Re:I once toured their headquaters...
on
FASA Dies
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· Score: 2
So that's where Dowd went. SR really hasn't been the same since he left (it finally reach "big steaming pile" last year), and I hope, but doubt, that WizKids will find a way to get him back. I'd love nothing more than to see Weisman and Dowd take back the game, roll the clock back to 2055 or so, and try to stamp out the last few years. Enough of the evil AI's, President "D", Horro..er, "the Enemy", SR needs to get back to its roots, before saving the world became the minimum acceptable goal for a story arc.
AFAIK, no, as long as you distribute the program under the terms of the GPL. That's where the incompatability lies: the GPL overrules more permissive licences by requiring you make the source available.
I don't remember any genetically engineered Star Wars characters. The Jedi are powered by large colonies of symbiotic critters that everyone possesses, not by any particular genetically based abilities. I mean, look at Luke: he wasn't exactly the 'fittest'....
but what if there's a reason we haven't evolved there yet?
Just to make sure we're on the same page, you do realize that evolution is not a teleological force that directs our genes, right? If some property hasn't evolved it could be that never showed up, or the individuals who had it could have been struck by lightening, or it just may not have had time to appear. Evolution is a marvelous process, but I hope we're not going to start basing all of our decisions on what has and has not evolved.
Our view of gene structure is simplified.
This is changing as biology gains access to the resources needed for more complex modeling. It's extremely unlikely that we'll ever have any significant accuracy predicting the effects of genetic alterations, but any accuracy at all puts us well ahead of Mother Nature. Anyway, I trust biologists to do the right things, ethically and scientifically -- I doubt many of them are eager to start tinkering with humans just to see what happens.
Everything is balanced tenuously in nature
If nature was as fragile as some make it sound there would be more room for evolution at all. I find it far more impressive that nature is sufficiently robust to withstand the constant mutations and disasters that drive evolution.
That has to be true, but doesn't make any fscking sense. What do they expect us to do, add slashboxes for every section?[0] I mean, we're able to filter sections out but not in, so why did they decide to do it this way instead of running everything and allowing us to exclude what we don't want?
And I'm not about to try to figure out why I never saw this policy announced.
[0] As I just did. My there are a lot of stories I don't remember....
Simple: if they are distributing in the US then the gov't can dictate as much as they please, either directly to the US division or via import restriction and whatnot. This happens all the time in other industries; e.g, Japanese car companies aren't unregulated in the US simply because they're foreign-owned.
Don't put too much faith in things that are proven mathematically...
True enough, which is why I said it was proven and verified by experiment, instead of simply 'proven'. The implication of my statement was that we had sound math which, fairly amazingly, had been supported by the science. Then again, I've been up for two days so maybe that isn't what I was saying.... I do seem to have more faith in mathematical physics than you do, though.
We have no proof that any physical system works in accordance with any particular piece of math.
Well, I particularly enjoyed by the proof (can't remember whose) that classical particles are Turing-equivalent. It fit well with a proposal that Turing machines be taken as a model of causality, sort of the logical conclusion of 'effective computation'. It's a lot of fun and lets some of us would-be computer scientists feel like we're contributing to the scientific world;-)
Keep in mind that supporting a theory's predictions don't prove a theory, they only give us more faith in it.
Which is why we don't have anything but theory in science; nothing in the real world can be proven. Math encourages people to aim too high in life and run around searching for proof.
Yes, I also hate using the word faith in relation to physics,
*shrug* Doing so forms a rather enjoyable part of my life, so don't feel uncomfortable about bring it up. I was a philosophy student long before I became really interested in anything resembling decent science, and I brought all of my epistemological wisdom along with me.
The upper limit on the speed of information is a pre-existing part of physics, not a result of this experiment. To the best of my knowledge (which isn't saying much) it has been proven mathematically and verified experimentally. On the other hand, I've only seen this in reference to the instantaneous effects you see in quantum mechanics, so it's possible that a simple speedup is OK.
"Can anyone really say they saw Moore's Law coming... no."
Um, Moore did...;-)
(Then again, IMNSHO think "Moore's Law" is load of crap arrived at by massaging reality to fit one's beliefs. The current popular version seems ammount to "Intel's flagship line doubles in benchmark performance about every 18 months", which I must admit doesn't impress me that much, assuming even it is true.)
"There are a couple things that are not clear to me here..."
At least one of the PGP FAQ's mentions this (this may not be the freshest link), an includes links to relevant papers. I couldn't care less about whether it's true or not, so I haven't bothered to follow up.
You can just declare a priori that machines will 'never' do something -- as the saying goes, that isn't even wrong. Machines now can't do it, but unless you are prepared to argue for a magical property of animal minds that allows them to transcend the capabilities of mere machines you have to accept that some machine, somewhere may be capable of thinking for itself.
Consider also what you mean by machine. Are bioengineered neurons machines? If not, what about neuromorphic robots, designed to mimic the animal nervous systems? How about psychological models or human cognition, which, incidentally, can already do much of what you claim they can't.
And, completely on tangent, AFAIK you're the only person who still believes in pure epistemological empiricism.
Sorry, but AI (hereafter referred to as computational intelligence, or CI) has a long history of working hand-in-hand with psychology. A great deal of CI has fallen under cognitive modelling, which is arguably a from of experimental psychology, and many CI researchers refer to themselves as cognitive scientists, emphasizing the psychological (insofar as cogsci is dominated by psychologists) aspects of their work. As for putting it over psych, or linguistics...why? Both of them are far broader topics, and will remain so in the foreseeable future.
I could see biology as the home of artificial life, but until recently CI's interactions with biology have been restricted to useful metaphors. Traditionally CI has worked at a higher level, and I feel it appropriate to respect this. You're the first person I've seen suggest that biology is foundation for CI, or even that it's an significant contributor, except by way of neuropsychology.
I largely agree with everything you're said, except:
"technology will always only be as smart as those who made it, never smarter."
I would love your proof of this. We certainly don't have any particularly intelligent artifacts at the moment, but that's amounts to exactly nothing for the purpose of proving we never will.
All everything was at one point research. I researched my TV guide before I turned on the Simpsons tonight. If you can't see the difference between cognitive modelling research and kernel plug-and-play research you're welcome the results of your 'AI'.
Can you say that Open Source is not good for software?
*thwack* Score: AC 1, strawman 0.
AI must and will one day leave the research departments of bigshot CS schools.
Why, praytell? Wouldn't it be a good idea if *gasp* scientists, even computer scientists, led the way? Actually, you're right about CS; if anything, AI should be under psychology, or better yet, a department of it's own.
And who will be better to lead it than Open Source ?
I just said who: cognitive scientists and AI researchers -- in other words, people who understand the subject. More engineers is the last thing AI needs: It's nearly managed to redeem itself as a science, and I really don't want to lose that ground.
Um, no. Take a look around the Internet -- do you see more than a handful of open source developers who know anything about cognitive science? How about modern AI systems? The closest thing to open source AI I've found is the source for Hofstader's Copycat, and you can be sure community development wasn't why it was released.
Look, open source is great for many things, but research -- let alone research of this sort -- ain't one of them.
Much of AI has moved to 'Computational Intelligence' recently. More descriptive, sounds better, and provides a nice way of distinguishing it from the less computer oriented approaches (e.g., bioengineering has a potential AI aspect).
Of course, the really serious AI workers just call it cognitive science;-)
As it happens, I have a several of Siegelman's papers, though I'd never read any until you mentioned her. Just quickly skimming, it would seem that she also proved that a recurrent NN with rational weights can simulate a multitape Turing Machine, and that a similar stochastic network is super-Turing. Most interestingly, one paper states that the real NN is robust enough to withstand noise and implementation error, "[including] changes in the precise form of the activation function, in the weights of the network, and even an error in the update" (Siegelman, Analog Computation via Neural Networks). There is an implication that it uses a finite number of neurons...kinda makes me wish I understood the math well enough to figure out how it works;-)
"i'm sorry, but this fantasy of so many people today that somehow, mysteriously, "intelligence" will "emerge" from "sufficient complextity" is a bunch of speculative wishful thinking. i don't know how so many people can buy into this superstition."
I'm not going to address intelligence until someone defines it. Emergence, OTOH, is both well defined and well described mathematically, thanks to people like Hermann Haken. That this fact is virtually unknown even among supporters of the idea is surely no evidence that it doesn't exist.
"Materialism can never offer a satisfactory explanation of the world."
Of course not. Luckily we have other forms of monism to fall back on, so this isn't really a problem.
"He ascribes the power of thinking to matter instead of to himself."
I'm sorry, but this is so obviously wrong I don't know where to begin. First, he is assuming that he is material, so even by ascribing thought to himself, he would be ascribing it to matter. Steiner is assuming thought is immaterial, not arguing for it.
Second, he isn't ascribing thought to matter, but to interactions between material objects. This is the same mistake as believing that 'driving' must be an inherent part of a car's physical makeup -- that cars can't drive unless all of their quarks can drive as well.
"The materialist has turned his attention away from the definite subject, his own I, and has arrived at an image of something quite vague and indefinite."
Oh please. You know, philosophy has advanced a bit in the last century, it would be nice if everyone would come and join us. If you were going to pick something in which to ground a criticism of materialism, you could at least choose experience or intentionality. There's every indication that the self will be explained psychologically.
"Actually, according to the other poster, they are LESS efficient."
Hmmm, I don't see that in his post. He pointed out that they're actually finite state machines because they lack infinite memory, but the same is true of every other computer that can actually exist. My point was merely that von Neumann's model for computing was an application of the MP model for neural networks. Each MP neuron is single logic element from which Boolean function are built -- in other words, a transistor.
Back onto what you're proposing, programming languages for NN don't have a wildly successful history. There are some here and there that appear workable (e.g., schema theory), but we're still a ways off. Plan to spend many years on the problem.
"But I'm not convinced that the current methods are the best path."
NN have been used in AI for several decades. They show up a lot in robotics and applications that need pattern matching, and occasionally in reasoning systems (e.g., ACT*). In addition, Bayesian networks were proven equivalent to large class of NN's, so there is some significant crossover that isn't immediately apparent. Hofstader's current work (Metacat and IIRC Letter Spirit) have some features of NN, but operate at a much higher level, forming a nice interface layer between NN's and neo-classical AI.
Basically what I'm saying is that AI is an extremely diverse field, and that there's much more to it than stuffy predicate logic systems and chess machines. Many of criticism of AI's methods are the result of lack of publicity for the more original architectures more than any lack of creativity on the part of the researchers.
One minor point: MP neural networks are no more inefficient than the computer you're using right now. In fact, they're exactly as efficient: take 7 million neurons with fixed connections and weights, wire them up as a Boolean network, and you get a Pentium III.
I wonder, has someone around here been reading Ghost in the Shell?;-)
I am more than the sum of my parts? Cool!
*shrug* It's not that big a deal. Emergence has been extensively studied this century, in both natural and artificial settings.
Consciousness in a psychological sense, which seems to what is being discussed here, is so poorly defined that using it is just inviting misunderstanding. You can't call it a 'level of complexity', because some people associate introspection with being conscious, and it's hard to see how a level of anything could introspect, or how introspection could lead to massive qualitative changes in complexity.
There's also a problem with equating consciousness with unpredictability. In general, conscious behavior is no more unpredictable than anything other human quality, and far more predictable than, say, the weather. At the same time, the behavior of presumable less complex elements of the brain can be virtually impossible to predict -- thus the great mystery of the unconscious mind. The related 'willful behavior' theory falls apart when you consider how many things in the world appear to act of desires similar to those of animals. Surface tension can be readily anthropomorphized into a desire on the part of a substance to stay whole, for example.
At any rate, the sort of intuitive notions of consciousness that most people seem to have should apply to most animals higher up the evolutionary ladder than lizards, and possible quite a bit lower. Dogs seem to be self-aware (if not capable of introspection), certainly possess emotions, exhibit complex behavior, socialize -- in short, they seem to meet all of the various criteria for being conscious.
"One puzzle I have pondered is that machine intelligence will likely have no emotions/feelings."
This is an intuition about machines, not AI. It's been more than sufficiently proven (IMO, and that of many others) that emotions are required for intelligence. Human emotions are an evolutionary adaptation, after all, not a property of our biological nature, as some would have it. We don't feel pain (which probably isn't an emotion, BTW) because biological organisms are inherently pain-bearing entities, but because damage to organisms is a Bad Thing. Presumable AI's would be equally in need of some way to detect damage, and the associated emotion -- suffering -- to encourage them to avoid damage. This wouldn't necessarily be physical damage, either: the logical 'body' of the AI would need some form of protection, as well.
The primary emotions -- anger, sadness, happiness, loneliness, boredom, fear, etc -- all have important cognitive roles that AI's would very likely need to function. There would probably be variation in some of the details, but we see as much everyday with humans as it is. Once the lingering dualism (another product of Descartes) between Reason and Emotion is discarded believing we can have the former without the latter will probably appear as silly as believing in immaterial minds.
"if God had have wanted sentient beings made from sand he would have done when he created the Earth."
You've obviously never read Genesis;-)
" it follows that intelligence that is not created in God's form does not have a soul."
Not necessarily. God could grant souls to human creations, if He liked. In fact, since we have no idea what a soul is, it would seem that God would have to intervene if our AI were ever to have one.
"it thus follows that they cannot help but act against it instead."
Again, not necessarily. You can act in accordance with the wishes of an agent you don't know exists. You could condition the AI to mimic the thoughts and behavior of the Pope (not any specific Pope, of course), resulting in a being that is both following God's will and utterly unaware of that fact. (Yes, I know this doesn't count.
"Think about it.
I'd be much for interested in thinking about why you believe theology has any place in a discussion of AI at this point. Regardless of what else it may be, AI (the term is deprecated, if anyone cares) is an empirical science. If you create something that acts like a human, you have very likely found an insight about mankind. In the same vein, creating an AI would have a profound impact (always wanted to say that;-) on theology. What if, by some miracle, the AI wasn't evil? What if it was utterly saintly, personally blessed by God, and sent to teach us about His ways? That would empirical evidence that God approved its existence, and that He has a somewhat more flexible view of the universe that His misguided children.
All of this is academic, though, since I don't believe in God, evil, or that AI's are going to jump out of our networks.
Single, two round and three round burst, full auto and another weird option I've never really understood. The trigger group is modular, so you can choose the particular options you want on each gun.
Full auto, BTW, is all but useless for anything except suppression. Throwing a couple dozen bullets in the general direction of your adversary isn't a real good tactic most of the time.
Someone should moderate this up -- it definitely deserves comment from people familiar with the law.
The only difference I can think of is that you can limit the behavior of the search engine bots, to some extent. I don't know if you can control caching, but you are supposed to be able to tell the bots not to index your pages. Not doing so could be interpreted as implicit permission to cache. I very much doubt the law would agree, but I'm sure someone would argue it.
Come to think of it, the whole issue of web caching on the sever side (e.g., to speed browsing), and possibly even client-side, seems to have been under-addressed. I believe the UK (or EU; whatever) has law on the books, but I can't remember what it says. I could be thinking of the wrong caches, though.
Then again, while the law certainly doesn't agree (I assume), this doesn't appear to threaten the copyright holder's rights. Google makes it very clear where the page came from and how to get to the original, and this really seems to be beneficial to page owners, given the unpredictable nature of the Web (e.g., server crashes). Maybe caching should be fair use, perhaps as an infrastructure feature.
Slashdot Mirror
So that's where Dowd went. SR really hasn't been the same since he left (it finally reach "big steaming pile" last year), and I hope, but doubt, that WizKids will find a way to get him back. I'd love nothing more than to see Weisman and Dowd take back the game, roll the clock back to 2055 or so, and try to stamp out the last few years. Enough of the evil AI's, President "D", Horro..er, "the Enemy", SR needs to get back to its roots, before saving the world became the minimum acceptable goal for a story arc.
AFAIK, no, as long as you distribute the program under the terms of the GPL. That's where the incompatability lies: the GPL overrules more permissive licences by requiring you make the source available.
Just to make sure we're on the same page, you do realize that evolution is not a teleological force that directs our genes, right? If some property hasn't evolved it could be that never showed up, or the individuals who had it could have been struck by lightening, or it just may not have had time to appear. Evolution is a marvelous process, but I hope we're not going to start basing all of our decisions on what has and has not evolved.
This is changing as biology gains access to the resources needed for more complex modeling. It's extremely unlikely that we'll ever have any significant accuracy predicting the effects of genetic alterations, but any accuracy at all puts us well ahead of Mother Nature. Anyway, I trust biologists to do the right things, ethically and scientifically -- I doubt many of them are eager to start tinkering with humans just to see what happens.
If nature was as fragile as some make it sound there would be more room for evolution at all. I find it far more impressive that nature is sufficiently robust to withstand the constant mutations and disasters that drive evolution.
-jcl
And I'm not about to try to figure out why I never saw this policy announced.
[0] As I just did. My there are a lot of stories I don't remember....
-jcl
-jcl
True enough, which is why I said it was proven and verified by experiment, instead of simply 'proven'. The implication of my statement was that we had sound math which, fairly amazingly, had been supported by the science. Then again, I've been up for two days so maybe that isn't what I was saying.... I do seem to have more faith in mathematical physics than you do, though.
We have no proof that any physical system works in accordance with any particular piece of math.
Well, I particularly enjoyed by the proof (can't remember whose) that classical particles are Turing-equivalent. It fit well with a proposal that Turing machines be taken as a model of causality, sort of the logical conclusion of 'effective computation'. It's a lot of fun and lets some of us would-be computer scientists feel like we're contributing to the scientific world ;-)
Keep in mind that supporting a theory's predictions don't prove a theory, they only give us more faith in it.
Which is why we don't have anything but theory in science; nothing in the real world can be proven. Math encourages people to aim too high in life and run around searching for proof.
Yes, I also hate using the word faith in relation to physics,
*shrug* Doing so forms a rather enjoyable part of my life, so don't feel uncomfortable about bring it up. I was a philosophy student long before I became really interested in anything resembling decent science, and I brought all of my epistemological wisdom along with me.
-jcl
-jcl
-jcl
Um, Moore did... ;-)
(Then again, IMNSHO think "Moore's Law" is load of crap arrived at by massaging reality to fit one's beliefs. The current popular version seems ammount to "Intel's flagship line doubles in benchmark performance about every 18 months", which I must admit doesn't impress me that much, assuming even it is true.)
"There are a couple things that are not clear to me here..."
At least one of the PGP FAQ's mentions this (this may not be the freshest link), an includes links to relevant papers. I couldn't care less about whether it's true or not, so I haven't bothered to follow up.
-jcl
-jcl
Consider also what you mean by machine. Are bioengineered neurons machines? If not, what about neuromorphic robots, designed to mimic the animal nervous systems? How about psychological models or human cognition, which, incidentally, can already do much of what you claim they can't.
And, completely on tangent, AFAIK you're the only person who still believes in pure epistemological empiricism.
-jcl
I could see biology as the home of artificial life, but until recently CI's interactions with biology have been restricted to useful metaphors. Traditionally CI has worked at a higher level, and I feel it appropriate to respect this. You're the first person I've seen suggest that biology is foundation for CI, or even that it's an significant contributor, except by way of neuropsychology.
-jcl
"technology will always only be as smart as those who made it, never smarter."
I would love your proof of this. We certainly don't have any particularly intelligent artifacts at the moment, but that's amounts to exactly nothing for the purpose of proving we never will.
-jcl
All everything was at one point research. I researched my TV guide before I turned on the Simpsons tonight. If you can't see the difference between cognitive modelling research and kernel plug-and-play research you're welcome the results of your 'AI'.
Can you say that Open Source is not good for software?
*thwack* Score: AC 1, strawman 0.
AI must and will one day leave the research departments of bigshot CS schools.
Why, praytell? Wouldn't it be a good idea if *gasp* scientists, even computer scientists, led the way? Actually, you're right about CS; if anything, AI should be under psychology, or better yet, a department of it's own.
And who will be better to lead it than Open Source ?
I just said who: cognitive scientists and AI researchers -- in other words, people who understand the subject. More engineers is the last thing AI needs: It's nearly managed to redeem itself as a science, and I really don't want to lose that ground.
-jcl
Look, open source is great for many things, but research -- let alone research of this sort -- ain't one of them.
-jcl
Of course, the really serious AI workers just call it cognitive science ;-)
-jcl
-jcl
I'm not going to address intelligence until someone defines it. Emergence, OTOH, is both well defined and well described mathematically, thanks to people like Hermann Haken. That this fact is virtually unknown even among supporters of the idea is surely no evidence that it doesn't exist.
"Materialism can never offer a satisfactory explanation of the world."
Of course not. Luckily we have other forms of monism to fall back on, so this isn't really a problem.
"He ascribes the power of thinking to matter instead of to himself."
I'm sorry, but this is so obviously wrong I don't know where to begin. First, he is assuming that he is material, so even by ascribing thought to himself, he would be ascribing it to matter. Steiner is assuming thought is immaterial, not arguing for it.
Second, he isn't ascribing thought to matter, but to interactions between material objects. This is the same mistake as believing that 'driving' must be an inherent part of a car's physical makeup -- that cars can't drive unless all of their quarks can drive as well.
"The materialist has turned his attention away from the definite subject, his own I, and has arrived at an image of something quite vague and indefinite."
Oh please. You know, philosophy has advanced a bit in the last century, it would be nice if everyone would come and join us. If you were going to pick something in which to ground a criticism of materialism, you could at least choose experience or intentionality. There's every indication that the self will be explained psychologically.
-jcl
Hmmm, I don't see that in his post. He pointed out that they're actually finite state machines because they lack infinite memory, but the same is true of every other computer that can actually exist. My point was merely that von Neumann's model for computing was an application of the MP model for neural networks. Each MP neuron is single logic element from which Boolean function are built -- in other words, a transistor.
Back onto what you're proposing, programming languages for NN don't have a wildly successful history. There are some here and there that appear workable (e.g., schema theory), but we're still a ways off. Plan to spend many years on the problem.
"But I'm not convinced that the current methods are the best path."
NN have been used in AI for several decades. They show up a lot in robotics and applications that need pattern matching, and occasionally in reasoning systems (e.g., ACT*). In addition, Bayesian networks were proven equivalent to large class of NN's, so there is some significant crossover that isn't immediately apparent. Hofstader's current work (Metacat and IIRC Letter Spirit) have some features of NN, but operate at a much higher level, forming a nice interface layer between NN's and neo-classical AI.
Basically what I'm saying is that AI is an extremely diverse field, and that there's much more to it than stuffy predicate logic systems and chess machines. Many of criticism of AI's methods are the result of lack of publicity for the more original architectures more than any lack of creativity on the part of the researchers.
-jcl
-jcl
I am more than the sum of my parts? Cool!
*shrug* It's not that big a deal. Emergence has been extensively studied this century, in both natural and artificial settings.
Consciousness in a psychological sense, which seems to what is being discussed here, is so poorly defined that using it is just inviting misunderstanding. You can't call it a 'level of complexity', because some people associate introspection with being conscious, and it's hard to see how a level of anything could introspect, or how introspection could lead to massive qualitative changes in complexity.
There's also a problem with equating consciousness with unpredictability. In general, conscious behavior is no more unpredictable than anything other human quality, and far more predictable than, say, the weather. At the same time, the behavior of presumable less complex elements of the brain can be virtually impossible to predict -- thus the great mystery of the unconscious mind. The related 'willful behavior' theory falls apart when you consider how many things in the world appear to act of desires similar to those of animals. Surface tension can be readily anthropomorphized into a desire on the part of a substance to stay whole, for example.
At any rate, the sort of intuitive notions of consciousness that most people seem to have should apply to most animals higher up the evolutionary ladder than lizards, and possible quite a bit lower. Dogs seem to be self-aware (if not capable of introspection), certainly possess emotions, exhibit complex behavior, socialize -- in short, they seem to meet all of the various criteria for being conscious.
-jcl
This is an intuition about machines, not AI. It's been more than sufficiently proven (IMO, and that of many others) that emotions are required for intelligence. Human emotions are an evolutionary adaptation, after all, not a property of our biological nature, as some would have it. We don't feel pain (which probably isn't an emotion, BTW) because biological organisms are inherently pain-bearing entities, but because damage to organisms is a Bad Thing. Presumable AI's would be equally in need of some way to detect damage, and the associated emotion -- suffering -- to encourage them to avoid damage. This wouldn't necessarily be physical damage, either: the logical 'body' of the AI would need some form of protection, as well.
The primary emotions -- anger, sadness, happiness, loneliness, boredom, fear, etc -- all have important cognitive roles that AI's would very likely need to function. There would probably be variation in some of the details, but we see as much everyday with humans as it is. Once the lingering dualism (another product of Descartes) between Reason and Emotion is discarded believing we can have the former without the latter will probably appear as silly as believing in immaterial minds.
-jcl
You've obviously never read Genesis ;-)
" it follows that intelligence that is not created in God's form does not have a soul."
Not necessarily. God could grant souls to human creations, if He liked. In fact, since we have no idea what a soul is, it would seem that God would have to intervene if our AI were ever to have one.
"it thus follows that they cannot help but act against it instead."
Again, not necessarily. You can act in accordance with the wishes of an agent you don't know exists. You could condition the AI to mimic the thoughts and behavior of the Pope (not any specific Pope, of course), resulting in a being that is both following God's will and utterly unaware of that fact. (Yes, I know this doesn't count.
"Think about it.
I'd be much for interested in thinking about why you believe theology has any place in a discussion of AI at this point. Regardless of what else it may be, AI (the term is deprecated, if anyone cares) is an empirical science. If you create something that acts like a human, you have very likely found an insight about mankind. In the same vein, creating an AI would have a profound impact (always wanted to say that ;-) on theology. What if, by some miracle, the AI wasn't evil? What if it was utterly saintly, personally blessed by God, and sent to teach us about His ways? That would empirical evidence that God approved its existence, and that He has a somewhat more flexible view of the universe that His misguided children.
All of this is academic, though, since I don't believe in God, evil, or that AI's are going to jump out of our networks.
-jcl
Full auto, BTW, is all but useless for anything except suppression. Throwing a couple dozen bullets in the general direction of your adversary isn't a real good tactic most of the time.
-jcl
The only difference I can think of is that you can limit the behavior of the search engine bots, to some extent. I don't know if you can control caching, but you are supposed to be able to tell the bots not to index your pages. Not doing so could be interpreted as implicit permission to cache. I very much doubt the law would agree, but I'm sure someone would argue it.
Come to think of it, the whole issue of web caching on the sever side (e.g., to speed browsing), and possibly even client-side, seems to have been under-addressed. I believe the UK (or EU; whatever) has law on the books, but I can't remember what it says. I could be thinking of the wrong caches, though.
Then again, while the law certainly doesn't agree (I assume), this doesn't appear to threaten the copyright holder's rights. Google makes it very clear where the page came from and how to get to the original, and this really seems to be beneficial to page owners, given the unpredictable nature of the Web (e.g., server crashes). Maybe caching should be fair use, perhaps as an infrastructure feature.
-jcl