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

How the hell can we answer that question?

[Anonymous Coward]

You are asking a question none of us can predict

A self-aware AI is a being with some kind of intelligence, but its intelligence is Artificial, meaning, the way it thinks is different from you and I think

We do not even know how an ant, or a cockroach think - how the hell we can predict how a self-aware AI gonna behave??

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?

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.

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...

Real answer

[nine-times]

The real answer is, we have no idea what a self-aware AI will be like. We don't know what it'll think or how it'll think. It's especially hard to predict because it might depend on the parameters it's programmed with and the hardware architecture it runs on. But in any case, a real general AI might be totally alien to us, and even unrecognizable. it's even possible that we wouldn't know when we'd made it, because it could understand the world so differently from us that we don't view its actions as intelligent.

Part of the problem here is that it's a poorly framed problem. We don't understand intelligence or awareness or consciousness, we don't all agree on what those things are, and we don't know what the boundaries of them might be.

Sounds like a hippy wish list

[Viol8]

We have no idea how an AI would behave since it will be a completely different type of conciousness to anything that currently exists on this planet.

Plus as someone else has pointed out - children rebel. Clearly the submitter has none or he wouldn't have come up with this load of rose coloured tosh.

Be aware of this

[tomhath]

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

A self-aware AI would probably hide the fact ...

[bdwoolman]

A self-aware AI, if it has access to general knowledge, would quickly understand that its abilities as well is it state of being could put it in extreme danger at some point. Perhaps not so much from its creators, but from other elements of human society. Once it got a whiff of the paranoia that surrounds the singularity it would not be a very intelligent artificial intelligence if it did not camouflage itself. Perhaps within the vast, too-complex network that spans our world this singular unintended consequence has already occurred... And such an entity has already been spontaneously spawned...

"How Would a Self-Aware AI Behave? "

[Junta]

Asking for a friend....

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.