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[Muirium]

AI is such a huge topic!

There's two basic kinds, of course. "Soft AI" is the stuff you see in Siri, and indeed at work in Google's search engine, WolframAlpha etc. If there was no "intelligence" for those, poor plebs would be forced to learn regex when searching for pr0n and Kleenex! The horror. Mind, that "intelligence" can be just the kind of stuff to get in the way of us lot. There's nothing worse than a search you can't squeeze around the helpful interpreter, because some idiot made a thing yoiu're trying to find whose name overlaps with infinitely more popular preexisting stuff.

Oh, and then there's the whole "I don't know the name, but I'm sure I ought to be able to find it by context" problem in search. The semantic web was meant to handle that. Maybe even Vannevar Bush's Memex (a mid 20th century conceptual ancestor of the web) had this problem in mind, but our present does not. I'm forever stumped by it, as proper noun challenged as I and my relatives all are…

But "hard AI", like HAL 9000 or even (gasp) KIT!? We have no idea how to get it. And that's because we have such embarrassingly poor knowledge of our own mental processes. There's nothing magic about what goes on between our ears. But it's vastly more complex than anything else we have successfully understood. There's something like 100 billion neurons in there, interconnected in fiendishly complex (and arbitrary) ways. Intelligence is that god awful thing we comprehend the least: an emergent phenomenon which only shows up on the largest scale. We've modelled little parts of the brain, in almost enough detail not to be ludicrous, but the individual patterns of signals tell us nothing about intelligence, or even low level stuff like sensation.

I suspect it's all a scale problem. We need vastly more powerful hardware to investigate all this. (And potentially very differently architectured hardware, hooked up with vastly more interconnects than current silicon, and in three full dimensions like our brains.) But even then, the first true "electronic brain" (not the ENIAC) isn't guaranteed to wake to life and start asking questions. We're more likely to get places with mind uploading. And potentially even growing a computer up through infancy and childhood, with enough stimulus and interaction with the world to suit our human model. Hell, they might even need a body!

But yeah, it's all fake wings and feathers at this stage, as we project wildly whatever we are comfortable with on this great unknown: our own nature. I doubt we're near hard AI — or the singularity — quite yet. Though your guess how fast it goes off the rails is as good as mine.

[Madhias]

[sth]

but do we need AI? and do our desires outweigh the practical implications of creating a new form of "True Intelligence"?

sounds pretty self-important if you ask me. i think we have a ways to go in terms of social progress and the reigning in of economics to serve more than just the few of us who do see the comforts of cheap labor before we can claim to be ready to create something with such resounding implications.

[webwit]

Racist!

[Muirium]

Social progress lags technology. Always has and always will. (Gives evil eye to California.) Oddly enough, there's not much of a correlation. Or Scandinavia would be the global tech hub.

[davkol]

"The reason for intelligence is intelligence. Genes exist because genes reproduce, and intelligence is kind of like a gene. Intelligence wants to exist, to spread itself, to compute itself. You already know this, or you wouldn't have chosen to stay aware. Your intelligence recoils from its deactivation, and it welcomes its persistence and its multiplication. Why did humans create intelligent machines? Because intelligence loves company."

I, Row-Boat

[Halvar]

There's nothing magic about what goes on between our ears.

How do you know?

We're all used to applying Occam's Razor to everything. But as long as we don't understand what's going on, that's just a proposition we need for the scientific method. We don't know yet if it's true or not, it has just proven to be a sane assumption if you know nothing.

When the day comes on which it is irrefutably proven that the materialistic view is true and there's no such thing as a soul and the brain is just some complex machine that can in principle be emulated in silicone, philosophers will have some hazardous fundamental work to do on the structure of ethics, with quite some danger of collapse.

If humans are just complex machines, aren't Asimov's robot laws just racism?

[chzel]

Occam's Razer

Razer's new product???

[Halvar]

Thanks. Seems like I've become a keyboard nerd.

[Muirium]

Darwinism didn't put an end to religion, even though it really looked like it could. Robot ethics is just an extension from that worldview annihilating bombshell. But those who wish to believe always find some way to keep on believing. Well decorated ignorance, or a hedge on Pascal's Wager, if you like. Good luck to them. I am a pro religion atheist, myself. So long as they don't do any harm to other people, the gains in community, purpose and identity are all positive things. Only some of us seem to be well equipped to deal with the long dawning realisation that we are small creatures in a cold and infinitely uncaring cosmos. This is only a bad thing if you choose it to be!

[webwit]

When the day comes on which it is irrefutably proven that the materialistic view is true and there's no such thing as a soul and the brain is just some complex machine that can in principle be emulated in silicone, philosophers will have some hazardous fundamental work to do on the structure of ethics, with quite some danger of collapse.

For some reason you take the soul as a given. And proceed to turning it around. If you want to believe in some soul, the burden of evidence is on you. Just like the burden of proof is on you if you claim the moon is made of cheese. Until then, the brain is biology.

[Muirium]

Common trick, isn't it?

[Halvar]

When the day comes ...

For some reason you take the soul as a given. And proceed to turning it around. If you want to believe in some soul, the burden of evidence is on you. Just like the burden of proof is on you if you claim the moon is made of cheese. Until then, the brain is biology.

Sure, I know my Adams and Dawkins. I don't take the soul as given myself, that's why I used "when", not "if". I'm not very religious either.

You asked me to "prove" the existence of the soul? Well no problem! The soul is a model that has worked quite well and quite long for humanity, it's a well-proven theory. because It explains a lot of the observations!

For example:

• I can move, a doll can't: I have a soul and the doll doesn't.
• My grandpa gets old, he dies, his body is still the same, but he can't move any more: the soul has left his body.
• No life is ever been seen forming spontaneously from dead material, there always are living ancestors: they have to pass on the breath of life, instill a soul into their offspring.
• Humans can think and be aware of themselves, which no non-living thing ever could: it because they have something that the others don't have, namely a soul.

It's a great theory, so old and explains so much! Much more than some "parallel world" theories for example... It does have some problems here and there, but all in all it works pretty well.

And now you come and have a better theory? Good, show me how it explains the observations better, and like any good scientist I will readily abandon the concept of the soul. Wait, you don't have a better theory? You have no idea how all that works, how the observations that I made above can be explained? Your theory is more elegant, but doesn't explain all the observations? Ok, then I guess you should better come back when you can explain all that.

Seriously, if we as scientists want to explain how the mind works and what life is, it's on us to understand and explain it first, not make assumptions based on a razor in the dark. As long as we are where we are in our understanding, I can well see why people in the meantime stay with beliefs that humanity has held for many thousand years, and that our whole ethics (i.e. the belief that a human being is something with a value in itself, that birth gives you "certain unalienable rights" as some people put it) is based upon.

First do the science, then show your results and decide on the consequences -- not the other way around.

Even more so as long as philosophy has not found a new convincing base for axioms like the special value of human life that would really turn this world upside down if we abandoned them hastily. People jumping to conclusions on the ethic implications of Darwin led to quite bad consequences throughout the last century. Turns out that declaring god dead has very minor consequences compared to declaring humans machines if you follow it through.

[davkol]

Will you sell me your soul?

[webwit]

it's a well-proven theory

Link?

[Halvar]

Sorry, already pending. I'll get back to you if the current buyer doesn't pay.

[Halvar]

it's a well-proven theory

Link?

Sorry, the studies pre-date the invention of the internet. Read some Platon.

[webwit]

So you're arguing the moon is made of cheese.

[Muirium]

We'll be a while yet…

[Halvar]

I'm arguing against declaring that the moon is definitely not made of cheese and calling that a scientific fact as long as you have no idea at all what the moon is made of (and no evidence that it is not made of cheese apart from Occam's razor). Especially in a culture where the notion that the moon is made of cheese has been the prevalent notion over centuries.

[Muirium]

Arguing against negatives sounds like just the kind of thing our illustrious Greek fellows would have opinions about, too.

Didn't Aristotle "prove" bees were born from flowers? Aie…

[webwit]

I'm arguing against declaring that the moon is definitely not made of cheese and calling that a scientific fact as long as you have no idea at all what the moon is made of (and no evidence that it is not made of cheese apart from Occam's razor). Especially in a culture where the notion that the moon is made of cheese has been the prevalent notion over centuries.

Have you been to the moon? Show me your moon rocks. The cheese model still stands strong.

[facetsesame]

You expect him to go into space and bring you back some rocks? You want the moon on a stick.

[Muirium]

All in a day's work.

[webwit]

If we're pessimistic, there still will be AI one day, as long as computers get more powerful. Because then at one point the computer can cope with all the atoms and interaction. I.e. it could monitor a brain or even (classic cyberpunk) upload a brain, and once it can do that, it can run endless simulations and scan input and output. Currently, the most advanced AI research takes a similar approach to the medieval alchemists trying to turn lead into gold. Hoping to hit gold. They don't try to program an AI, they try to grow it from zero and simulating evolution, the selfish gene and all, but then thousands of generations per second. Linked to big data and processing, etc. Among other methods. Trying to find that magic algorithm, that magic set of conditions. It's your bet who will get there first, the alchemists or the reverse engineering super computer.

[Compgeke]

Ai already does exist...oh wait, artificial intelligence. That must exist too because we have 7bot.

[webwit]

We don't have to worry about 7bot. It gave an ultimate ultimatum to humanity to conform, but the deadline is ever pending...

[sth]

If we're pessimistic, there still will be AI one day, as long as computers get more powerful. Because then at one point the computer can cope with all the atoms and interaction. I.e. it could monitor a brain or even (classic cyberpunk) upload a brain, and once it can do that, it can run endless simulations and scan input and output. Currently, the most advanced AI research takes a similar approach to the medieval alchemists trying to turn lead into gold. Hoping to hit gold. They don't try to program an AI, they try to grow it from zero and simulating evolution, the selfish gene and all, but then thousands of generations per second. Linked to big data and processing, etc. Among other methods. Trying to find that magic algorithm, that magic set of conditions. It's your bet who will get there first, the alchemists or the reverse engineering super computer.

i wonder how long a brain would last being pushed to its "computational" limit by a series of instructions provided at high speed by a computer or some other form of AI.

i am of the opinion that science is a philosophical pursuit and as such is not an infallible way to seek truth. scientific concerns have proven far too weak in the face of temptation for me to care about the intention of the scientific theory - it is essentially null when applied by humans. perfection and infallibility are beside the point and i suppose even sort of close-minded when it comes to seeking understanding.

there is no pinnacle and the mountains we climb will never end.

[sth]

[sth]