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??

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.

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...