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Comment by anon987 | Hacker News Reader

I think all AIs in my lifetime will simply be Chinese Rooms

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room

The question of whether or not AlphaGo is 'really' intelligent is irrelevant to whether it can beat me at chess. The question of whether or not the Pentagon's integrated AI system is really intelligent is similarly irrelevant to whether or not it might undertake a program of action it's creators would object to if they understood what it meant.

The Chinese room argument is irrelevant here.

is it? It seemed to me like author assumes AI decision making will be roughly equivalent to biological decision making, just faster. I thought one of the Chinese room arguments is that biological decisions will always be "different" than AI ones.

Also it seemed like the author assumes great technological advances in AIs, but not in biology. If we're gonna dream shit up why not dream that brains in the future will be 10,000 times as dense and computers won't be able to keep up except as tools.

The point of the Chinese room argument is that while the room receives and emits Chinese just like any Chinaman, it isn't conscious. As the WP article makes clear, the assumption is that the Chinese room is just as competent at emitting Chinese:

"Suppose, says Searle, that this computer performs its task so convincingly that it comfortably passes the Turing test: it convinces a human Chinese speaker that the program is itself a live Chinese speaker. To all of the questions that the person asks, it makes appropriate responses, such that any Chinese speaker would be convinced that they are talking to another Chinese-speaking human being."

> If we're gonna dream shit up why not dream that brains in the future will be 10,000 times as dense

Because... that is not a thing which is happening. And deep learning and AI progress are things that are happening. (Quite aside from the many issues with your proposal, like a brain 10kx as powerful due to 10kx density would probably break thermodynamic limits on computation and of course cook itself to death within seconds.)

whats not a thing thats actually happening? Drugs and other procedures that increase synaptic/neural density are indeed happening.

Like i mentioned, i don't know all the AI terminology but isn't there an unresolved argument that ai architecture in the short run can't mimic biological decision making, and so the decisions will always be different/ tasks for which tool AI will be better to help the biological decision making processes?

No, the Chinese room takes as an assumption that the input and output of the room is the same as someone who "actually understands" Chinese. In other words, it assumes that biological decisions will always be the same as the AI's decision.

I think we will discover that our own consciousness works like the Chinese Room, and acknowledging and internalizing that will cause tremendous unrest between philosophers, computer scientists, neurologists, and other academic disciplines--potentially even including the law.

You are a Chinese room too.

Is this what they call anatta?

That would be my interpretation, yes. To be fair Searle would say that it proves the opposite, but his argument isn't much more than "isn't that crazy?!" (Ok that wasn't very fair.)

It depends who they are. (Ha ha.)

That's one perspective on anatta, but not a particularly useful one. You may find this interesting:

http://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/thanissaro/selves...

  If you've ever taken an introductory course on Buddhism, you've
  probably heard this question: "If there is no self, who does the
  kamma, who receives the results of kamma?" This understanding turns
  the teaching on not-self into a teaching on no self, and then takes
  no self as the framework and the teaching on kamma as something that
  doesn't fit in the framework. But in the way the Buddha taught these
  topics, the teaching on kamma is the framework and the teaching of
  not-self fits into that framework as a type of action. In other
  words, assuming that there really are skillful and unskillful
  actions, what kind of action is the perception of self? What kind of
  action is the perception of not-self?

Or perhaps philosophical zombies?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie

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