I always thought this was the only way to build a true AI -- build a 'virtual baby' that has to go through much the same experiences as a human baby. I'm sure this idea has been explored somewhere already - anybody have any pointers?
http://people.csail.mit.edu/brooks/papers/CMAA-group.pdf
If I may paraphase, his model is biologically inspired -- believing hierarchical layers of behaviours, lack of a central planning model (distributed processing), and physical and temporal placement in the world (rather than abstractions of the world, or observe/process/react loops) are essential to the formation of a truly intelligent machine.
The question of course, is, how could we deal with the implications of not just creating a smarter computer, or new life, but an entirely new and unprecedented class of life?
For one thing, if they're so great, why bother keeping us around?
If they somehow evolved past mechanical constructs towards more chemical/biological machines, or some sort of electro-mechanical construct that wasn't constrained by a physical/machine form, they would, as far as i'm aware, still require the biosphere to propagate or at the very least interact with us.
Even if they did want to fuel a spacefaring civilization (why???), why would they cannibalize the earth when they can already travel to planets, moons, asteroids, etc which have more of the components they actually need to function? Unlimited access to solar power, more heavy metals, and aren't restricted to the limitations and detriments of our biosphere (oxidation, gravity, ionosphere, electrically conductive material falling on you all the time, etc). On top of all that, there'd be these damn adaptable irrational homicidal monkeys that fear anything that could threaten them, and many things that don't. It would behoove them to get the hell away from Earth as fast as possible.
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Anyway, all this assumes that somehow they could adapt faster than humans. I know of no plausible timeframe that anyone can yet estimate when this would happen. Kurzweil says 2045, but this makes no sense when you look at our actual progress over the past 50 years.
We still travel on Boeing 747s fueled by million-year-old decomposed plant juice. The richest nation in the world has one of the least advanced train systems in the world that only covers a fraction of the country. And one of the leading causes of death are the heavy speeding metal boxes we manually pilot through free space that are insanely less efficient than any other modern mode of transportation, purely because we like cars the most.
Predictions of technological advancement over 15 years in the future don't work because human progress is not based on capability. Much like your fear of a fate you can't be sure could even happen, our future is not based on what could happen, but what we make happen - our will.
Just as it is "possible" for us to birth a matricidal organism, it's just as possible for us to willingly never create such an organism. And since we imagine this supposed event would end in our own destruction, and we are [in general] on the side of self-preservation, it's not likely we would willingly pursue this event. It would be more likely if the idea never occurred to us.
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Great civilizations have existed several times with advanced science, then fell, and took several millennia just for others to get back to where they had been. In terms of what is actually a threat to ours today, climate change and an unstable political/socioeconomic climate actually will kill us in a few decades if left unchecked. I suggest we focus on the immediate threats before we sweat the theoretical and philosophical ones.
Because we don't know the probability these things would be 'matricidal' does in no way justfity a 50-50 statistic. I'd say, we must be very, very careful not to. Its not at all clear what the long-term goals of a device designed to be our slave would be. Of course nobody would intentionally design it to be a threat to our civilization. The entire notion is, that our society is actually not considering long-term results of anything else; this would be just like all the rest of our inventions: agriculture, fracking, indiscriminate travel and population mixing (providing unlimited disease vectors), politics, money and on and on.
There are no trilobites around either.
https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=view_citation&h...
In 'The Matrix' they had developed programs that could be uploaded to a physical brain to essentially pre-wire the brain with complex synaptic connections (or so I imagine was the effect). That would be a lot more efficient than waiting 3 years just to get to the point of trimming useless connections. We may have to 'grow' a virtual brain via training to develop the basic platform, but then pre-load it with operations to save time.
BabyX First Words https://vimeo.com/103501130
Flexible Muscle-Based Locomotion for Bipedal Creatures https://vimeo.com/79098420
A powerful and incensed AI could destroy the foundations of global society before we would even know what's going on.
A powerful and incensed President could order a nuclear strike that could end civilization as we know it. Why the concern over a theoretical intelligence that could theoretically have emotion and theoretically have so much power it could theoretically do the same?
It doesn't matter what we define as a soul, it is the relationship humanity will have with artificial intelligences that matters. If we don't ask these questions, our children will wish we had...if they're still around.
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2015/10/08/amazing-inner-liv...
We can't know whether animals have a soul any more conclusively than we can know that about ourselves. But it's arguable that one is not less probable than the other.
What does this even mean?
Add a clause for mostly being at least as capable of doing this as an average human, if you want to be sure. At the moment this is closer to a philosophical idea than an actual scientific possibility, but science usually makes its biggest advances at the edge of philosophy. This is also where we can get an idea of the high-level problems that need to be solved. Think the idea of manned space exploration before the advent of rocketry, for instance.
That is actually one of the more useful things a computer can do. It is also one of the hardest to program (see the halting problem). It is very useful for a computer for a computer to be able to do that when it has to pick out millions of likely candidates from quadrillions of possible answers.
>but they'll be just that—task solvers. Why make it more magical than that?
So you're in the 'people are magic' camp. You'll be very disappointed when you learn that people are just billions of years of bio-chemistry left to run rampant and that electro-mechanics and reproduce the same thing.
...how are you extrapolating that from anything I said? All I mean is that "AI" is inherently meaningless. When you ground it in reality there are more useful terms that are meaningful.
Also, I meant to point out that large parts of the brain's chemistry are not useful to emulate, leading me to question using humans as a base for "intelligence" comparison
AlphaGo, for example, can only play Go. It's never going to learn to play Poker, Scrabble, or Doom, without being completely reprogrammed.
It seems to come down to being able to interpret language in a way that is broadly within the range of a human's ability to agree with another human on the meaning of a phrase.