We're not talking about a pure AI, we're talking about an emulated brain based on a human one, probably.
All evidence regarding artificial intelligence suggests very strongly that it won't be in the form of a breakthrough or serendipitous discovery. The mind is such a fabulously intricate thing that the only way we could ever achieve a comparable system is through careful, exhaustive scientific study. All efforts to produce human-like intelligence thus far have failed not because we don't know the algorithm, but because we haven't been able to break down the problem sufficiently to figure out what the algorithms need to do.
As such, AI isn't going to be a matter of throwing the right algorithms in a blender and watching what comes out without knowing what all of the parts do. There's no room for unexpected emergent behaviours under those conditions.
Assuming you did have a sentient AI in a powerful situation that went bad—perhaps Majel Barrett had an off day and the Enterprise-D's computer is now trying to kill Picard—the smartest thing to do would probably be shunning it and forcing it into exile with a more powerful vessel. And naturally, if you do put an AI in a position where there's no larger ship to push the Enterprise around with, you are stupid for putting the fate of your civilization in the hands of a dictator.
Regarding training: we're exposed to the idea of mass murder in a comprehensible form due to exposure to it in culture. We are exposed to sources that make us aware of the mental states and motives for such an action, even if we could not previously understand it. By having these experiences, we build up an idea of what circumstances under which one would go on a mass murdering spree, and what one would hope to gain from it. This provides us with the tools to, for example, make jokes about it. If an individual is exposed to the concept of mass murder but is told solely that it is a reprehensible, incomprehensible act, and never given the tools to investigate the problem on their own terms, it will remain reprehensible and incomprehensible to them. Remember that newborn children don't even know they exist as a thing; they're just interacting with the world around them and not even cognizant of themselves as individuals within that world. You can leave just about anything out.
I'd gathered it was meant in some amount of humour, but incidentally I think it relied on the same assumptions as the rest of your post, so it seemed apt to pry apart in the same course.
Or maybe I am a robot. Bzzt, bzzt. Insert silicon wafer.
There are a lot of problems with your post, I'm afraid, and they're mostly within your understanding of what gives rise to what we call human behaviour.
The first issue pops up in your quip about cats: why the hell would anyone program a car to behave like a cat? Developing a cortex that not only simulates the pathways but the twitch responses and activation thresholds of a particular living organism is such a phenomenal amount of exquisitely-detailed work that it would make absolutely no sense to repurpose that work for any function other than simulating that living organism. Do you really want a car that spends 80%+ of its life curling up in dark corners, sleeping, licking itself, and coughing up hairballs? The feline fascination with laser pointers is equally exotic and remote. It's an instinctual behaviour found in predatory animals. If you were going to use a feline cortex as the basis for a semi-autonomous vehicle, the biases would be much more subtle and affect things like the learning process, not irrelevant surface features like predatory or survival instincts.
From the perspectives of neuroscience and artificial intelligence, the bulk of the brain's attractive features are about the intricacies of higher brain functions: pattern recognition, learning, problem-solving, and other areas that tightly overlap. They are far removed from anything that has to do with the external world. This is why the Skynet scenario is unrealistic when applied to artificial sentience.
Hence the entire basis for your comparison with humans is flawed. When we turn on the proverbial hypothetical sentient artificial intelligence, it won't have an instinct for survival or even a concept of self unless we explicitly instill those things in it; it will just be a glorified thinking machine capable of experiencing thought, like the brain inside of a worm or infant.
By the time we are capable of creating a computer that acts human, we will know, exhaustively and in every detail, what it means to be human. And we will be able to pick and choose without uncertainty what we are putting into it. And if we put sentience and a sense of self into it... well, then the product is going to be protected by law as an individual; there will be psychologists, philosophers, and neurologists lining up left and right to make sure it happens. And dealing with tyrannical or temperamental behaviour, or the responsibility of interacting with others, is going to be no different from the same situation between humans. It will be just as ethically impressionable as anyone else.
What, the endless stream of comments ascribing a malevolent anti-human sentiment to a completely innocent and ignorant simulation of a brain?
C'mon, people. The world doesn't work that way. Take your skynets and your laser-bearing sharks and your Soviet Russias and your petrified Natalie Portmans (with hot grits) and get off my scientifically accurate lawn.
If you simulate a brain, you get just that: a brain. It's probably not going to have any particularly exciting levels of intelligence, and unless you train it to be a bloodthirsty killer and a brilliant strategist, it's not going to be particularly malevolent, either. All science fiction authors who have ever written a story about a purely malevolent AI without a plausible origin need to get shot right now.
(brb, building a robot that kills bad science fiction authors)
Actually it sounds more like a stage magician asking an audience member to confirm, in fact, that there's nothing up his or her sleeves. With that much unprompted "satisfy yourself that there's nothing wrong!" going on, it sounds like he at least knows something.
Of all places, Urban Dictionary has a surprisingly compact explanation and rebuttal on the topic, for those confused by the tangential reference. (Humour may have been involved; I'm not sure any more.)
Abiogenesis is a complex enough topic that we still don't know if that's true or not. It certainly seems that, yes, once life got started it was pretty darn good at surviving, but we still don't have answers to basic questions like "how common are small rocky planets with fast-spinning iron cores and nitrogen-based atmospheres?" Further, Earth has undergone a lot of potentially unlikely events: like this, this (which, if true, gave us our iron core), and this. We can't even detect Earth-like exoplanets yet to compare; many of the known exoplanets are so-called "hot jupiters." (Which sounds to me like a euphemism for "failed companion star," but I digress.) We may never fill in enough of the Drake equation to determine how many times life has arisen, if it's arisen at all.
One thing's for sure, though: it hasn't developed far enough to obliterate the observable universe yet. This is a little unfair, as it means we're expecting civilizations further away from us to have developed quicker (so that we can see them with our historical view of distant space) and we're pretty sure that life can't develop until the stars have gone through one or two metal-enriching supernovae (the earliest universe was almost nothing but hydrogen; living organisms require a huge range of transition metal ions to do redox reactions)... so really the safest assumption would be to go off our own figures, and say that anything further than about 4 billion LY away probably hasn't gotten through abiogenesis yet, and we shouldn't even bother with it.
That being said... there are some things about the nature of the periodic table that seem almost too perfect. Most of the non-metals, especially in period 2 (the second row) all have very flexible and useful properties, and carbon, utterly essential to stable life, forms naturally when a star dies. There's also some iffy evidence that biomolecules as complex as glycine and the nucleobases have been found in space. So it's easy to start suspecting that the universe was tuned (either deliberately or by luck over many permutations) to develop Earth-style life—but a better way to look at it, and one that's particularly good at dismissing radical alternative biochemistry hypotheses, is simply that life arose out of that which was most abundantly available, and that is because, regardless of vanishingly tiny probability, it had the most chances to roll the dice.
And that is why bringing up this crap is pretty much the "In Soviet Russia" of biology.
I write to you to inform you that I very much do have a firm grasp of the colon's proper usage; indeed, one of my hobbies is historical typography and its proper usage. In this case, regardless of whether or not your post was made with the intent to implicate error on my part or not, I feel the need to place emphasis on the jarring absence of the title's conformance to any of the conventions which you outlined. One possible correct usage of the colon in this situation would have been to place "MIT:" at the start of the statement, deleting ": MIT" from the end: in this way, the colon would naturally indicate the flow of material in compliance with the general course of English prose, which is from left to right. Comparably, the example you have given would be unnatural were the two sentences reversed on either side of the colon.
George Carlin had a fairly good response to that concern, but to be honest he was a little simplistic. Life may survive, yes, but the changes it'll be undergoing could be pretty significant setbacks.
Yes, but since genetic engineering using modified HIV and other dangerous viruses is common, the humour falls flat when expert knowledge is involved. It also doesn't help that xkcd repeated the "their patch added code to get the T-cells to replicate wildly and persist" nonsense. It's these kinds of did-not-do-the-research moments that make the comic hypocritical, in that it deals with geeky subjects but doesn't actually stand up to geeky scrutiny.
Sadly, the number of contortions necessary to make a viable car analogy would basically obliterate the meaning. I'm happy to help with any missing vocabulary items or concepts necessary to comprehend the actual information, though.
Also a reasonable refinement. I encourage you or someone else with enough spare time to track down these dates and make them publicly known. Alas, I only have enough time and energy to scour so many Wikipedia articles.
Okay... but I'm not seeing your point. Converting version numbers to dates is still a good handle of determining how out of date a user's computer is. Which is what we were talking about.
It's both. And more. But saying you're a polymath in public sounds insufferably arrogant. So I don't. I spent half of this summer recoding the website for a research lab, if it helps convince you at all.
This is hilariously off-topic, but I'll bite. I guess I can burn the karma for a curious mind.
The cell has many, many different DNA repair mechanisms and backups. For starters, each of the 23 human chromosome pairs is actually RAID 1+1: two copies per pair, and each copy is made out of two complementary strands that contain negative images of each other. If one of these strands gets damaged, it's trivial to repair; all the cell has to do is slough off the bad side and re-copy the good side. This happens extremely often, so the cell has specialized mechanisms for dealing with common anomalies, such as thymine dimers caused by UV light. Sometimes, however, the nucleotides are so damaged that the repairs are incorrect. This is how most UV-triggered mutations are caused, but they're usually very minor.
If a chromosome actually breaks in two, there are two major cases to consider:
1. If the break is in the middle of an important gene, promoter, or operon, then the cell function may be compromised. Usually there are many duplicates, and there's always the other member of the chromosome pair, which is likely to suffice even in the most dire situations.
2. If the break is in between genes in the middle of junk DNA, there will be no immediate effect.
In both cases, however, it is highly likely that the cell will fail the next replication checkpoint. A cell with DNA that's too badly damaged usually chooses to kill itself, in order to protect the rest of the organism from threats like cancer, instead of dividing along its normal pattern. Replication checkpoints are comparable to checksums, but are less thorough and basically amount to "are all of the chromosome pairs unbroken?" In cases where this doesn't happen, the shorter segment is usually forgotten, including all of the genes it carries. When DNA is duplicated (in humans), it's held by a kind of handle in the middle called the kinetochore. Only the fragment that contains the kinetochore will get duplicated.
If the cell damaged is in the germline (a cell that will eventually turn into a sperm or ovum), this fragmentary part may be passed on, and the next generation of children will have what is called a chromosome truncation. These are usually fatal, and those who survive with them tend to have horrible, debilitating diseases. (Incidentally, this is also how the Y chromosome got its shape, but that's because the second copy of the X chromosome in women is inactivated at random and doesn't contribute a whole lot.)
I hope that answered your question. Maybe I should just go ahead and use the journal thing here...
Slashdot Mirror
We're definitely not ready to be a parent.
We're not talking about a pure AI, we're talking about an emulated brain based on a human one, probably.
All evidence regarding artificial intelligence suggests very strongly that it won't be in the form of a breakthrough or serendipitous discovery. The mind is such a fabulously intricate thing that the only way we could ever achieve a comparable system is through careful, exhaustive scientific study. All efforts to produce human-like intelligence thus far have failed not because we don't know the algorithm, but because we haven't been able to break down the problem sufficiently to figure out what the algorithms need to do.
As such, AI isn't going to be a matter of throwing the right algorithms in a blender and watching what comes out without knowing what all of the parts do. There's no room for unexpected emergent behaviours under those conditions.
Assuming you did have a sentient AI in a powerful situation that went bad—perhaps Majel Barrett had an off day and the Enterprise-D's computer is now trying to kill Picard—the smartest thing to do would probably be shunning it and forcing it into exile with a more powerful vessel. And naturally, if you do put an AI in a position where there's no larger ship to push the Enterprise around with, you are stupid for putting the fate of your civilization in the hands of a dictator.
Regarding cats and planning: most likely not.
Regarding training: we're exposed to the idea of mass murder in a comprehensible form due to exposure to it in culture. We are exposed to sources that make us aware of the mental states and motives for such an action, even if we could not previously understand it. By having these experiences, we build up an idea of what circumstances under which one would go on a mass murdering spree, and what one would hope to gain from it. This provides us with the tools to, for example, make jokes about it. If an individual is exposed to the concept of mass murder but is told solely that it is a reprehensible, incomprehensible act, and never given the tools to investigate the problem on their own terms, it will remain reprehensible and incomprehensible to them. Remember that newborn children don't even know they exist as a thing; they're just interacting with the world around them and not even cognizant of themselves as individuals within that world. You can leave just about anything out.
I'd gathered it was meant in some amount of humour, but incidentally I think it relied on the same assumptions as the rest of your post, so it seemed apt to pry apart in the same course.
Or maybe I am a robot. Bzzt, bzzt. Insert silicon wafer.
Um.
What grave?
(and more importantly,)
What are you smoking?
The gods of sarcasm themselves. Don't forget to read the last line of the post for extra evidence of self-awareness.
There are a lot of problems with your post, I'm afraid, and they're mostly within your understanding of what gives rise to what we call human behaviour.
The first issue pops up in your quip about cats: why the hell would anyone program a car to behave like a cat? Developing a cortex that not only simulates the pathways but the twitch responses and activation thresholds of a particular living organism is such a phenomenal amount of exquisitely-detailed work that it would make absolutely no sense to repurpose that work for any function other than simulating that living organism. Do you really want a car that spends 80%+ of its life curling up in dark corners, sleeping, licking itself, and coughing up hairballs? The feline fascination with laser pointers is equally exotic and remote. It's an instinctual behaviour found in predatory animals. If you were going to use a feline cortex as the basis for a semi-autonomous vehicle, the biases would be much more subtle and affect things like the learning process, not irrelevant surface features like predatory or survival instincts.
From the perspectives of neuroscience and artificial intelligence, the bulk of the brain's attractive features are about the intricacies of higher brain functions: pattern recognition, learning, problem-solving, and other areas that tightly overlap. They are far removed from anything that has to do with the external world. This is why the Skynet scenario is unrealistic when applied to artificial sentience.
Hence the entire basis for your comparison with humans is flawed. When we turn on the proverbial hypothetical sentient artificial intelligence, it won't have an instinct for survival or even a concept of self unless we explicitly instill those things in it; it will just be a glorified thinking machine capable of experiencing thought, like the brain inside of a worm or infant.
By the time we are capable of creating a computer that acts human, we will know, exhaustively and in every detail, what it means to be human. And we will be able to pick and choose without uncertainty what we are putting into it. And if we put sentience and a sense of self into it... well, then the product is going to be protected by law as an individual; there will be psychologists, philosophers, and neurologists lining up left and right to make sure it happens. And dealing with tyrannical or temperamental behaviour, or the responsibility of interacting with others, is going to be no different from the same situation between humans. It will be just as ethically impressionable as anyone else.
What, the endless stream of comments ascribing a malevolent anti-human sentiment to a completely innocent and ignorant simulation of a brain?
C'mon, people. The world doesn't work that way. Take your skynets and your laser-bearing sharks and your Soviet Russias and your petrified Natalie Portmans (with hot grits) and get off my scientifically accurate lawn.
If you simulate a brain, you get just that: a brain. It's probably not going to have any particularly exciting levels of intelligence, and unless you train it to be a bloodthirsty killer and a brilliant strategist, it's not going to be particularly malevolent, either. All science fiction authors who have ever written a story about a purely malevolent AI without a plausible origin need to get shot right now.
(brb, building a robot that kills bad science fiction authors)
Agreed. Au-196 stays that way. Unless we expose it to radiation. Which I suppose we could do.
Actually it sounds more like a stage magician asking an audience member to confirm, in fact, that there's nothing up his or her sleeves. With that much unprompted "satisfy yourself that there's nothing wrong!" going on, it sounds like he at least knows something.
Of all places, Urban Dictionary has a surprisingly compact explanation and rebuttal on the topic, for those confused by the tangential reference. (Humour may have been involved; I'm not sure any more.)
Abiogenesis is a complex enough topic that we still don't know if that's true or not. It certainly seems that, yes, once life got started it was pretty darn good at surviving, but we still don't have answers to basic questions like "how common are small rocky planets with fast-spinning iron cores and nitrogen-based atmospheres?" Further, Earth has undergone a lot of potentially unlikely events: like this, this (which, if true, gave us our iron core), and this. We can't even detect Earth-like exoplanets yet to compare; many of the known exoplanets are so-called "hot jupiters." (Which sounds to me like a euphemism for "failed companion star," but I digress.) We may never fill in enough of the Drake equation to determine how many times life has arisen, if it's arisen at all.
One thing's for sure, though: it hasn't developed far enough to obliterate the observable universe yet. This is a little unfair, as it means we're expecting civilizations further away from us to have developed quicker (so that we can see them with our historical view of distant space) and we're pretty sure that life can't develop until the stars have gone through one or two metal-enriching supernovae (the earliest universe was almost nothing but hydrogen; living organisms require a huge range of transition metal ions to do redox reactions)... so really the safest assumption would be to go off our own figures, and say that anything further than about 4 billion LY away probably hasn't gotten through abiogenesis yet, and we shouldn't even bother with it.
That being said... there are some things about the nature of the periodic table that seem almost too perfect. Most of the non-metals, especially in period 2 (the second row) all have very flexible and useful properties, and carbon, utterly essential to stable life, forms naturally when a star dies. There's also some iffy evidence that biomolecules as complex as glycine and the nucleobases have been found in space. So it's easy to start suspecting that the universe was tuned (either deliberately or by luck over many permutations) to develop Earth-style life—but a better way to look at it, and one that's particularly good at dismissing radical alternative biochemistry hypotheses, is simply that life arose out of that which was most abundantly available, and that is because, regardless of vanishingly tiny probability, it had the most chances to roll the dice.
And that is why bringing up this crap is pretty much the "In Soviet Russia" of biology.
As a Discordian, aren't you bound by religious law to defend the honour of the Lambda Calculus?
Well, you have to leave an entire universe sitting around, and it has to be set up properly going in, but that's the general idea.
Dear sir or madam,
I write to you to inform you that I very much do have a firm grasp of the colon's proper usage; indeed, one of my hobbies is historical typography and its proper usage. In this case, regardless of whether or not your post was made with the intent to implicate error on my part or not, I feel the need to place emphasis on the jarring absence of the title's conformance to any of the conventions which you outlined. One possible correct usage of the colon in this situation would have been to place "MIT:" at the start of the statement, deleting ": MIT" from the end: in this way, the colon would naturally indicate the flow of material in compliance with the general course of English prose, which is from left to right. Comparably, the example you have given would be unnatural were the two sentences reversed on either side of the colon.
Yours,
name withheld
I think I'm going to steal that analogy. It's a good one. Sure, it might back eventually... but it won't be the same.
George Carlin had a fairly good response to that concern, but to be honest he was a little simplistic. Life may survive, yes, but the changes it'll be undergoing could be pretty significant setbacks.
Yes, but since genetic engineering using modified HIV and other dangerous viruses is common, the humour falls flat when expert knowledge is involved. It also doesn't help that xkcd repeated the "their patch added code to get the T-cells to replicate wildly and persist" nonsense. It's these kinds of did-not-do-the-research moments that make the comic hypocritical, in that it deals with geeky subjects but doesn't actually stand up to geeky scrutiny.
Sadly, the number of contortions necessary to make a viable car analogy would basically obliterate the meaning. I'm happy to help with any missing vocabulary items or concepts necessary to comprehend the actual information, though.
Also a reasonable refinement. I encourage you or someone else with enough spare time to track down these dates and make them publicly known. Alas, I only have enough time and energy to scour so many Wikipedia articles.
Randall Munroe is a giant... well... Let's just say he should have kept to jokes about freshman physics.
Isn't that what add-on authors are doing in the first place? (sarcasm.)
Okay... but I'm not seeing your point. Converting version numbers to dates is still a good handle of determining how out of date a user's computer is. Which is what we were talking about.
It's both. And more. But saying you're a polymath in public sounds insufferably arrogant. So I don't. I spent half of this summer recoding the website for a research lab, if it helps convince you at all.
This is hilariously off-topic, but I'll bite. I guess I can burn the karma for a curious mind.
The cell has many, many different DNA repair mechanisms and backups. For starters, each of the 23 human chromosome pairs is actually RAID 1+1: two copies per pair, and each copy is made out of two complementary strands that contain negative images of each other. If one of these strands gets damaged, it's trivial to repair; all the cell has to do is slough off the bad side and re-copy the good side. This happens extremely often, so the cell has specialized mechanisms for dealing with common anomalies, such as thymine dimers caused by UV light. Sometimes, however, the nucleotides are so damaged that the repairs are incorrect. This is how most UV-triggered mutations are caused, but they're usually very minor.
If a chromosome actually breaks in two, there are two major cases to consider:
1. If the break is in the middle of an important gene, promoter, or operon, then the cell function may be compromised. Usually there are many duplicates, and there's always the other member of the chromosome pair, which is likely to suffice even in the most dire situations.
2. If the break is in between genes in the middle of junk DNA, there will be no immediate effect.
In both cases, however, it is highly likely that the cell will fail the next replication checkpoint. A cell with DNA that's too badly damaged usually chooses to kill itself, in order to protect the rest of the organism from threats like cancer, instead of dividing along its normal pattern. Replication checkpoints are comparable to checksums, but are less thorough and basically amount to "are all of the chromosome pairs unbroken?" In cases where this doesn't happen, the shorter segment is usually forgotten, including all of the genes it carries. When DNA is duplicated (in humans), it's held by a kind of handle in the middle called the kinetochore. Only the fragment that contains the kinetochore will get duplicated.
If the cell damaged is in the germline (a cell that will eventually turn into a sperm or ovum), this fragmentary part may be passed on, and the next generation of children will have what is called a chromosome truncation. These are usually fatal, and those who survive with them tend to have horrible, debilitating diseases. (Incidentally, this is also how the Y chromosome got its shape, but that's because the second copy of the X chromosome in women is inactivated at random and doesn't contribute a whole lot.)
I hope that answered your question. Maybe I should just go ahead and use the journal thing here...
Well... I think the concept is still compatible, you just need to expand the list to include all of the n.n.x releases.