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

Re: Oh dear.

[Anonymous Coward]

The belief in singularity, a superintelligence improving the human condition, etc., is merely the new religion.

A brief history and philosophy lessons.

Nietzsche proclaimed the death of god in the 1800s. This was essentially due to the scientific revolution. Discovering fundamental information about the universe kept painting god into an ever smaller corner of human existence. "Where is god?" everyone kept asking. We weren't finding him anywhere.

Human existence appears to require a reason or meaning, in order for psychological and social wellbeing. The concept of god has historically provided an easy meaning. So easy, in fact, it is arguable that human society and possibly even the human brain evolved to use the concept of god.

As such, the death of god was akin to losing a fundamental technology, like fire, or shelter, or the wheel.

The result of the death of god was a new age nihilism that created things like strong nationalist movements and various ideological stances. Nazism, Bolshevism, Communism, Capitalism... all of the -isms that attract a religion-like fervor and cause people to fight and die for them are manifestations of the death of god in a humanity that evolved with the God concept.

Albert Camus wrote about The Absurd, the idea that there is a space between humanity's need for a reason to exist, and the universe's indifference in providing that reason. He wrote of three distinct solutions to The Absurd.

The first is literal suicide. Some humans obviously choose this option, but it's a small minority.

The second is what he called philosophical suicide. Religion, nationalism, etc., or systems of belief which one can cling to which will provide a ready-made reason for existence.

The third is the creation of the Absurd Hero, as he called it. A human that exists, acknowledging the Absurd and the apparent meaninglessness of his existence, yet still chooses to exist in spite of this, and in essence justifying his own existence by himself.

The technological singularity hype is merely a manifestation of the second response to the Absurd and as such is philosophical suicide. No proof exists that a singularity will magically solve all of humanity's ills. It is quite likely to destroy us in some way. As such, it is yet another religion humans have developed, in order to lazily scratch the god itch that we all have.

I don't think we'll get truly self-aware AI.

[jd]

This isn't because I think it can't be done. Rather, it's because we are developing neural interfaces at about the same speed,

I'm going to borrow some ideas from Sir Fred Hoyle here.

First, in his novel The Black Cloud, his characters argue over whether an interstellar cloud would have one intelligence or many. They conclude that the latency would be so low and the interconnects of such high bandwidth that the distinction of one and many ceased to be meaningful.

This will apply to AI. The brain-computer interfaces will be so advanced by the time strong AI becomes possible that the distinction between one and many won't apply. Any given AI and all the humans linked to it will become a single intelligence with multiple avatars. Because humans are reluctant to give up individuality, I suspect it'll be one AI linked to one person at any given time.

There will be no conflict between machines and people because there will be no distinction.

One reason I think this a plausible scenario, in addition to Hoyle, is that it eliminates the whole phobia of technology. The machines don't run anything, we do because we are the machines. Another is because of Hoyle's other prediction, in Ossian's Ride, that we might not find alien philosophy palatable.

No, the techno-idiots have escaped again

[Excelcia]

Have the techno-hippies escaped again?

Negative. It's the techno-idiots and the donut-eating mother's-basement-living sci-fi dweebs that have escaped.

The combination of machine learning and robotics have exciting prospects for eliminating mundane jobs. Including new horizons in human-machine-interface technology. Real-time limited natural voice interaction may become a reality in the near future. However we are no closer to hard AI today than we were forty years ago. Worse, actually. At least forty years ago we were coming down off the pinnacle of the first mount stupid. After the Heinlein-esque overly optimistic sci-fi of the 50's and 60's where AI (along with nuclear rockets, flying cars, and colonies throughout the solar system) was just assumed to be right around the corner, computer scientists actually drank the cool aid and believed it. In the 70's and 80's we sheepishly came down off that mount and realized we didn't even really have a clue how to do it and we learned a bit of wisdom.

However, what the mount stupid graph I liked above doesn't show is that it's quite possible to have more than one of them in a single subject. Now with new machine learning techniques we are climbing right back onto another mount stupid. People think that because a medical database can spout off fringe diagnoses better than some actual experienced doctors that this means AI is right around the corner. I am no more impressed with that or with computers winning at Go and Chess than I am impressed that a hydraulic press can exert several (thousand) times my strength. The software that is winning at Chess and Go are, in fact, little smarter than that same hydraulic press. The software knows from analyzing millions of games that humans have played what winning strategies are, and combines that with brute force strength to know where to optimize its searches. For like reason I am also not terribly impressed with the Google's latest natural voice accomplishments either. At least, not as an indicator that actual AI is around the corner. They are just the same machine learning tied into voice recognition data Google has been able to compile by stealing billions of voice samples by claiming that voice recognition requires them to transmit your actual voice to their servers.

We are not close to hard AI. We are not close to soft AI. For AI to be AI it has to be BOTH A and I, and one out of two doesn't count. I personally don't think we are within half a century of hard AI.

Re: Oh dear.

[Kjella]

The third is the creation of the Absurd Hero, as he called it. A human that exists, acknowledging the Absurd and the apparent meaninglessness of his existence, yet still chooses to exist in spite of this, and in essence justifying his own existence by himself.

I'd actually sub-divide those into two groups, those who justify their existence by their individual self and those who justify it through their relation to other people. The first kind are those who could live like a Robinson Crusoe, even if there's nobody else around and you're not creating anything for anyone else my life has meaning by living it. The other is the kind of people who seem to find meaning in what they mean to other people, from the moment they're born to the people who show up at their funeral. I think there's a lot more of the latter than the former, which you can kinda read out of the suicide statistics. If they've lost the ones they love, they can't go on because their own existence is not enough. Then again the individual side has all the sociopaths...