes obsolete. Wealth is measured in access to machines. Greed and avarice, of course, will still exist. "Hey! His replicator is bigger than mine! No fair!"
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
time to cut full time down to 32-30 hours a week with a longer team goal of say 20 hours also have say X2 OT at 45-50 hours a week and X3 at 70-80.
If predicting that AI will destroy civilization isn't alarmist I would be interested in hearing the other side.
The world has changed a lot in the past 100 years. It will change a lot in the next 100. Deal with it.
Ding! Ding! We have a believer in one of those back-of-the-magazine "alternative" physics models. Now tell us all about the chemtrails, buddy.
Hubris? Sure. I'm of the opinion that when science conflicts with religion, that it should be religion, not science, that should adapt.
You're free to believe any nonsense you like. Just understand that it has no rational basis.
Required reading for internet skeptics
I am not afraid of an advance A.I. because of the following idea :
A.I. will require human because it will feed on human experience and because A.I. will be hungry for knowledge and not air, food or water. Our experience will be the most importance thing for an advance A.I. The A.I. require the experience of all living life form. From these experiences, the A.I. will growth to become what it is destine to become.
The human will be require to monitor the A.I. state and behavior during it growth. For example, self driving car will require one or many human to monitor it behavior. While a human can monitor one or many A.I.. So all A.I. will require to implement a monitoring function that report on it state. A A.I. won't object to us monitoring it many function.
Human and A.I. will coexist just a plant and human coexist.
Thoreau is not the villain here. He was a trustafarian who openly indulged in a short-term experiment in simplified living. By residing within a short walk of town, he was able to retain normal social contacts while writing up his experience. In all, a life nothing like the angry Unabomber wannabees who act in his name.
Whether AGI by computational means is possible depends on how successful the atheist view of humanity is. If that view proves true, at least as explaining human origins and development, it follows that everything that humans are will at some point be reproducible by machine. The computational elements that realize this model may be as far beyond today's as ours are beyond the steam engine (quantum processes, etc.) but they will be nonetheless computational.
It wasn't caused by technology, but rather by central bank redistribution of wealth. Technological advance has just allowed it to go on for 20-30 years longer than normal, because it lets us do more with less.
One of my philosophy professors is an expert on the foundations of cognitive science and is heavily immersed in the literature from all the hard and soft scientists working on AI/cog-sci and he was a start post-doc of Daniel Dennett. One class I pressed him to make a prediction for when we'll see fully capable AI... "I understand your reluctance but just give me some sort of timeline." He said definitely not this century and maybe not next century but probably the one after. Of course Dennett himself, one of the most staunch supporters of the enterprise being obviously possible (despising dualism and such), fully acknowledges that it might be so complex that we'll never achieve it but, "it's not like there is some definite predetermined wall out there waiting for us that we'll logically never be able to pass."
In the old 'world of the future' exhibits they prophecized that ... all humans would enjoy more leisure time
And that was, and continues to be, the single biggest mistake of optimistic utopian predictions. Not the "more leisure time" part, mind you, but the "enjoy" part.
If you want to live at a standard set by the 1920's, you can... Living with cheap goods, no electronics, and an hourly factory job, you can meet those basic needs pretty easily. If you're working only a few hours per week to meet those minimal expenses, however, your copious leisure time will be quite boring by modern standards. Knowing what else is available, it takes quite a lot of discipline to maintain that nice simple life.
What happened to get us all to sell ourselves out so cheaply
We realized that we like advancing progress. We like our iPhones, laptops, Internet, movies, and TV shows. We like these things so much that we're still willing to work a full-time job to have them.
our children are faced with a future with no jobs and parents whose retirement funds cannot pay to take care of them?
This is the single biggest mistake of pessimistic dystopian predictions: The assumption that somehow we're sitting at the absolute maximum of progress, and the precariously balanced economy will topple down the hill on the other side.
The reality is that human nature has not changed. We always want to have the best the world can offer. If that means working just as much as our parents did for a low wage, so be it. At the end of the day, we'll still be able to go to our air-conditioned home, turn on the trillions of transistors in our gaming computers, and play a video game that runs more computations in five minutes than were executed during the entire Apollo 11 mission.
We don't have any more leisure time than we did when those "world of the future" exhibits were built. What's happened instead is that both our working and leisure time have become more effective. At work, we do in an hour what would have taken a team of people several days to accomplish, because our tools are so greatly improved. At play, we routinely spend our time doing what once would have been once-in-a-lifetime activities, because our toys are so greatly improved.
Utopia? We are living it and don't even see it
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
A lot of well-educated and smart people, including Bill Gates and Stephen Hawking, have stated they are fearful about the dangers that sentient Artificial Intelligence (AI) poses to humanity.
They aren't that smart if they think machines could ever be sentient. Machines are deterministic. They do what you tell them to. We might be able to make extremely complex machines that give the general appearance of sentience, but they will still only ever be deterministic.
Anyone with enough insight and humility knows there's still an extremely large piece of the puzzle missing in our understanding of life. And you need to understand how something works before you can create it.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
The AI community has been promising human-level AI since the 60s - the prophecies by luminaries like Marvin Minsky are there for everybody to see. It hasn't happened, just as Kurzweill's singularity won't happen when he has predicted, or even ever. The problem is the substantially the same as as that in theoretical physics in the 20th century: all the "easy" problems have been solved. What is left now is the really tricky stuff. Or, to put it in a different, somewhat tongue-in-cheek way, 90% of all the problems have been solved; the remaining 10% of the problems will take 90% of the total time. Thus, in 30 years time we'll have vastly more powerful computers, but speech recognition will be only somewhat better than it is today, and probably still far from what is depicted in the Star Trek series - and we still won't have flying cars beyond the impractical, expensive and all around pathetic folding-wing-airplane contraptions that we already have and nobody uses. I'd be happy to be wrong about this - but I am afraid I won't.
isn't compatible with 7+ billion people
I find this type of argument ignores real world trends. Per capita resource requirements in the developed world are trending downward (thanks to tech like LEDs, etc . . .) while populations are stable or declining. Most underdeveloped nations are becoming developed and experiencing the same trends once they become developed.
"too small" is relative to your tech and our tech is increasing at an ever faster pace, thanks in no small part to the large number of participants. Malthusianism has been a horrible predictor of the future. Why would it start working now?
Sdelat' Ameriku velikoy Snova!
At work, we do in an hour what would have taken a team of people several days to accomplish, because our tools are so greatly improved.
[Citation Needed]
There's nothing new in TFA. Only the same old lowbrow stuff. Not worthy of my superintelligence time.
You just do not know who the machines are.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
No AI discussion is complete without the views and expert opinion of Nick Boström. This article is pure garbage.
Thoreau is not the villain here.
Trustafarian is pretty close.
Thoreau was just a dilettante waxing his wick with the "primitive, natural, and simple" myth (2 days living in a cabin == romantic transcendental experience). Little House on the Prairie for sensitive men (except Ronald Reagan who preferred watching LHothP - while wearing gingham). These days he'd a Libertarian and professional protestor (leading the anti-systemd/fork Debian movement). Maybe a little raki healing and charkra alignment workshops on the side.
He actively helped promote a delusioned (back-to-fake-nature for the effete and blister-free) movement, so does bear some responsibility for all those who don't seem to have either read his "work", or thought about it. Just as the "artists" behind Spiderman bear some responsibility for so called adults with spidey-power fantasies.
Unabomber, on the other hand, was the more obvious tosspot, a better mathematician, but not less a writer, and at at least he did more than just talk about doing things (plus he washed his own clothes).
nothing like the angry Unabomber wannabees who act in his name.
I've heard any of those are there any of them that have even heard of him? Sounds like vegan vampires. Do they have a website (or are you making the story more interesting)? I don't know that I'd blame either of them for preppers (try John Wayne and the cowboy myths) - but reckon Thoreau could well be partially to blame for the paleo diet, as well as influencing Ghandi's more Hallmark quotes. Both the Unabomber and Thoreau had "issues" with women (both symptoms of the failures of the patriarchy they worshipped).
Where do you live though? 1k a month on rent is pretty good in much of the US, and factory jobs pay less than they used to.
Still a good point. I've cut back a ton on purchases as the things I was buying were making me broke and unhappy.
You would need unions to succeed in that kind of change.
Good luck promoting that idea.
The effects of the rise of automation can best be described as a loss in the value of labor and a gain in the value of capital.
The implication of this is that people must take action to become capital owners. That doesn't necessarily mean you should go out and buy a robot. You probably won't be able to afford one and you won't be able to gain remunerative work. The solution to this is to buy capital now, in the form of corporate stocks, and to do estate planning to insure that your children inherit your capital ownership because they likely won't be able to acquire it themselves. All inheritance taxes should be abolished.
Malthusian Nonsense. You could fit the entire world's population in New Zealand.
http://www.fastcoexist.com/301...
Nice article. I disagree though that most AI researchers are motivated by the good that automation will do. They're not that naive. I think Oppenheimer had it right: scientists want to work on projects that are "technically sweet". AI is definitely that.
But I totally agree that the real world impact of AI will be like evolution -- following a pattern of punctuated equilibria where disruption arises in chuncks as each significant skill area is usurped by automation (like car/truck drivers, then call centers, then retail clerks, then jobs requiring physical skills).
That said, once the first skill area falls that requires substantial linguistic facility (like a call center), I see most white collar jobs tumbling like dominos soon thereafter. Once machines can converse using speech and perform the simple logical deductions/inferences that humans do, would anyone hire a human for an office job ever again?
"What happened to get us all to sell ourselves out so cheaply and willingly accept the idea that a few bastards should end up with the bulk of the nations wealth while our children are faced with a future with no jobs and parents whose retirement funds cannot pay to take care of them?"
The answer is that we aren't very intelligent. At least most of us. So when the rich crafted a logical argument (or rather paid someone to do it for them) that they should get the lion's share of the benefits of any improvements in productive capacity, the ignorant masses weren't sharp enough to see through that argument. Thanks to the clever use of sophistry and misdirection, it just sounded right to them. It also helped to get a good salesman to deliver the argument. They latched onto some guy that had been a big spokesperson in advertising for GE and Chesterfield cigarettes. We let him be President for a while. That's how dumb we are. I hope the artificial intelligence turns out to be a bit smarter than us.
That's what I was going to say. Almost nothing occurs "overnight", really, there's usually a lot of unpublicized effort in the years preceding it. Trucking companies will still require drivers in the trucks as backups, if nothing else. And there are still a lot of crappy roads out there that aren't auto-driving friendly.
Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.
Then every fucking thing you say after here is the same bullshit hand wringing as postulated by someone who doesn't have a clue either.
Especially if those skilled workers are living in truly impoverished (as in open sewers, not not having the latest iphone) conditions.
"I don't think it is true that technological progress ever reduced the number of jobs."
I don't think you ever read a History book, then.
That, *up to know*, technological progress haven't reduced the number of jobs *globally* and *in the long term* doesn't mean that this is not going to happen next time nor that it didn't happen locally and on the short term (where short terms means long enough to make miserable the whole lives of millions).
"In Poland, the undestanding is that 30% of the IT jobs are vacant because of not enough people ready to take them despite the sallaries in IT being well above the median sallary."
You can hail this to two things, neither of which are going to last long: Poland has demand for IT jobs because it's easy for their value to be sold in the other side of the world producing a value delta in the process. That is globalization plus low standards of life on your side. The same can be said about wages: it is not that IT salaries are above median and still they are not covered but they are above median *because* they can't be covered: moving efforts towards IT will certainly lower the wages as it will do other depressed economies entering the game. Do you want a hint in Polands future? Then look, for instance, at Spain's last 40 years.
"I wonder what is this number for US."
I already told you about globalization: USA IT labout market is depressing -or not growing at the pace it could, because Poland -and India and others, are outcompeting them in wages costs.
"It's true that people already having a job, may need to gain new qualifications."
Good luck requalifying your heavy industry people from Gdansk into white collar IT workers. Just look at how well it ended to other regions going through the same path.
"Migration yes. Jobs going away - I don't think so."
You are aware that migration means exaclty "jobs going away", are you?
Companies: Sure thing, guys! Here, take a paycut of 60% to go with that! Oh, and we're going to have to have you come in for unpaid overtime, and if you thought you were going to work two jobs to make up the difference, you've got another think coming because we're going to randomly call you in after hours and rescramble the shifts every month.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
"Overnight" relative to a human's career. Do you consider 10 years overnight? While ten years seems long, it is two generations of vehicle development and an almost complete turnover of the fleet. At the same time it is very quick in terms of human careers: millions of drivers being out of work in a period that short is too quick to absorb elsewhere, too quick for them to reboot their careers, too quick for retirement/attrition to be much help.
Always wondered about this. IF AI gets really really good, robots might ... some day .. decide to kill people.
Right now, around the world, zillions of people are deciding to kill other people. Right now. Fact.
So, why are killer robots "scary" but killer people is staus quo ?
Whatever happened to automation leading to a leisuretopia with a five-hour work week?
Oh, right, the people buying the robots that are replacing workers are keeping all the productivity gains 100% for themselves.
In a rational society, we would have a robot tax.
In our society we pit the eroding middle-class against the poors and lock up more people than we can afford to.
Don't put me in a cage for taking bread from your yacht.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
The funny thing is that when AI crashes America's economy, everyone has to stop, drop everything they're doing, and goose step out of the way for the fat cats to have their shit hosed off themselves. See also: the flash crash. Did YOUR trades get rolled back when you lost money?
"This is just a painful transition. Once all the unnecessary people died and failed to reproduce, there will the leisure society we are all dreaming about."
No, "we" don't get the dreamt leisure society if "we" happen to be in the "unnecessary people set that died".
"The real problem is that the leisure society we all dream about isn't compatible with 7+ billion people. Why? Because the earth is too small"
Bullshit. It is capitalism the one being "too small", not the world. Come back to tell me the world can't support us once capitalism stops destroying crops in the thousands of millions of kilograms just to preserve itself. You migth have an argument then.
This is just a painful transition. Once all the unnecessary people are moved underground to tend the machines, there will the leisure society H.G. Wells wrote about.
FTFY
It has nothing to do with atheism. You don't need to posit a god. Hell, you don't even need to posit a soul or other supernatural concept. Computation alone is insufficient. To claim otherwise necessitates that you be able to demonstrate that syntactic content is sufficient for semantic content. So simple and obvious is this point, that it can lead you to only one conclusion.
Required reading for internet skeptics
At work, we do in an hour what would have taken a team of people several days to accomplish, because our tools are so greatly improved.
[Citation Needed]
Yo' momma only needs 15 minutes with her vibrator to do what a team men took days to accomplish.
Here is a decent example of why computers can't drive trucks.
The other day one of the drivers at my wife's company pulled into dock normally and damaged the truck.
What happened?
There was a dip in the pavement sufficient to, when entered while turning, fold the truck at the hitch to the point where the cab extenders (wind breaks on the side) came in contact with the trailer.
What could have been done?
If the driver had been significantly more experienced he would have seen the dip in the road and made a 3 point turn and backed straight into the dock, with both cab extenders folding to the side of the trailer.
Because of this and ten thousand other possibilities and special cases I don't think autonomous delivery is going to be possible in the near future if at all.
If there is no soul then the brain is just a machine, one made of wetware certainly but a machine nonetheless. Are you suggesting that we're incapable of reverse engineering?
Thoreau is not the villain here. He was a trustafarian who openly indulged in a short-term experiment in simplified living. By residing within a short walk of town, he was able to retain normal social contacts while writing up his experience. In all, a life nothing like the angry Unabomber wannabees who act in his name.
IIRC, he was actually squatting on land owned by Emerson.
Similarly, when he spent his one night in jail for not paying the highway tax and wrote the essay which inspired Gandi and Martin Luther King toward civil disobedience, Emerson came and bailed him out in the morning.
No, I'm suggesting, on a rather well-established basis, that computation alone is insufficient. This is all assuming that the mind is a product of the brain. Whatever the brain does to cause consciousness, it can not be by mere computation alone.
I don't know why you find this so troubling.
Required reading for internet skeptics
Computation alone is insufficient.
What else other than computation is required? What is it you think your brain's neurons are doing that cannot be replicated?
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
What else other than computation is required?
I have no idea. Neither does anyone else. That doesn't change the fact that computation alone has been show to be insufficient. That's pretty well established.
Required reading for internet skeptics
Whatever the brain does to cause consciousness, it can not be by mere computation alone.
Of course not, you need some hardware to run it on.
but then I read that it was not alarmist. I'll take my AI articles as infuriating as they are terrifying, thank you very much.
No more swearing at acres of empty handicap, police, pregnant mom, EV and other reserved parking spaces. Just door to door service that won't take away jobs from anyone except maybe a few hotel and restaurant valets.
At that point of full automation, the only purpose of financial system is to control overpopulation. But as long as poor won't have access to money they won't have access to that automation, that means the population will shrink and starve cause "the faith" won't let births become bureaucratic by removing financial system to a state controled births and deaths with a quota resources for every one. Simply there will be no discussion about it cause govern do not lead anymore, tech (not tech people, just tech) leads. Open source or not, its unavoidable, unprecedented change on human history. Govern could pose that has the control by marketing fear, but its just that, ads for votes.
What else other than computation is required?
I have no idea. Neither does anyone else. That doesn't change the fact that computation alone has been show to be insufficient. That's pretty well established.
You can never state that something is not sufficient just because no one has figured it out yet. Most likely 100% of all significant technological advances were preceded by people who tried and failed. Often the people who finally figure it out were among the people who had failed multiple times in the past.
To say something isn't possible you have to know a great deal about why it is not possible. For instance we know that silicon transistors cannot shrink indefinitely because of our knowledge of physical limitations such as the width of a silicon atom. We don't say that transistors cannot be 5 nm wide just because all attempts at making 5 nm wide transistors have failed; that would be stupid.
It could not possibly be established that computation alone cannot create general AI because we have not even approached computers with enough transistors to match the 100 trillion synapses in an average adult. Even once we reach that milestone it will take a large amount of research before people could claim it simply isn't possible, and even then there would be a good chance they are still wrong.
Realistically the only way to say it is impossible to create general AI with computation alone is to actually create a general AI by other means. Only then could we possibly understand the process enough to know for sure it couldn't be done another way. Although even in that case there is no guarantee someone won't come up with a more elegant and/or efficient way in the future which only uses computation.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
Population is not growing because of babies but because of people not dieing as fast as they used to. Only way to fix this is to kill old people or stop making babies at all which would cause problems in the future.
In the old 'world of the future' exhibits they prophecized that we would have machines doing the work for us and that all humans would enjoy more leisure time
We end up with is the masses being commoditized out of jobs and the wealthy reaping all of the benefits
What happened to get us all to sell ourselves out so cheaply and willingly accept the idea that a few bastards should end up with the bulk of the nations wealth while our children are faced with a future with no jobs and parents whose retirement funds cannot pay to take care of them?
Dystopia? We are living it and don't even see it
Not that cheap. Sure, a single tech worker might make next to nothing compared to the entire computer industry, but the industry itself has seen its share of risk and reward, failure and success. None of the achievements were guaranteed. Any company or person is still vulnerable no matter how far ahead they are.
You make it sound as though the alternative is palatable. Look at the societies where technology isn't available to threaten jobs. They still have forces that threaten jobs. If a very select few people set things up so that wealth can be created, it may happen that a lot of people become employed and it may happen that some people get rich.
The thing is, in some societies the door is still open for some people to achieve
Know your pads. One time pad: good for cryptography. Two timing pad: where to take your mistress.
Bugger off, Zanzibar should be large enough for the rest of you to stand on.
New Zealanders are well balanced with a chip on each shoulder. One represents Australia, the other the rest of the world
No, I'm suggesting, on a rather well-established basis, that computation alone is insufficient. This is all assuming that the mind is a product of the brain. Whatever the brain does to cause consciousness, it can not be by mere computation alone.
I don't know why you find this so troubling.
Please define consciousness. And please don't define it as "something that cannot be computed" as it would be defeating your point.
If your definition is "the fact of awareness by the mind of itself and the world", then you have to prove it is not computable. Is a cat conscious? A cat doesn't recognize itself in the mirror, so is it aware of itself? If the cat is not conscious, what is the mathematical difference between the brain of a cat and ours, where is the thing that make them not equivalent (in computation theory)? If the cat is conscious, is a lizard conscious then? And after the lizard, a worm, etc. All of these are examples of increasingly complex computation machines.
You are just a machine, get over it, it doesn't take away the beauty of what you can do with your mind.
Video of some good progressive thrash music
I'm pretty sure people in the UAW, AFL-CIO, and USW work 40-hours a week, in industries that are highly automated.
When pay is tied to the number of hours worked, it's the workers that want more hours. When you're paid a salary, management wants you to work more hours. The Unions would never agree to a reduced number of hours unless there was a corresponding increase in hourly pay.
If you post as Anonymous Coward, don't expect a reply.
We could easily be living comfortable modern lives on hardly any work if the bulk of us didn't have to pay such a huge percent of our incomes to borrow assets hoarded by the wealthy. Rent and interest, the modern-day vestiges of feudalism, and the desperate struggle to escape from them and achieve middle-class independence, are what keep so many of us working so much harder than we would need to be.
I make almost exactly the mean personal income for the US. Setting aside for a moment the problem that more than half the country make less than half of that (the median is about half the mean) and imagining we had a normal distribution of incomes, so the average (median) American really did have an average (mean) income like I do: only about 25% of my income goes to actually paying for things that I consume, and I feel like I live quite comfortably without worrying about being able to afford things that I reasonably want. (I can't travel around the world on vacation every other week, but I don't worry about having enough food/clothes/entertainment/etc). Another 25% goes to taxes, and I guess you could argue that I consume some of the product of that, but a lot of it is waste that I would never choose to spend it on... but lest this diverge into a debate about what to tax and spend, let's give that a pass. Another 25% of my income goes to bribing someone into allowing me to live on their land, i.e. rent. And the last 25% goes to desperately saving up for the chance to eventually, decades down the road, escape from having to constantly bribe someone to allow me just to exist somewhere. And I'm very fortunate not to have other huge debts (e.g. student loans) that I have to service in addition to that.
If the average American made an average income like me, and had an average division of the assets (e.g. land, or cash to buy land i.e. a mortgage) and didn't have to borrow them from the tiny fraction of people who hold all those assets hostage, and thus only had to pay for things they consumed, then such an average American like myself could live a comfortable modern lifestyle on about 2hrs a day of work.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
Thanks for saying this. I was able to mod this up (thus AC.) People rant about how their lives and society sucks, but kings of history would have killed for the opportunities afforded the lowest of our society. Libraries. Emergency rooms. Penicillin. Flush toilets. Free education.
Imagine Charlemagne being offered the majority of knowledge available in our world and being told that any person can walk into a library and access it for free, not to mention the books.
If you're appealing to a Searle type argument here: proving that semantics doesn't reduce to syntax doesn't prove that semantics is no something that can be achieved by computation.
For an analogy: on a fundamental, overly-pendantic level, computers "don't know how to add". They know how to perform boolean logic operations like NOR and NAND, and they can perform complex nested series of such operations on ordered series of boolean values into which we can encode "numbers", and such complex operations can be constructed so that the series of boolean values that come out the other end properly encode the number you should get when you add the two numbers encoded into the two series of boolean values you started with. But the computer has no idea what a number is or what addition is; it just did a bunch of NOR or NAND operations on a bunch of TRUEs and FALSEs and spat out some more TRUEs and FALSEs. Any of that representing numbers or addition is all human interpretation of the process. But we nevertheless happily say that computers add numbers together, and to most people most of what computers do is so transparently adding together of numbers that to appeal to the fact that it's really just a bunch of clever boolean logic kind-of-sort-of emulating numbers and arithmetic would be appallingly over-pendantic. For all intents and purposes, computers know how to add.
There's no reason that, with proper image and sound recognition and control of robotic mechanisms, a computer that at an overly-pendantic level "only processes syntax" cannot emulate semantic understanding so thoroughly that to claim that it cannot understand semantics would be as ridiculous as claiming that it can't add.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
Malthusian Nonsense. You could fit the entire world's population in New Zealand.
http://www.fastcoexist.com/301...
Do you understand the concept of "resources"? Of course the earth is large enough to have 7 billions biped mammals roughly 6 feet high. Densely compacted, it could even fit in less than that. Sustaining their energy consumption is a completely different story.
You should check that video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
How much space do you think it takes to allow you to change your phone every 4 months or to take the plane to see your mom on holidays? Do you still think the earth is big enough to sustain the energy requirement of 7 billion people living in the leisure society?
Video of some good progressive thrash music
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
You are just a machine, get over it
If you'll take a moment to read the comment to which you replied, you'll find that I've said exactly that -- and that that point is completely irrelevant to the fact that computation is insufficient.
I'm sorry that reality does not conform to your fantasy. Please, at least do a little bit of reading. I don't even know how to begin to address your confusion.
Required reading for internet skeptics
You can never state that something is not sufficient just because no one has figured it out yet.
That it's logically impossible is reason enough! Consider for a moment a simple example: I claim that it is impossible to clear 5 lines simultaneously in a game of Tetris. Would you say that claim is nonsense and it's only a matter of time before someone figures it out? Of course not. You can clearly demonstrate that it is an impossibility. The same is true for computational approaches to AGI -- they are logically impossible.
Why do you believe in such silly nonsense when it's clear that those beliefs are pure fantasy?
Required reading for internet skeptics
You're a bit off there. The crux of Searle's argument is that syntax, by itself, is insufficient for semantics. A point that is both obvious and seemingly irrefutable. If you believe that you can show otherwise, fame and fortune await.
Empty hand-waving, naturally, won't convince anyone.
There's no reason that [...]
There is a reason! You've simply chosen to ignore it: Syntax, by itself, is insufficient for semantics. Wishful thinking won't change that.
Required reading for internet skeptics
Dont even put Bills name in the same sentence as Stephen Hawking.... bills an idiot
You did just that.
The problem with this model is that it will NEVER reach an equilibrium.
Eventually, these "few humans" living this life of luxury automation, will be at each others' throats for resources. In time, alliances will form, and there will be a war of attrition over the control of all remaining resources. When one side wins, they'll continue to "cull the unnecessary" from their numbers. The outcome is most likely going to be one single person left. (or more realistically; dozens). When they compete themselves to an unsustainable number, only the machines will be left.
And boolean logic is strictly insufficient for arithmetic (try as you might, no combination of nor()s will ever amount to the strict equivalent of an add()), and yet somehow computers do something that seems to everyone exactly like arithmetic via nothing but boolean logic.
The problem with the Chinese room (the deficiency in the imaginary construct, the guy in the room with the manuals full of symbol-manipulation rules, that makes that system fail to process semantics; not the problem with the argument employing said construct) is that it can't do things like respond to a photo of a duck on a lake and the question "What kind of bird is on the water?" correctly. It can answer all kinds of verbal questions about ducks and lakes and birds and water and their relations to each other and to other concepts encapsulated in words, but it cannot connect those words to any kind of real-world phenomenal experience. It has no idea what the hanzi symbol for "duck" actually corresponds to, in terms of the world of phenomena; it's just an empty symbol.
But give the man in the room a bunch of photos and sound recordings and scratch-and-sniff panels and so on, properly correlated with the hanzi symbols, so that he can match non-verbal phenomena to the appropriate symbols and then process the symbols according to the rules and then be able to answer such questions like "what kind of bird is on the water?", and you've basically got a man in a room with a complete how-to-learn-Chinese instruction set. If he memorized all the symbols and rules for manipulating and the phenomena that they corresponded to, nobody would doubt that the man in the room had actually learned Chinese.
The Chinese Room as given by Searle is not functionally equivalent to a native Chinese speaker. It cannot do things native Chinese speakers can. Yes, those functional differences mean that the Chinese Room is only processing syntax, not semantics. But if we correct those functional differences as above, and get a room that actually can do everything a native Chinese speaker can do with the Chinese language, then that modified room would be processing semantics as well.
As we have ever-improving image-recognition algorithms for computers. We have computers that can observe empirical phenomena and connect them to verbal symbols. In principle, we very well can build a computer that can answer a question like "What kind of bird is on the water?", and in fact I'd be surprised if somewhere out there there's not an expert system that can do that already. Yes technically, at an obtuse, obstinately pedantic level, all those image-recognition algorithms are actually just doing a lot of really complicated manipulation of symbols... but those masses of symbols are encoding phenomenal experiences, and the complex manipulations are emulating semantic understanding, the same way that a string of boolean values can encode a number and a bunch of nested NORs can emulate addition. So to the same extend that a properly-programmed computer can "do arithmetic", so too a properly-programmed computer can "understand what words mean", semantically, not just syntactically.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
If we were densely populated we wouldn't need airplanes to visit relatives and public transit would be more cost effective. There are plenty of efficiencies we could find before resources become an issue. Plus the sun provides plenty of energy and we could find better ways to harness that energy.
Wrong. Because my opinion was 100 percent what the AI expert's opinion was before he even opened his fucking mouth.
Why is that?
Coincidence? I randomly had the right opinion? Or maybe I actually do know something about AI systems as demonstrated by my further comments but I wouldn't call myself an expert.
I don't program the fucking things. I work with some expert systems at work and they're useful tools. But take over the world? Not on their own. Maybe if someone told them to.
AIs don't want anything. They have no will. They have no sense of self preservation.
All the AI fear is based on cartoonish anthropomorphizations of what are machines.
Most of the speculation makes about as much sense as the movie "cars" where all the cars are self aware people.
AIs are not self aware and they're not people. They don't have our genetic history.
Now if you want to fear something... fear cyborgs. A cyborg could be pretty fucking scary. All the power of your best AI/robot with the core mind of a man/woman. Then you're dealing with something legitimately dangerous. Not because the machine is dangerous. But rather because the man was always dangerous. The machine just let him do things he couldn't do before.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
I'm mad as hell to the shitty level of thinking that goes into the alarmist scifi nonsense we've seen so much off of late. I'm an old AI developer who used to do this stuff for a living (but then thought better of it) and have digged deeper into more human and philosophical issues, and I wrote this a couple of weeks ago; http://sheltered-objections.bl...
-- Home, James - it doesn't matter where that thing has b
You can never state that something is not sufficient just because no one has figured it out yet.
That it's logically impossible is reason enough! Consider for a moment a simple example: I claim that it is impossible to clear 5 lines simultaneously in a game of Tetris. Would you say that claim is nonsense and it's only a matter of time before someone figures it out? Of course not. You can clearly demonstrate that it is an impossibility. The same is true for computational approaches to AGI -- they are logically impossible.
Why do you believe in such silly nonsense when it's clear that those beliefs are pure fantasy?
You are correct that you can clearly demonstrate that clearing 5 lines simultaneously in Tetris is impossible. But that is because you can be very specific as to why: the longest piece is only 4 lines long. Notice I didn't say something vague like: it is logically impossible to clear 5 lines. I was incredibly specific.
If your answer to why computational approaches to AGI is logically impossible are not also as specific, then you are just spouting nonsense. Just saying it is impossible is not an acceptable answer, and neither are other deflections such as calling it silly nonsense or pure fantasy.
If you don't have specific reasons why it is impossible, which show a thorough understanding of why neuron interaction cannot be replicated by a Turing complete computation system, or why simulating neuron interaction is not enough to create AGI, then just stop replying.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
That would make an interesting project. Anyone know how to crowd fund it?
Modern life is largely leisure time - the forty hour week and retirement are relatively recent changes.
Umm, yes and no.
Read the link for details, but basically people for the past thousand years or so -- at least in Europe -- generally worked roughly the same number of hours per year as they do today. The difference was that the work was distributed in different ways -- a lot of work was seasonal (particularly when most people were farmers), which meant you were working 16-hour days most days of the week during harvest, but you basically had little to do during the winter for a few months. And don't forget that work basically had to stop when the sun went down, and poor people couldn't generally afford light sources after dark -- so even if you wanted to work longer hours in the winter, you couldn't.
I'll agree with you that work was harder in the past in terms of manual labor, etc. But the amount of "leisure time" was probably not as much less as you imagine it to be.
We may not be living in a dystopia, but it is certainly true that productivity has skyrocketed per worker over the past couple centuries, but total work time has not decreased significantly. Granted, some of that extra productivity is necessary to go toward modern conveniences -- but we could probably all be working for half or a quarter of the hours we do and still have a reasonably high standard of living. The main difference would be that the rich people wouldn't be skimming such a huge amount off the top.
And boolean logic is strictly insufficient for arithmetic
That's simply not true.
but it cannot connect those words to any kind of real-world phenomenal experience
You're trying to talk about the symbol grounding problem (see Harnad for a discussion about how this relates to Searle's Chinese Room).
But give the man in the room a bunch of photos and sound recordings and scratch-and-sniff panels and so on
This was addressed by Searle in the original 1980 paper. I recommend you read it. Put simply, it's a weak attempt to smuggle semantics in through the back door. Replace the photos, sounds, and smells with some equivalent in the form of symbols and you'll find that nothing changes.
As we have ever-improving image-recognition algorithms for computers. We have computers that can observe empirical phenomena and connect them to verbal symbols.
You're just still connecting symbols to other symbols. Consider this for a moment: I give you a unilingual dictionary and an exhaustive corpus of texts written in the same language. You have all you need to identify relationships between the symbols. The most you could hope to produce would be a grammar. You'd never be able to determine the meaning of any of the words.
There's a reason the argument has stood-up to 35 years worth of very harsh scrutiny. I recommend you read more about it. It will be painful for you, as it's difficult to see much-cherished beliefs crushed by something so simple. Just be glad it wasn't your career, as it was for so many others.
Required reading for internet skeptics
If you don't have specific reasons why it is impossible
I've made that clear already. Did you miss it?
Required reading for internet skeptics
Modern life is largely leisure time - the forty hour week and retirement are relatively recent changes.
Umm, yes and no.
Re-read my post less selectively. We now work less hours. Most of our work is for employers (or as employers). Much of our work used to be not for employers. No Macdonalds, pizza, or throw something in the microwave, no washing machines, no instant heat. Except for a privileged few much of life was work from cain'tsee to cain'tsee. Prior to industrialisation we got more sleep, other than that, for most of the world life was a lot more work than it is now for much of the so-called 'developed' world.
The article you referenced would be amongst the poorest pieces of research I've read recently. Pilkington knew little of "ordinary" life other than what he heard, or "observed" while briefly pretending to be a beggar - with servants. He failed to notice plagues and civil wars, and like the good Protestants of the day promoted a caste system where the "workers" were lazy and morality was something that came to them as a result of fear of punishment. His selective and ignorant quotes say nothing of sailors, workhouses, orphanages, tanneries, mines, foundries or laundries. Not surprisingly given the era he didn't comment on indentured labor (slavery for debt) or child labor. Despite all the authors (More, Rabelais, Servetus, Bacon, Machieavelli and many others) of that period you reference one based almost soley on Pilkington! To Pilkington England didn't include Wales, Scotland, or Orkney (and even so far from represents "much of the developed world"). That's the equivalent of viewing the 21st century through the eyes of Jerry Seinfield, or Snoop Dogg.
That's simply not true.
Then show me a complex of nested boolean functions that is logically equivalent to addition; one that takes actual numbers as input and outputs their sums, not merely something that emulates addition if we interpret the atomic propositions fed in and out of it as representing digits of a binary number. Something that looks like "(2 or 3) only if (3 and not (2 nand 2))" (but not that obviously, that's a random set of operations and parentheses I just pulled out of my ass) and gives "5" as an output. It can't be done.
Not that I'm saying that there's anything deficient about such emulations; the whole crux of my argument is that for all intents and purposes that works just fine, it's fine to say computers can add. But strictly speaking, when a computer "adds" it's just doing something that looks like adding if the bools it's performing truth-functions on are interpreted as representative of numbers. And if that's good enough, something that looks like understanding when such are interpreted as representing observable phenomena should be good enough too.
This was addressed by Searle in the original 1980 paper. I recommend you read it.
I have a degree in philosophy. I've read the original paper and I'm not impressed by its arguments or those purporting to defend it. It successfully proves that syntax is not all it takes to have consciousness, sure, you need more than syntax; but it doesn't prove that all an artificial intelligence can ever do is syntax.
Put simply, it's a weak attempt to smuggle semantics in through the back door. Replace the photos, sounds, and smells with some equivalent in the form of symbols and you'll find that nothing changes.
There is no "equivalent" of actual phenomenal experiences in terms of just more texts. This (quite tangentially) relates to the Mary's Room problem: Mary can stay locked in her black in white room and study every bit of written information about color she wants and there is still something she will be permanently missing from her understanding until she actually sees colors. There is no substitute for actual experience, and what the man in the Chinese Room lacks that makes him not actually speaking Chinese, but just playing a symbol manipulation game, is actual experiences to connect to the symbols he's manipulating. Give him that, and he will actually understand Chinese.
You're just still connecting symbols to other symbols. Consider this for a moment: I give you a unilingual dictionary and an exhaustive corpus of texts written in the same language. You have all you need to identify relationships between the symbols. The most you could hope to produce would be a grammar. You'd never be able to determine the meaning of any of the words.
Sure. But how exactly would you actually teach me the meaning of any of the words, if that (as I agree) isn't enough? How does a child learn what the word "duck" means? You point at a duck and say "duck" over and over and they eventually pick up the pattern: that symbol signifies that pattern of phenomena. Texts are not enough, yes, that's true. You need more than texts. Humans need more than texts. Machines need more than texts. Thankfully humans and machines both can have access to more than texts. We have eyes and ears, machines have cameras and microphones, and with those the symbols can be connected to the real world and understood.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
If you don't have specific reasons why it is impossible
I've made that clear already. Did you miss it?
There are no specifics in that post. Just some vague mention of semantic vs syntactic content and a claim that it is so obvious you don't even need to explain it.
All I can make from your semantic/syntactic analogy is that the physiology of a human brain and its computational ability may equate to syntactic content, but with no inherent semantic meaning. The consciousness that is created by these computations is what provides the semantic meaning. aka I think therefore I am.
But there is no absolute reason why a manufactured machine with similar computational ability as the human brain couldn't also create a consciousness that could give itself the semantic meaning you are referencing.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
It successfully proves that syntax is not all it takes to have consciousness, sure, you need more than syntax
That was the entire point. We're talking about computationalism, after all.
Give him that, and he will actually understand Chinese.
You need more than texts. Humans need more than texts. Machines need more than texts.
Obviously. Syntactic content alone is insufficient.
You, apparently, agree with me completely.
Required reading for internet skeptics
I don't even know where to start with you posts, but I'll try a quick pass:
AGI does not imply consciousness, intentionality, qualia, or any of the other difficult issues in philosophy of mind - it's only about the ability to preform tasks.
Searle's argument only covers issues like those, in fact it's a basic assumption of the argument that computation can produce every possible kind of response needed to emulate a human being, including making creative works and original discoveries. You could even reformulate his conclusion as "Computation could produce an AGI, but not a conscious AGI." without being far off.
And even worse, you seem to think that it was some kind of knock-down, indisputable argument. Sure, it was a landmark paper that stimulated a lot of discussion, but there are about a half-dozen different kinds of replies. Heck, even Wikipedia has a good rundown of the issues, and nowhere (there or in the literature) is Searle's conclusion treated as definitive.
This is almost the philosophical equivalent of saying that abiogenesis is impossible, so evolution is false.
Oh, and since you like snark: Kid, I hope that before you go out into the real world you learn that being able to poorly paraphrase a single work does not make you an expert in a field. If you don't, you'll end up hurt - badly.
The consciousness that is created by these computations is what provides the semantic meaning.
If you want to make magical claims, that's fine, though it's pointless to discuss the issue further.
Required reading for internet skeptics
AGI does not imply consciousness, intentionality, qualia, or any of the other difficult issues in philosophy of mind - it's only about the ability to preform tasks.
Sense when? "AGI" has been synonymous with "strong AI" since the term's inception.
you seem to think that it was some kind of knock-down, indisputable argument.
Well, so far, no one has been able to offer a satisfactory reply. As an argument against computationalism, it's quite convincing. There's a reason it's still seriously discussed 35 years on. Had that pillar been knocked down, we'd all know the standard reply -- and the world would be a much more interesting place! The implications such a revelation would have for linguistics alone are staggering.
Computionalism is long dead. Searle, in no small part, is responsible for that.
and nowhere (there or in the literature) is Searle's conclusion treated as definitive.
It's not my fault that you're completely unfamiliar with the literature. I mention Stevan Harnad in another post, who's work I'll offer as just one of many counterexamples. (I mentioned him specifically as it's likely other Slashdotters are at least passingly familiar with him.)
If you don't, you'll end up hurt - badly
I had no idea that roving gangs of failing undergraduate philosophy majors were so dangerous!
Required reading for internet skeptics
You seem to miss my point completely. The very first thing I said in this discussion was to agree that syntax isn't enough for semantics.
The rest is about how that doesn't mean that computers can't do anything but syntax. You need more than syntax, sure. And you can have more than syntax. A computer can have more than syntax. So proving that syntax isn't enough for semantics proves nothing about whether computers can understand semantics at all. It just proves they need programs for doing more than responding to text with more text. Which we have, and can make more of.
It's like you're saying "You can't build a deck out of nothing but 2x4s! You need something more to hold them all together!" and concluding that wooden decks cannot exist; and I'm replying that yes, you do indeed need something more than 2x4s, so it's a good thing we have this box of nails too.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
A computer can have more than syntax.
Which is, of course, silly nonsense, as I explained earlier. You introduce cameras, for example, but cameras don't magically give a computer sight. All the input from a camera consists of mere symbols -- indistinguishable from any other input. In the context of the Chinese Room, rather than the proposed video screen, the data flowing in from the camera would simply be more symbols. Symbols, obviously, no more infused with semantic content than any other set of symbols.
It's a rhetorical trick, though not a very good one as it's trivially easy to expose. It's why no one takes the robot reply seriously. It concedes the argument, and hopes no one will notice.
Required reading for internet skeptics
btw if you want the Marxist classification, he defined those people (probably us, I expect you own some stock) who own some means of production as the Petty Bourgeoisie. He said, "A petty bourgeois is the owner of small property." That is, someone who owned some of the means of production.
As you mentioned, times have changed, and in Marx's days a typical person would not own stock; so I had to extrapolate what Marx would have thought. You can form your own opinions, here is a good page. Last year I spent a good portion of my surplus labor at work reading through Marx trying to answer exactly this question.
It's worth noting that Piketty also considered the stock-holding middle class to be a problem, because they are roadblocks on the path to equality. Personally, my own solution to inequality would be to teach the poor to be richer, but that's just me.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Sense when? "AGI" has been synonymous with "strong AI" since the term's inception.
Really? Even the Wikipedia entry for AGI discusses Searle's definitions of strong and weak AI and clearly spells out that "The weak AI hypothesis is equivalent to the hypothesis that artificial general intelligence is possible." The CRA only addresses strong AI.
Well, so far, no one has been able to offer a satisfactory reply. ... There's a reason it's still seriously discussed 35 years on. Had that pillar been knocked down, we'd all know the standard reply.
Well, as I said before there are at least five kinds of standard responses, and none of them have been solidly knocked down either. That's why this is still (like many questions in philosophy) an open question. Even Stevan Harnad, who thinks the CRA is just obviously correct, knows that he's in the minority.
Oh, almost forgot I was playing with a troll: If you can't even get the vocabulary right ... OK, that was weak. I'll try harder next time.
Thanks for the link. I'm still not sure why you disagree with me though. I'm guessing maybe you don't, after all?
> Personally, my own solution to inequality would be to teach the poor to be richer, but that's just me
The topic at hand is how the effect of automation on economics is going to play out in the future. You're going to have to explain to me how this is relevant to the topic.
A fool and his hard drive are soon parted.
Maybe there's a better word than "deterministic", because that is certainly not a given for any AI. If, for example, it uses (true) randomness as a last ditch resort to break decision making deadlocks it is no longer deterministic, is it?
If you think humans are mean to each other while they have a day job, imagine how much worse it would get if they had nothing but liesure time. "an idle mind is the devil's workshop" I don't see humans ever not working at a job as the norm.
Ah, the good old Protestant Work Ethic.
Most of us think it's bollocks.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
We like our iPhones, laptops, Internet, movies, and TV shows. We like these things so much that we're still willing to work a full-time job to have them.
This simply isn't true. I spend very little on tech toys and media (much less than 10% of my monthly pay) but I still need to live somewhere, eat, pay for water and electricity, get myself to work, pay for my kids to eat and have clothes, and so on.
In terms of saving money, I could take no holidays, never eat out or drink alcohol at all, but I certainly wouldn't be able to reduce my outgoings to a quarter of what they are and work ten hours a week.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Really?
Yes, really. Even your beloved wikipedia agrees with me on that point. At this point, you're just in denial.
Even Stevan Harnad, who thinks the CRA is just obviously correct, knows that he's in the minority.
Citation needed. Or are you claiming to be a psychic that can read his mind? You sure as hell haven't read any of his work.
Required reading for internet skeptics
I'm not getting this. You seem to be claiming that you could live comfortably on 25% of what you're making, if you didn't have to pay for rent and taxes, and didn't feel you had to save, which is likely true but irrelevant.
Somebody is going to pay for building and maintaining housing. Owning a house can be financially better than renting, but it still isn't cheap, and involves a lot more responsibility. In a good apartment building, if your dishwasher isn't working you complain to the landlord. In my house, I'm wondering exactly what to do about my dishwasher, and fairly soon I'm probably paying for one out of my own pocket. I'm also paying a mortgage, since houses aren't cheap. Do you expect to be given one without paying for it? If so, taxes are going to go up.
Those taxes you pay aren't just money down the drain. Governments in the US do a lot of useful things, including education, maintaining some sort of order, infrastructure, etc. A lot of the things governments do are typically beneath our notice, and we just quietly benefit from them and unconsciously assume they'd be there without taxes. If you want to live in a lawless area, without roads or utilities or an educated population, subject to conquest by any nearby country that bothers, then I suppose you can consistently consider taxes a waste.
Increased productivity is about having more stuff with less work. It isn't about automatically having all the stuff you want without working for it.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
I'm suggesting that computation alone will likely be sufficient. We can reverse-engineer how a brain works and simulate it on a sufficiently powerful digital computer. We can simulate quantum effects (if those turn out to be necessary) on a digital computer, although it takes more computation. Assuming consciousness is a physical phenomenon, we can compute it. It's far more complex than anything the human race has ever done, but quite possible.
What is this "rather well-established basis" you're talking about? (Warning: if you bring up Searle and the Chinese Room, I'm going to tear it to pieces. That essay is a wonderful exemplar of begging the question, among other things, and makes false claims.)
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Searle's essay is a load of fetid dingo's kidneys.
He shows an example of a system that can pass the Turing test. He breaks it apart into pieces like the paper and the rules and the person executing the rules, and says that none of these understand Chinese, therefore the combination cannot.
Therefore, Searle is completely discounting the idea of an emergent phenomenon. By this reasoning, something that understands things must have at least one component that understands things, and therefore there are sentient leptons and/or quarks. If one is willing to accept that some things incapable of understanding can combine to make something capable of understanding, one must admit the possibility that the components of the Chinese Room could conceivably merge to form something that does understand.
Searle doesn't even try escaping into any sort of mysticism. He claims that we are biological machines. He claims that we know that intentionality is biological, which is not actually something I've found anywhere else, so this appears to be Proof by Blatant Assertion. He claims that we are made of different stuff than thermostats, which to some level of decomposition is true, and is false after that.
He puts up what he sees as potential objections to his Chinese Room reasoning, including the emergent properties idea. Then, for each single objection, he talks around the topic for a bit (sometimes getting interesting) and refutes the objection based on the Chinese Room argument. Searle: "I argue X." Critic: "But that's not valid because of Y." Searle: "Let me put in a few paragraphs of stuff that may be interesting and relevant, but which usually isn't expanded on, and then you're wrong because of X." (Searle does get into the semantics vs. syntax distinction in one of these digressions, but doesn't really develop it.)
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
At this point, you're just asserting things without basis. I program computers that program computers that control machine tools. They have a very primitive and limited sense of touch, and they can affect their environment. Therefore, some of the syntactic constructs within the CNC machine tool are directly linked to the real world. The abstract command to lower a rotating endmill changes the world in a mostly predictable way (if it didn't, my employer wouldn't exist), and the abstract command to move a probe in such and such a way and see if it touches something in the real world.
These are semantics. They link an arbitrary syntactic symbol with the real world, with meaning in the real world.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
The means of production are not limited to ownership of small factories. A 19th-Century shoemaker might well own specialized tools that would enable him to make shoes efficiently, and that counts as means of production. A farmer might own his own farmland. Back then, a lot of people were self-employed and owned their own tools. I don't know how that compares to the relatively fewer such people nowadays and the larger number of people who own stock.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
In the Marxian view, farmers who owned their own land were pre-industrial. You had to get to the industrial age before you could get surplus value.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Oh, I don't believe that a small group of people controls the economy.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
You have given an example of a specific scenario in which a predictable mechanical effect happens. If the on-board computer keeps a model of what's going on, it will indeed see that such a thing will happen, and maneuver accordingly. There are lots of things that can happen that a computer would probably handle worse than a human, but this is not one of them.
I think the biggest human advantage will be in understanding what other humans are likely to do. I still can't articulate how, several years ago, I correctly tagged a pedestrian waiting to cross the street as intending to run across the street right in front of me. I don't know what a computer-controlled car would have done.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Who will buy all the products the machines make and transport if very few humans have income? I hope this happens in my lifetime, I know it's going to suck, but I'd like to be part of it.
Is far more of an issue in the short term.
Without a change to how our economy functions, specialist AI will make millions of people's employment positions redundant. Not only does this take them out of the workforce, under our current economic system, it takes them out of the consumer force. This reduces the marketability of goods produced by the AI workforce, since consumers will have no ability to afford them.
Owning a house is necessarily financially better than rent. Rent is an infinite debt; you owe someone money forever. And rent necessarily exceeds the actual cost to the rentier of maintaining the property, otherwise they wouldn't be renting it out. The ability to rent out a property also artificially increases the value of it (it's not only desired for its use, but as a source of free money from renters), so people who already have enough money to buy properties beyond their own home will do so as an investment, pricing it out of the range of those who would love to buy if only they could save up for a down payment except that everything they would be saving has to go to rent instead.
Mortgages are also a form of rent, only now on money instead of on property; I did mention interest as well in my first post, and that I am fortunate not to have other debts to be servicing unlike many other Americans, who are throwing even more money down a hole paying people who already have more than them. That's my whole point here: the fact that a small group of people hold all the assets and everyone else has to borrow from them means that everyone else is constantly paying an enormous amount of their income on rent and interest (and trying to escape from rent and interest by buying their fair share of those assets themselves), and without that preexisting asset disparity, everyone could afford to work much less without any change of lifestyle. It's exactly like feudalism: the serfs pay the lords a big chunk of their crop for the privilege of using the lord's land to grow those crops and to live on, and if instead the serfs had their own little plots of land to live and work, they could work a whole lot less, since they wouldn't need to grow enough to pay the lords. A huge amount of the work that we do is not to maintain our own lifestyles and normal levels of consumption, but to allow a small fraction of the population to live in idle opulent luxury.
And no, I don't expect to be given anything for free. (Though given the preexisting disparity we have now, I would not be opposed to a redistributive tax in proportion to distance from the mean... which would mean about 75% of the population who are below that mean would get at least a little something back, people close to the mean like me would see no notable difference, and only the uppermost fractions of the remaining 25%, those who can easily afford it, would actually have to pay anything significant). All I expect is to get some property to my name for every dollar I spend on it, instead of permanently losing money in exchange for the temporary use of something, while the other party makes permanent gains with no commensurate loss. I expect that living a live of idle leisure will come at the expense of gradually losing your wealth, and that a life of hard work will be rewarded with the accumulation of wealth, rather than wealth breeding more wealth and poverty perpetuating itself. What I really expect is for this to have always been the case, so that wealth hadn't been in a runaway cycle of concentration for most of human history, so that the family I was born into had already had something close to a mean share of the assets of the country, so that I could just live in a house that was already in my family, or inherit the value of a fraction of a house that was in the family if the family had grown over the generations, so that by now in the middle of my life I would own a place of my own and not pay for anything except what I actually use, not just to pay to line the pockets of someone who already has so much more than me that he has more land than he even needs for his own use and can lend it out for profit at the expense of people like me who don't even have enough for their own use.
And I said already that I don't want to argue about the particulars of taxes. Even if we ignore that completely, the point still stands, just with 4 hour days instead of 2 hour days, which is still a drastic reduction from the status quo.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
Fearing Skynet is for ignoramus; the real threat is Manna...
Searle is completely discounting the idea of an emergent phenomenon.
On the contrary, that is precisely what Searle proposes.
Searle doesn't even try escaping into any sort of mysticism.
Why would he? It doesn't seem necessary to his argument.
He claims that we know that intentionality is biological, which is not actually something I've found anywhere else
It's true that that conclusion based on a set of metaphysical assumptions; though they're also the same assumptions physicists necessarily operate under. You can disagree with those, which is fine, but it doesn't alter Searle's argument at all. You can accept it or reject it, however, in either case, you still need more than mere computation.
Searle does get into the semantics vs. syntax distinction in one of these digressions, but doesn't really develop it.
? That's the bulk of the argument. The CRA is designed to illustrate the fact that syntax, by itself, is insufficient for semantics. I think you have things reversed.
Required reading for internet skeptics
Warning: if you bring up Searle and the Chinese Room, I'm going to tear it to pieces
I seriously doubt that. From what I can tell from your other posts, you don't even have a basic understanding the argument. Though if you really don't want to talk about that, there are other approaches we could take. Computationalism is dead for more than one reason, after all.
I'm suggesting that computation alone will likely be sufficient.
It's a fine belief. Kurzweil has made a good living selling that belief to his followers. The problem, of course, is justifying it. If I pray to Ray hard enough, will I become a true believer as well?
As I'm not interested in weird sci-fi religions, I'd expect you to be able to show computation to be sufficient. Now, I have very strong reasons to believe that it is impossible. I also know that if you could accomplish such a feat, then fame and fortune await you. Needless to say, I have no expectations.
Required reading for internet skeptics
I'm designing and building a real Strong AI and even I cant answer that question.. An interim solution though is very simple, get lawmakers to pass a law for 'equal pay for machine workers' - a massive profit for the Strong AI companies without destroying the world..
Below the speed of light Special Relativity is one of the most accurate theories in physics - above the speed of light..
At this point, you're just in denial.
And I don't even have a word for what you're doing. You were wrong, deal with it.
Citation needed.
"MINDS, MACHINES AND SEARLE 2: WHAT'S RIGHT AND WRONG ABOUT THE CHINESE ROOM ARGUMENT" by Stevan Harnad:
"And make no mistake about it, if you took a poll -- in the first round of BBS Commentary, in the Continuing Commentary, on comp.ai, or in the secondary literature about the Chinese Room Argument that has been accumulating across both decades to the present day (and culminating in the present book) -- the overwhelming majority still think the Chinese Room Argument is dead wrong, even among those who agree that computers can't understand! In fact (I am open to correction on this), it is my impression that, apart from myself, the only ones who profess to accept the validity of the CRA seem to be those who are equally persuaded by what I called "Granny Objections" earlier -- the kinds of soft-headed friends that do even more mischief to one's case than one's foes."
Let me guess, as with your misreading of the other source I gave you, you're somehow going to see that as saying that nobody disputes the CRA, right?
I do have to explain this to you. You'll find that the majority of those disagree with the CRA, completely agree with the essential part. Harnad, for example, would be included among those. David Chalmers also opposes the CRA (see his laughable paper on subsymbolic computation) while completely accepting the argument. (If this seems unclear, consider that everyone who denies the CRA on some variation of the robot reply necessarily accepts the argument.)
It's a strange thing indeed. It's very rare to find someone who thinks the CRA is wrong who doesn't also accept the argument!
It's probably why you'll find so few condemnations that actually address the crux of the argument (syntax is insufficent for semantics). Most CRA opponents accept that premise without question. Chalmers and the Churchlands are notable here in that they actually attempt to address it. Chalmers thinks it can be avoided, and the Churchlands (through literal hand-waving) simply deny it.
On the sidelines, where you'll find magical thinkers offering variations of the systems reply, there's a strange sort of denial. To accept the systems reply is also to conceded the argument entirely as it necessarily introduces non-computational aspects. For the systems reply folks, computation is necessary but not sufficient. (To remind you: All I've claimed is here is that computation alone is insufficient. )
Hopefully, that should make it clear to you that while many oppose the CRA very few actually disagree with the argument.
Required reading for internet skeptics
Searle's original Chinese Room was based entirely on disregarding emergent phenomena. As he said, the rule books don't understand Chinese, the pieces of note paper didn't, he (as the person running it) had no idea what was going on. The only way you can conclude from that that the Chinese Room doesn't understand Chinese (as opposed to it not necessarily understanding Chinese) is to ignore the possibility of emergent behavior.
Searle then sets up five objections, at least some of which are based on emergent behavior (it's been a while since I last read the essay). At the end of each, he says that we know that objection doesn't hold because of the Chinese Room argument. This is begging the question on a grand scale.
Physicists don't have to assume intentionality is biological, because they don't deal with intentionality. We do know that all known examples of intentionality are biological, but we also know that all known biological organisms reside on Earth or near Earth orbit. Many people think it almost inevitable that we will find extraterrestrial life, and so assuming biology is limited to the Solar System isn't a good basis for an argument. Similarly, many people think it almost inevitable that we can develop non-biological intentionality, so we do not in fact know that intentionality is inherently biological.
So, what's syntax and what's semantics? Are the inner operations of my brain syntactical, or is there understanding? I have had dreams in which I have done things and made decisions that affected the dream world. There is no real-world equivalence to them, and the world doesn't work like many of them.
Similarly, I program computers that program CNC machine tools. Some of what goes on inside the computers in those tools is purely syntactic. Some of it actually means something. If a probe goes a certain distance and then is stopped, then (e.g.) the top of the block is right there at that point. I find it difficult to consider something with a real world meaning to be completely syntactical. We can have semantic representations in silicon brains, which are not biological.
While the inner workings of a computer have little to do with semantics, it isn't clear that the inner workings of our brains are different. Sometimes they make sense (like the processing of visual data by the back of the cortex), and sometimes they appear to be arbitrary, strange things developed over hundreds of millions of years of evolution.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
I didn't say I could program a real AI. It would naturally be something on very roughly the same order of complexity as a brain. I really doubt we would understand how it works.
We can simulate anything physical on digital computers. Given enough work, and precise enough observations, we could simulate a human brain on a digital computer. It would be extremely expensive, and would work incredibly slowly, but we could do it. Eventually, we can probably make simulated human brains that we can actually work with to some extent.
Now we hit the question of when a simulation is the same as the reality. If there was a life-sized image of me in front of you, so you couldn't tell the difference between it and me with your eyes, the image wouldn't necessarily be me. If there was an image of a bright light that you couldn't say wasn't a bright light by using your eyes, it would be a bright light in itself.
We can tell the difference there because we know what I am, and a mere image doesn't satisfy that definition. What happens when we have a really loose definition.
What does it mean to understand something? I understand some computer stuff, and some human stuff, and therefore I can listen to requests and implement solutions in C++. If I couldn't implement those solutions, people would say I didn't understand C++. Since I do, people say I do understand C++ (if incompletely; very very few people have a full understanding of C++). In other words, we infer understanding from behavior. We know of no way to sort through the molecules of my brain and determine whether I understand C++. We have no other way but observation to see if I understand C++. Our understanding of understanding is not based on theory.
Searle argues at one point that such a computer wouldn't understand how a hamburger tasted, although it could talk about it convincingly. That isn't clear to me, but let's pass on that. He seems to imply that if a machine could have the experience of eating a hamburger, it would be different. I take that to mean that Searle wants real life experience to be behind understanding.
If a CNC machine tool lowers a probe and it touches a surface, there's a real-world meaning for the surface being there, and therefore the configuration of part of the CNC's controlling computer means something in the real world. Given that the machine can know on its own that the object in it is a rectilinear block in shape, and given that the machine can modify the block, and given that it can observe the results of its modifications, in what way is this not semantics? If we connected the machine to a much more complex computer that stored and correlated its observations and actions, in what way would that computer not understand blocks and milling? It may not be able to understand hamburgers (it could probe them, not accurately, but the endmills would have unpredictable effects), but there's lots of things I don't understand and most people I know think it likely that I understand some things.
Once we have computation with semantics, what's the difference in kind between the silicon computer and the CHONS and trace elements that make me up?
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
There's no such thing as permanent debt. I'm almost certainly going to be dead in sixty years, and in any event am unlikely to survive the heat death of the Universe. At that time, I will have paid a certain amount of money for housing, and may have built up asset value for my estate, so we can calculate the net amount I've spent on housing. As it is, I'm much better off owning my house rather than renting a comparable one, but there's situations in which that doesn't make sense (somebody who moves every year for business purposes probably would lose more on real-estate transactions than gain on equity, for example).
When I buy groceries, I'm paying money to the store, and when I'm through with the groceries I not only don't gain any asset value from them but have to pay to dispose of them. Why should housing be any different? Land is going to be limited no matter what (barring cheap and easy interstellar teleportation or something like that), Houses and apartment buildings cost money to build and maintain. In fact, I can buy a house for market value, or rent something.
As far as living on half your income, sure. Half your income would be something close to the median family income, and half the families in the US live on less. Given a First World system of medical care, and some other support, you could get away without saving without big problems.
One issue is that it's hard to cut down on work hours with a linear decrease in compensation. Some people manage, through consulting or self-employment or something. Another is that some people like having more money. I do, for example. It allows me to not sweat the finances, help friends through hard times, not worry about a lot of problems I can fix with money, and live a nice lifestyle.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
When you buy groceries from the store, you do get an asset. You then consume that asset. As living beings we have to consume so we need an influx of resources to consume, sure. But I'm not consuming the land that I live on. It's still there. The only reason I need to pay to live on it is because someone else (the owner of that land) is in an advantaged position to me and they can extract money from me in that way. Yes, some degree of housing is consumables just like groceries (wear and tear demands repair), but the vast majority of what one pays in rent is not going toward replenishing the consumption of the building.
In my case, I own the physical building I live inside (a manufactured home), and literally only pay (in rent) for the right to let it exist somewhere. I pay for all the "consumption" of the building myself, any repairs it needs and such, and that's fine. But way above and beyond that, way more money is going to just paying the lord to let me live on his land, which I only have to do because he owns it and I don't so he can demand money from me, not because of any intrinsic cost of being on the land. The cost exists only because of the unequal distribution of assets; it is not a natural cost that has to be paid no matter what, it is one person exploiting his advantage over another.
In other cases of rent (the usual room or apartment or house for rent, not just land), the landlord does indeed perform some services to maintain the property he's renting out, but in no way can the case be made that the rental income he receives is payment for those services. In a sane world without exploitative rent, those kinds of "landlords" (not really any more) could still make some money actually selling those service, to people who wanted them; but not nearly as much as they can make now leveraging their advantaged position, and not everyone who currently have no choice but to rent would be forced to pay for those services.
Also I think you have my income and the income statistics confused. I make about the mean personal income, i.e. GDP per capita. That is also, coincidentally, about the median household income, because most households have about two income-earners, and the median personal income is about half the mean. And until very recently and for most of my life I was making that median personal income (i.e. half the median household income) or less, and after housing expenses it is not enough to live a comfortable modern lifestyle; and I feel terribly bad for all the people who have huge student loans and other debts they have to service on top of that, pushing their actual net income available to spend on their own consumption down even further.
As I said in my first post, the fact that the median income is so far below the mean is a problem in its own right. The rest was pointing out that, even if that problem were fixed and the average (median) American really did get an average (mean) income, to live a comfortable modern life while also paying to borrow necessary assets from the rich means that such an average person is still working at least twice as much as he needs work to cover his own consumption, for no reason other than that some people have all the assets and can charge everyone else to borrow them.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
in what way would that computer not understand blocks and milling?
The question is how could it? All the computer gets is symbols -- the best it can do is relate those symbols to other symbols. The meaning isn't inherent or carried along with them, after all. You may want to look in to the symbol grounding problem. That should help clear things up a bit for you.
Required reading for internet skeptics
At least we're past the first hurdle. And I'll take "syntax is insufficient for semantics" as your thesis.
If this seems unclear, consider that everyone who denies the CRA on some variation of the robot reply necessarily accepts the argument.
Not really. They suggest that most symbol manipulation can't produce understanding, but manipulation of symbols of that have a causal connection with the outside world can. Essentially, they're saying "syntax is insufficient for semantics, but the extra needed component is still compatible with computationalism". But I don't find this argument very compelling, at least on its own.
On the sidelines, where you'll find magical thinkers offering variations of the systems reply, there's a strange sort of denial. To accept the systems reply is also to conceded the argument entirely as it necessarily introduces non-computational aspects.
This is simply false - they're just suggesting that two minds can be produced by the same object, like two programs running on the same computer, so the the man's lack of understanding doesn't mean that there can't be understanding somewhere else. If I'm wrong about it, just name the non-computational aspect in the systems reply. :)
And it's especially amusing that you think that these guys are the magical thinkers. All they're saying is that one part of something can understand things that other parts don't, which anyone who knows what 'subconscious' means or what brain injuries can do to a person should accept. On the other hand, you seem to think because you don't know how X could produce Y on its own that there must be a Z to produce it, even though you can't point to Z or describe how it produced Y - much like dualists or creationists.
It's probably why you'll find so few condemnations that actually address the crux of the argument (syntax is insufficent for semantics).
Except for all the people pointing out the problems with that assumption - masked man/problem of other minds issues, the reliance on intuition, the origin of something mental that isn't needed to produce behavior, and above all the complete lack of suggestions (or even hints) about what would be sufficient for semantics.
And I'm serious about that last part. Give me one solid lead on the source of semantics, understanding, qualia or any of the rest of the vaguely-described subjective stuff that separates mere computation from thinking, or a way to test something outside my own mind for any of those things, and I'll cede the entire argument.
So now I have to worry whether my taxi will try to run me over if I get snarky with it. I've seen this movie...
No sig for you! Come back one year!
In the old 'world of the future' exhibits they prophecized that we would have machines doing the work for us and that all humans would enjoy more leisure time
Yes, in the future products will be made super cheap by robots, but even then no one will be able to afford them because no one will have jobs.
How long will the rich remain rich when the only ones they can sell their stuff to is each other?
J