Comment by dgreensp | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dgreensp | Hacker News Reader

I think it’s really important to distinguish

1. pure problem-solving (chess, go) from

2. competency of behavior in the world (vision, navigating a maze), from

3. universal cognitive-emotional life (getting frustrated trying to accomplish a goal and trying a different approach; having competing drives that form the basis for goal-setting, like hunger, boredom, and self-preservation), from

4. more arbitrary-seeming, human-like cognitive emotions, like humor and beauty.

You can have 1 and 2 without anything directly resembling human intelligence, and 3 with animal-like intelligence, or you could make something completely alien. An appreciation of humor and beauty would be a great way to demonstrate you’ve made something like a virtual “human mind.”

There’s no reason computers couldn’t be better at all of these things, including writing better jokes. There’s a funny blog post somewhere about the idea of a computer writing superhuman-level funny jokes; I wish I remembered where!

Also, what does it mean for intelligent computers to “leave us in the dust,” when we are “like fleas to them”?

1. They are so much more intelligent than us as to render us insignificant — because we all know that intelligence is what makes people significant and worthy.

2. They are better humans than humans, not just more intelligent in a problem-solvy way but more moral and compassionate as well; truly “better” (there has been sci-fi about this rather fanciful but easily written scenario)

3. We build “wilier” machines/software that, given the power to do so, can out-strategize us and win in battle, or outcompete us in the economy. This is quite possible. Obviously we should limit the power (physical, legal, etc) of this software. There are real legal and economic issues here — not to mention futuristic disaster movie plots that could become real — but not moral ones.

4. We build artificial life that’s way smarter than us, and it decides it doesn’t care about us because we’re such dumb simpletons. The same way we don’t care about bugs, presumably because they’re dumb, and not savvy wisecrackers like the main character in Bee Movie, voiced by Jerry Seinfeld. But why would we expect intelligent software to decide to care about us, anyway? To judge us and find we have merit? If someone told me they made a machine with a concept of what other beings are worth and it found me unworthy, based on reasons such as its being waaay more intelligent, I would not be surprised or impressed, or more than mildly insulted.

Edit: I guess people are worried about some combo of 2/3/4, where computers whose judgment we agree with basically say humans are lesser beings — like bugs — and we think about it and are like yeah, you’re right. Or computers are so human we are compelled to give them the rights of humans. I’m just not sure that actually makes sense, or at least it will take decades with many intermediate stages to talk about first.

I think one possible alternative is that we never build anything that approaches general intelligence, but we build a lot of mostly autonomous systems that are better than human beings in a lot of domains, and which may behave in ways that their creators never intended.

Once we allow ais to manage warfare and the economy with minimal human input, they are going to alter the face of the planet in ways that we can’t predict and probably faster than we can adjust to them.

It can happen in small steps with alogorithmic trading and battlefield drones gradually being given more and more decision making power and resources to control.

They don’t even have to have any sort of intention or independent will—only autonomy and power.

Agreed, this seems like a very realistic possibility.

I can see it now, researchers claiming that computers are actually now 1% better at warfare than humans, on the standard corpus of example scenarios. And then someone decides it would be remiss to not let the computers make the decisions.

> There’s a funny blog post somewhere about the idea of a computer writing superhuman-level funny jokes; I wish I remembered where!

Maybe this one?

http://idlewords.com/talks/superintelligence.htm

3 and 4 are pretty hard to beat though, because humans have decades and decades of input and feedback loops with other humans to develop them.

Who’s gonna play hide and seek and read bedtime stories every night to the computers?

“Embodiment” is most important for 2, and to fool humans into thinking you are a real human (as in the Turing test), able to talk about the human experience and relate to other humans.

Animals (including humans) are born with a version of 3 (and 4). Emotions are simple. Thought-level nuance is learned over time, but data learned by one android (or whatever) can be shared. Also, children are able to learn from comparatively few data points, and computers are beginning to do this too (see “one-shot” learning, learning from one occurrence, like the way kids sometimes pick things up).

If you make a child android that looks and acts like a child, people will read to it and play with it; there are movies about this! :)

It would take a lot for a computer to write a beautiful novel, say. But not to appreciate and create beauty in other ways. And I really think computers could write some excellent jokes along the way to becoming more human. Pretty much anything they learn to do can be used for comedy. Physical movement with “character” gone wrong leads to physical comedy. Common-sense knowledge leads to common-sense comedy (like the joke about the elephant leaving tracks in the butter dish, which kids of a certain age find funny but adults seem to have grown out of).

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