OT - Sentience

[narf poit chez BOOM]

I have never felt my choice taken away by my religion. In fact, without that structure, I would likely have far less choice. I could still choose to be evil, but I would have far less capacity to choose good.

[AgentZero]

Ed Kolis said:
So the only reason you consider robots to not be worthy of moral consideration is that they have only "artificial" experience? What makes you think that that experience is not as real as that which comes from naturally occurring entities? And could it not be argued that humans also have artificial experience as well? Babies don't just drop from the sky - they require other humans to create them!

I guess I just don't buy into the whole "nature is good, humans are bad" thing quite completely enough to go for that argument

Artificial intelligence is one thing. We have plenty of computers and machines out there that could be considered intelligent, which is to say, capable of deriving their own output from a given set of inputs. But do any of them really know what they are doing, or is it simply a matter of action/reaction?

You give a computer a complex set of equations, it returns you an answer. You put a flame near an ant, it runs away. Is one really more intelligent than the other? The real question is whether the machine is self-aware, conscious. But we're not there yet. Our current computers are no more conscious or intelligent than an intricate set of pulleys or some other such mechanical construct. The fact that our modern machines use invisible electrical signals bouncing around tiny strands of wire instead of gears & levers does not make them any more "alive".

After all, I for one would not be happy to find out that Call of Duty was suing me for damages from the Post Traumatic Stress Disorder I inflicted upon it's AI by forcing it to die a thousand deaths.

[capnq]

narf said: Basically, I have never seen nor heard of a machine that outputs anything that wasn't either in the input or in the machine.

Narf, have you ever heard of emergent behavior?

Ed Kolis said: I for one would not be happy to find out that Call of Duty was suing me for damages from the Post Traumatic Stress Disorder I inflicted upon it's AI by forcing it to die a thousand deaths.

AI existential angst

[narf poit chez BOOM]

I have studied learning AI; every single possible path the AI may learn and grow in is implicit in the algorithms the AI uses to learn and the data set provided to learn from. If you iterated over X generations exploring every possibility, you'd have every possible X generation AI.

A self-growing gear box is still a gear-box.

(This is why I prefer the term VI - Virtual Intellgence)

[Ed Kolis]

I agree that we're not there yet in terms of the soldiers in Call of Duty or the dwarves in Dwarf Fortress, but I'm saying that it's within reason to think that we could be there in the next, say, 25 years - sooner if you include "the Internet as a whole" among things that you might consider self-aware.

[Raapys]

I don't think the current computer system has what we need, since it's limited by its programming. While it might be possible to make an AI that writes new and changes old code all by itself, even that might not be enough to get us what we want.

I think the best solution would be to instead design a new computer system which would try to directly replicate the way the brain does things.

Interesting subject though, in these days where direct brain-to-computer interaction is actually becoming a reality( Link ) and where it has been discovered the brain has already made your decisions long before your conciousness becomes aware of it( Link ).

[narf poit chez BOOM]

The video in the first link is vague and indefinite, with poor sound quality.

The second link is interesting, although lacking detail.

[Ed Kolis]

Honest, officer, I didn't plan to kill him... my brain made me do it!

[oli_chose123]

I personally think all life is simply programmed. After all, the possibilities of combinations of neurons for a period of 3 billion years could actually lead to a complex biological computer.
Our brain isn't different from a computer. Chemical reactions represent 1 and 0, or in the case of hormones or proteines, 1,2,3,4,5 and more. Everything we do, we were programmed to do it, exactly like we can program a computer to do it.
If we were to program a computer to mimic exactly a human, as in: work, talk, ask questions, even philosophical ones, and be able to write its own code, wouldn't it not be mimicking anymore?
Why would something that dies after a certain time be better than cilicon and metal that can resist time?

I would say that if something can ask itself questions in its "head", it is self-aware. A computer can think witout "saying" it out loud. For me, that's sentient, and self-aware. As said by Ed Kolis, I would think that what divides us isn't self-awarness or not, but the level of self-awarness at witch we are.

[narf poit chez BOOM]

Oh, forget it. I'm not going to repeat the gearbox problem again.

Out.