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When her best friend died, she rebuilt him using artificial intelligence

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Re: When her best friend died, she rebuilt him using artificial intelligence

#21

Post by narrator »

drdeca wrote: post #14

Why are people acting like a simple chatbot is somehow a recreation of a person? It isn't a person, it's a chatbot. There is even a company saying that they will try to revive people with a combination of chatlogs and brain scans or something. Chatlogs aren't going to bridge the gap between what you can get with brain scans and what you need to do a full emulation. Even if humanity does succeed in doing complete mind…

Isn't this Ray Kurzweill's brain uploading? You make a computer that can accurately simulate a person and then, according to Kurzweil, the person is no longer dead and completely equivalent to the previously alive human being.

I don't buy it of course, but isn't that the theory?

Re: When her best friend died, she rebuilt him using artificial intelligence

#24

Post by M_Grey »

drdeca wrote: post #14

Why are people acting like a simple chatbot is somehow a recreation of a person? It isn't a person, it's a chatbot. There is even a company saying that they will try to revive people with a combination of chatlogs and brain scans or something. Chatlogs aren't going to bridge the gap between what you can get with brain scans and what you need to do a full emulation. Even if humanity does succeed in doing complete mind…

The funeral industry in this country should answer that to you: where there are vulnerable populations, there will be people willing to exploit them for money.

Re: When her best friend died, she rebuilt him using artificial intelligence

#25

Post by evolve2k »

"An uncomfortable truth suggested by the Roman bot is that many of our flesh-and-blood relationships now exist primarily as exchanges of texts, which are becoming increasingly easy to mimic"

This. I was reflecting with a friend today how with modern social networks there is this strange feeling of being connected yet somehow disconnected. I think the above paragraph captures this same essence.

We discussed that maybe digital technology is akin to medicine, it's all about the dosage. Chat to the bot a little, maybe be healing, chat all the time and maybe it's really not going to be good for you.

How do we navigate these tools that can connect us with the world and yet often leave us feeling so alone at the same time?

Re: When her best friend died, she rebuilt him using artificial intelligence

#26

Post by sukilot »

imh wrote: post #19
drdeca wrote: post #14

Why are people acting like a simple chatbot is somehow a recreation of a person? It isn't a person, it's a chatbot. There is even a company saying that they will try to revive people with a combination of chatlogs and brain scans or something. Chatlogs aren't going to bridge the gap between what you can get with brain scans and what you need to do a full emulation. Even if humanity does succeed in doing complete mind…

>Why are people acting like a simple chatbot is somehow a recreation of a person? Because AI means whatever people imagine it to mean, and the media loves to take full advantage. Even "machine learning" can mean that to the lay person. The closest thing that would probably evoke an accurate reaction in a lay person would be "When her best friend died, she rebuilt him using statistics."

Modern physics says that statistics is essentially what you need to model a universe. Statistics isn't the weakness, the paucity and the bounded nature of the dataset is.

Re: When her best friend died, she rebuilt him using artificial intelligence

#28

Post by fergal_reid »

narrator wrote: post #21
drdeca wrote: post #14

Why are people acting like a simple chatbot is somehow a recreation of a person? It isn't a person, it's a chatbot. There is even a company saying that they will try to revive people with a combination of chatlogs and brain scans or something. Chatlogs aren't going to bridge the gap between what you can get with brain scans and what you need to do a full emulation. Even if humanity does succeed in doing complete mind…

Isn't this Ray Kurzweill's brain uploading? You make a computer that can accurately simulate a person and then, according to Kurzweil, the person is no longer dead and completely equivalent to the previously alive human being. I don't buy it of course, but isn't that the theory?

In fairness to Kurzweil, he isn't talking about a simple chatbot. That's a pretty big difference.

But beyond that, there's an argument that there's no clear distinction between a simulation of a person and the person.

If you want to get into this, start out by telling me the difference between A) a new sorting algorithm you wrote vs B) a simulation of the new sorting algorithm. In particular, why B isn't also running the same algorithm.

If that's not an objection, there's the question about "completely equivalent to the previously alive human being" - pragmatically, it seems impossible to me to fully recreate a 'completely equivalent' human from their writing/output; but, if you're willing to accept a 'so similar you cant tell', the idea is no longer as clearly ridiculous as it first seemed to me:

How big is the space of potential human minds?

Lets say you've an incredibly powerful intelligence: its got someone's DNA and their writings/output. And lets say it has a lot of data on humans, and has deduced a pretty good model of how their minds form, given their DNA and experiences. How much can it now deduce about how a deceased person's DNA was expressed, and the person they became, given their experiences? How small is the space of minds it could narrow in to, from that data? Can it find a small enough space that another human can't tell the difference?

How hard is it to model a human mind? I can make pretty good predictions about what people I know well will say in response to many situations.

But I don't know; I don't think we know enough about minds to say one way or the other.

Re: When her best friend died, she rebuilt him using artificial intelligence

#29

Post by beeskneecaps »

I can definitely sympathize here. There are so many people that I wish I could have one last conversation with and this would maybe help.. I, personally, would _really_ not want to be reanimated and potentially misrepresented by Markov chains and some early deep learning system.

Re: When her best friend died, she rebuilt him using artificial intelligence

#30

Post by narrator »

fergal_reid wrote: post #28
narrator wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't this Ray Kurzweill's brain uploading? You make a computer that can accurately simulate a person and then, according to Kurzweil, the person is no longer dead and completely equivalent to the previously alive human being. I don't buy it of course, but isn't that the theory?

In fairness to Kurzweil, he isn't talking about a simple chatbot. That's a pretty big difference. But beyond that, there's an argument that there's no clear distinction between a simulation of a person and the person. If you want to get into this, start out by telling me the difference between A) a new sorting algorithm you wrote vs B) a simulation of the new sorting algorithm. In particular, why B isn't also running…

The problem with the analogy to a sorting algorithm is that a sorting algorithm is obviously computable. What if there's something like protein folding that has O(2^n) complexity involved in being a person that the body does trillions of times a second but is impossible for any size computer to do for large N?
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