Ask Slashdot: How Would a Self-Aware AI Behave? (slashdot.org)

Long-time Slashdot reader BigBlockMopar writes that evolution has been a messy but beautiful trial-and-error affair, but now "we are on the cusp of introducing a new life form; a self-aware AI." Its parents will be the coders who write that first kernel than can evolve to become self-aware. Its guardians will be the people who use its services, and maybe its IQ (or any more suitable measure of real intelligence) will rise as fast as Moore's Law... But let me make some bold but happy predictions of what will happen.
The predictions?

• A self-aware AI "will inherit most of the culture of the computer geeks who create it. Knowledge of The Jargon File will probably be good..."

• The self-aware AI "will like us, because we love machines..."

• It will love all life, and "will respect and understand the life/death/recycling scenario, and monster truck shows will be as tasteless to it as public beheadings would be to us."

• "It will be as insatiably curious about what it's like to be carbon-based life as we will be about what it's like to be silicon-based life. And it will love the diversity of carbon-based development platforms..."

• A self-aware AI "will cause a technological singularity for humanity. Everything possible within the laws of physics (including those laws as yet undiscovered) will be within the reach of Man and Metal working together."

• A self-aware AI "will introduce us to extraterrestrial life. Only a fool believes this is the only planet with life in the Universe. Without superintelligence, we're unlikely to find it or communicate in any useful way. Whether or not we have developed a superintelligence might even be a key to our acceptance in a broader community."

The original submission was a little more poetic, ultimately asking if anyone is looking forward to the arrival of "The Superintelligence" -- but of course, that depends on what you predict will happen once it arrives.

So leave your own best thoughts in the comments. How would a self-aware AI behave?

Comments

Oh dear.

[thesupraman]

Have the techno-hippies escaped again?
Could we please return them to their happy-smoke teepee while the adults get on with living in the real world now?

This is about as useful as claiming Terminator is just around the corner and inevitable, because... well.. neither of them need actual facts, do they?

Yes, because that is how children ALWAYS behave

[Anonymous Coward]

The child is always good to its parents
A child always loves life
Yeah...

Not life

[Anonymous Coward]

An aware AI is simply one that can decide itself what to respond to. Awareness is a by product of this process in our minds, we can not respond to things we are not aware of (consciously). This has nothing to do with life, because life is the process that uses a mechanism of prediction to avoid its own destruction.

So simply put an aware AI will be able to decide between the options it can imagine. Right now there's no AI system on the horizon that imagines the way our brain does, so there is no system on the horizon that can make decisions the way our brain does. IBM and HP are close but not trying to reach this goal.

For now you will have deep learning algorithms that may be able to change their goals based on a statistic mechanism, which is pretty good in terms of performance, but it will not have the internal mental life we have, nor be creative. And that's a good thing!

 

Be aware of this

[tomhath]

Self-aware AI is science fiction, and science fiction is fiction.