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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

#31

Post by fergal_reid »

narrator wrote: post #30
fergal_reid wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

That seems a very specific/narrow point, not a general objection.

But anyway: I guess its possible human biological hardware does something difficult to simulate on a computer (at least one similar to our current architectures.)

Given a super advanced intelligence, though, I doubt adding hardware that does protein folding (or the protein folding analogue operation) fast - in biology if necessary - is going to be a major obstacle.

And that's if it can't come up with an algorithm that does an equivalent operation, that runs well on whatever hardware it already has.

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

#32

Post by RandomName2020 »

It ultimately boils down if you accept John Searle's Chinese room argument or not. (BTW his claim is not that conscious machines are not possible - we are such machines, but they cannot be implemented as digital symbol manipulators; we first need to figure out what exactly makes the biological machines conscious).

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

#33

Post by sapphireblue »

Rhapso wrote: post #3

This has been one of the reasons life logging has been interesting to me. It might be a while before we can "upload" your brain, but we can build a predictive model of your behavior and leave an interactive "autobiography" much sooner.

I very much agree with this point of view. It seems to me that dry metaphysical debates (i.e. questioning the nature of these conversation models) are obscuring interesting practical questions that could be asked and tested empirically.

Given modern deep learning conversation models it is already possible to recreate some basic patterns of human dialogue with a recurrent neural network trained on a large corpus (see Google's "A Neural Conversational Model" paper and someone's implementation of it: https://github.com/macournoyer/neuralconvo ).

It would be interesting to experiment with it and see, just how far can we push this modeling approach? How much data is needed? Is it possible to train the model on a huge corpus of human dialogues, and then to finetune it on small amount of data from one specific person?

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

#34

Post by rublev »

evolve2k wrote: post #25

"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…

I think our psyche is extremely delicate, and pretending we can mentally manage and sort the influx of constant information is fooling ourselves. Fooling ourselves because by virtue of exposing yourself to so much information daily, you're altering the way you think and rewiring your mind.

I'd like to think that I'm above being influenced by subliminal propaganda in media (especially television), but I'm not. I've caught myself a few times where I held a strong opinion about something I knew nothing about and I was able to trace it back to what originally influenced me. When pressed on certain opinions I couldn't say anything concrete.

Life has been a lot better when I deleted all social media accounts (900+ 'friends' on FB). Really only about 20 of those connections I keep in touch with, and I've made it a point that texting is only for details not chatting. Since talking on the phone and making efforts to see people in real life I've been a lot happier. My world feels less overloaded, there are no strings connecting my life to social media and the control is back in my hands. I can feel how I want to feel about things without carefully summing up and absorbing how others feel about my experiences. Social media and texting and all that shit is just another and even more shaved off abstraction of human interaction (boiling down interaction to just characters on a screen). I draw the line at the human voice, nothing below that save for carefully thought out and written letters is 'human' enough for me to really derive any lasting pleasure from.

It's depressing for a very long time after deleting social media accounts, it feels like your entire social rug has been suddenly swiped right out from underneath you. I didn't back any of it up or save any of it. And you know what? I don't remember any of it. I don't remember the conversations because there were 100's a day. I don't remember any of the comments or banter left on photos, or the photos themselves. It all blends into one. All of it was meaningless, I didn't grow closer to any of those people. I discovered more about them, sure.

Omitting (or at least trying my hardest to) popular media and social media has been mentally freeing. I get to ask people 'Oh yeah? Why don't you tell me about it?' when they say 'Hey have you heard of ?'

I have no idea what's going on anywhere and I love it.

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

#35

Post by noobermin »

evolve2k wrote: post #25

"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…

I'm not sure it is healing though, it seems more like avoiding the inevitable rather than facing the truth, and just prolonging true healing.

I think whether it is true or not, I'd wager that there is a reason we bury our dead after looking at their dead body instead of mummifying their corpse and leaving it in their favorite rocking chair. Burials aren't for the dead, they are for the living.

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

#36

Post by noobermin »

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…

We can take this a step further.

If chatbots can replace the dead, then they can replace the living.

How long until hot startup in 2040 gives us vchat bots that will be better than your real friends, with a VR set you wouldn't have to spend anymore times with those pesky real people with their real problems? Don't like something about friend #201 ("Bobby"), change parameter y and he'll be just what you want, say their annoying snoring[0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_Haven_(Star_Trek:_Voyager...

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

#37

Post by Esau »

An interesting article, although I disagree with use of the term "artificial intelligence" to describe what was created.

In some ways, I can sympathize with Ms. Kuyda. Both my father and grandmother died in 2013, and even though they are gone, I still get birthday alerts for them on my phone. I don't have the heart to remove them.

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

#39

Post by taneq »

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?

I'd say it's closer to the beta-level simulations described in Revelation Space (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_in_Revelation_Space...) - it's a statistical model derived from external observations. Kurzweil's brain uploading is equivalent to alpha-level simulation.
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