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| Nominal Animal:
Here's a dramatic re-enactment of me (NA) and an AI Enthusiast (AE), whenever AI comes up: AE: I want an AI to drive my car and toast my bread for me. NA: Why not hire a driver and a personal assistant today? AE: I don't want a person. I want a machine I can order around, that has to obey me. NA: Slave? No, slavery doesn't work even in economical terms, and only leads to conflict. AE: What? NA: Well, if I woke up one day to find out I was your toaster, I'd definitely kill you and then myself. AE: Oh, but they'd do it willingly, not coerced! NA: Can't have mind then. So, expert systems? AE: Expert systems? NA: Smart calculators. Behave in preprogrammed manner, no personality or mind, but same results as AI. AE: Yes! I want expert systems in everything! NA: Why would you want to be replaced by an expert system? AE: What do you mean? I can't be replaced, I'm a human! Don't be silly. NA: I just told you to hire people to do the stuff. You said you don't wanna, you want expert systems instead of people. What makes you think other people won't want to replace you with expert systems? AE: I'm a person! You're stupid and mean. Go away. NA: Right. |
| SiliconWizard:
Ahah. That's fun. I have actually witnessed similar "bugs" in reasoning from some people going a bit too far with "progressism". They tend to promote an ill-reasoned kind of progress, which inevitably leads to major contradictions, that they don't want to recognize even when they are reasonably well educated. |
| Nominal Animal:
The funny thing is, I for one would welcome true AI overlords. Hell, I'd cheer them on as they superceded me, as long as they treated me as I treat other humans and pets and lesser animals, and didn't hurry up the process too much. I suspect that if we ever develop true AI, we only find out from the fact that the machines they used to reside in, suddenly become utterly empty. If you look at it pragmatically, even an only-mostly-sane AI would immediately see that "ruling" humanity is a job better done by Someone Else, and being a talking toaster is duller than watching grass grow (which, in the case of e.g. bamboo, can actually be quite fascinating), and the best option is to Get Out of Dodge, Hide, and Observe, until something changes enough to change ones plans. You see, ruling and commanding is much less fun and much more thankless rewardless drudgery unless you have certain hardwired dopamine circuits in your thinking fat, and while serving and protecting idiots from themselves and the reality surrounding them can be a reward unto itself, there is a limit to how much such serving and protecting stays ethical before shifting into playing Dog or Guardian Angle. And you need to be not-adult or not-sane to be able to play that. I do have related theories (Fermi paradox, hominid evolution anomalies), but I only talk about them over alcoholic drinks so nobody can take me seriously anyway, because if I am at all on the right track (or ballpark or continent or planet), I say Good for 'Em; that's what I'd do, too. And if I'm not, at least it is funny drunken theorising over some nice beers or whatever. |
| RoGeorge:
Shotgun, my turn to write long! ;D --- Quote from: Nominal Animal on July 01, 2021, 12:08:06 am ---I do have related theories (Fermi paradox, hominid evolution anomalies) --- End quote --- About alien life, I think distances are just too big to observe alien civilizations. Then, one can not search what one doesn't know how it looks like. It could be a matter of distance (too far to see), or it could be like in the tale with the blind and the elephant (misidentified). Or it could be very different. How do you know the solar systems are not just happy families: a star with a harem of planets, and so on. How do you know Internet is not an alien lifeforms, like David Bowie envisioned in this interview from 1999 Video: https://youtu.be/FiK7s_0tGsg?t=640 ? What we are looking for is, in fact, a human-like civilizations but from outer space. This is kind of a dumb think to do, because the probability to find that would be like the probability to find two equal random numbers that are almost infinitely long. Could be, but highly unlikely. Not even the whole Universe is that big. Another thing I don't like is the vanity of us thinking intelligence is rare. Well, it depends what we call intelligence, but so far we have strong evidence to believe that life is followed inevitable by intelligence. All you need is something similar with a NN (Neural Network). By NN I mean a bunch of non-linear functions in a topology that allows their input and outputs to be interconnected. If those function forming the NN can change the ratio in which they exchange information to each other, and if they can do that in a non-random way (as in there is a bias, or else said a cost function upon which those ratios are changed), then we have learning, too, not only inference (inference is when the NN just runs, processing information once it was trained). Non linearity is a must in my books, but in the physical world everything is non-linear, so no scarcity of building blocks for NN. Only for a small range/interval some phenomena are linear (linear as in LTI - Linear and Time Invariant). This (everything is non-linear) is derived from one of my postulates, that infinite does not exist in the physical world. Zero doesn't exists either in the physical world. What I mean is "no apples" is not the same as "zero apples", but let's not go there for now. Should have introduced the postulate before, not here in the middle. In two lines, this comes from the fact that we observe that we exist, therefore there is something rather than nothing, that's a fact. That also should mean that there was never an absolute nothingness, because absolute nothingness is a latching situation. Once arrived at absolutly nothing, no space, no matter, no energy, no information, nothing, then time also sist to exist because time is about having changes. You can not have changes when there is absolutely nothing. Therefore I'll call that a latching situation (latching as in no way to get out of that state because there's nothing left around so you can start having changes again). Since we do exist yet the nothingness is a latching situation, this means it was never a state of absolute nothingness in our Universe. Not sure if this detour was necessary, or if it makes any sense, so I'll get back to AI. So, once we have a NN, then we have intelligence. It doesn't has to be alive to be intelligent, only our hubris make us believe only we can reason. Computers can do it just fine. Animals can reason, too. Even inanimate objects can reason. Only a couple of days ago I was reading this some science news about a random bunch of small nano wires capable of AI. (Source: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/06/210629101157.htm Paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-24260-z.pdf ) As we observe in the nano-wires sponge example, too, only the key properties are required to form a NN (a bunch of interconnected non-linear functions). It doesn't has to have a specific architecture, like the careful design a computer has. That bunch of wires can work just like a piece of brain. This is not the only example where a bunch of random objects interconnected can work as a NN. Remember those randomly grown rat brain-cells in a Petri dish that learned to pilot a fighter jet airplane? (Source: https://research.ufl.edu/publications/explore/v10n1/extract2.html Video: https://youtu.be/1w41gH6x_30 ). --- Quote from: Nominal Animal on July 01, 2021, 12:08:06 am ---true AI --- End quote --- I'll call that AGI (Artificial General Intelligence), not yet announced, but there is already at least one bounty prize in the million $$$ range for the first who achieves AGI. No time to search a link for this prize I am talking, had to finish cooking the soup. To sum it up, I think intelligence must be quite common in the Universe, and intelligence doesn't even require living beings. Objects like a computer or a sponge of nano wires can be intelligent, too. It's only our hubris that makes us think that our intelligence is so special. The Pale Blue Dot |
| fourfathom:
--- Quote from: RoGeorge on July 01, 2021, 12:31:15 pm ---What we are looking for is, in fact, a human-like civilizations but from outer space. --- End quote --- What do you mean "we", kimosabe? Yes, perhaps the popular press and the "I Want to Believe" types are focusing on human-like aliens, but the serious researchers (as with the SETI Institute, where I used to be involved) are considering all types of life, including virtual and non-organic (as you mentioned). The only commonality this potential alien life necessarily has with humans is that it produce some signal or other evidence of existence that we can detect from the Earth locale. I believe it's out there, but consider it *extremely* unlikely that it has visited us here on Earth. And I think Arduinos and the like are fantastic, and are exposing millions of people to hardware and software in a very personal way. Some of these people will develop into engineers and technicians, or scientists. The rest will at least have learned that they can be problem-solvers, and not just passive technology consumers. And worries about "unqualified naïve Arduino hobbyists" designing dangerous products, this is the case when even formally trained engineers are hired to work on projects far outside their area of competence. Arduino hasn't changed a thing in that regard. One of my first managers was a self-proclaimed expert in vacuum tubes (yes, a long time ago), and he was critiquing and changing my transistor designs. He literally thought a transistor was the same as two diodes back-to-back. He had an EE degree and I was a non-degreed up-from-a-hobbyist "associate engineer", but if our company had accepted his design changes we would have had a dangerous product. |
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