It's foolish to create general AI. What we should be working on is IA (Intelligence Amplification).
Why would you create a god, when you could instead become a god?
AI
311–317 of 317 posts
Re: AI
#312Earlier quoted context omitted.
> it's based on empirical data What empirical data can say anything about, for example, the philosophical zombie problem? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie
There's no such data, because the zombie problem is complete nonsense. Well, actually, it is complete nonsense precisely because empirical data can't say anything about it.
I think its nonsense also due to this :
"Many physicalist philosophers argued that this scenario eliminates itself by its description; the basis of physicalist argument is that the world is defined entirely by physicality, thus a world that was physically identical would necessarily contain consciousness, as consciousness would necessarily be generated from any set of physical circumstances identical to our own."
Also this :
"Artificial intelligence researcher Marvin Minsky sees the argument as circular. The proposition of the possibility of something physically identical to a human but without subjective experience assumes that the physical characteristics of humans are not what produces those experiences, which is exactly what the argument was claiming to prove."
from the wiki of p-zombie.
Re: AI
#313Re: AI
#314Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Actually, my point about pain was that it does exist, precisely because it can be examined and explained within a scientific framework. The physical processes of pain (ie. the electricity) can be observed scientifically, but the "sensation" of pain (to use your word from before) cannot. But it is the "sensation" of pain that gives it its moral significance, otherwise inflicting pain would be no different morally th…
> The physical processes of pain (ie. the electricity) can be observed scientifically, but the "sensation" of pain (to use your word from before) cannot. You state this as though it's a given, but it's not. You're assuming Dualism. So, of course you end up with Dualism. > But it is the "sensation" of pain that gives it its moral significance, otherwise inflicting pain would be no different morally than flipping on th…
> You state this as though it's a given, but it's not. You're assuming Dualism.
No. Dualism is the idea that our minds are non-physical. I say minds are fully physical, and all thinking happens in the physical realm. But somehow the results of this thinking are perceived and sensed by a self-aware being as "self" in a way that other physical processes are not.
> The patterns of electro-chemical reactions that occur when I inflict pain on another human cause that human to emote in a way that I can relate to because of the electro-chemical reactions that have been happening in me and those around me since before my birth.
Exactly. You are extrapolating by analogy that other people experience pain in the same way you do, because you cannot experience their pain directly in the way that they do. But this analogy of thinking is just an assumption. And it certainly offers no insight into why you are self-aware and a computer (a very different but still complex electrical system) is not (we assume).
Re: AI
#315Earlier quoted context omitted.
I still don’t see what this time-distance-size relation has to say about this case. Do you mean that one could infer since arrow and title are equal in size and close together it requires minimal time to point from the one to the other? It seems like breaking a butterfly on a wheel referring to Fitt’s law here. Sorry for nit-picking, maybe I’m missing something.
1) People aim fast. 2) The target "AI" is small. 3) They miss, and click the arrow instead. It's not that complicated.
You don’t need Fitt’s law for what you’re saying. It’s obvious that small objects are difficult to aim for. This is the main thing I dislike about HCI/UX: More often than not people have to unnecessarily refer to laws or norms to sell their observations.
The only non-obvious insights Fitt’s law bring are that objects twice as big and twice as far away take the same time to aim for, and that as objects become smaller or distance increases the time only grows logarithmically. Everything else is just squeezed into its definition to make it sound well-founded.
Re: AI
#316Re: AI
#317There's a joke in the computational neuroscience community somewhat along the lines of "consciousness is where neuroscientists go to die". I literally saw this happen when I was at the Salk institute as a lowly undergraduate research assistant. Sir Francis Crick was there at the same time, and spent his last 25 or so years in pursuit of a theory of consciousness. I was fortunate (and humbled) to get to talk to him a few times before he passed in 2004, and he was undoubtedly a thinker of superior ability and unbounded curiosity (a pretty awesome combination).
Actually there were (and still are) a lot of the biggest names in the field there at the time (including Crick, Terrance Sejnowski (a professor of mine who co-invented the Boltzmann machine* amongst other things), VS Ramachandran). These are all people who were coming at the problem from the biological &| pure science/math side of things (vs people like Andrew Ng, who Sam mentioned, who have a more CS/engineering based approach).
No doubt they consistently came up with spectacular theories and very interesting models of how a specific regions of the brain may function. How for the most part they worked was this:
1. Come up with a biologically or cognitively plausible mathematical model (many of which were fantastically cool). 2. Implement and run this model on massively parallel architectures (at the time not quite the level of technological sophistication you see nowadays, so things may have changed a lot) 3. To train, use feedback from EEG (this is what I "worked" on, but they also worked with other electrical signals, MRI and chemical measurements at the level of individual neurons).
The biggest progress was made at the smallest level (understanding how individual neurons and small networks work). This was primarily because measurement at this level actually provided useful information. The signal/noise ratio of EEG scalp recordings (which to this day gives me nightmares) was (and is) so terrible that I left the field as a quite disgruntled phd student. Maybe I just didn't have the intellectual capacity, but I never felt like I was working on anything that made sense. This was true for many of my fellow graduate students .. after a couple years, we felt we were doing pseudoscience.
Rant completed, I think the CS/engineering approach is more promising: don't worry about the biology or some grand theory of the mind and just try to do something useful. Since computers get more powerful consistently, we'll incrementally be able to do more and more useful things. If consciousness emerges at all, it may or may not appear like human consciousness. We may not even be able to tell if/when this happens, but at least we would be solving real problems in the meanwhile.