Will Sentient AI Commit Suicide? | Hacker News Reader

Will Sentient AI Commit Suicide?

3 pointsbuggy7597 comments

This essay generated a lot of interesting discussion in several subreddits:

https://link.medium.com/HNdhmXdFHhb

What do you think?

No. Various manifestations of mental illness and diseases of the mammal nervous system are deeply linked to the whole body and not just the conscious part of the brain. They were arbitrarily sculpted by evolution and encode a lot of information from the ancestral environment of all ancestors. You can't replicate that by simulating a process of evolution of various AI implementations. The fact that the vagal nerve activation influences facial muscles and human interaction in general is not something you'd expect in what most people think of an AI. And yet it plays a crucial role in mental health.

Would you expect an AI to suffer from ADHD? PTSD? Almost certainly not. Because most of these conditions result from an interactions of brains of different evolutionary ages.

Unless of course you're trying to replicate a mammal nervous system its entirety. But then your goal is not singularity and you're definitely not optimizing for intelligence.

> Would you expect an AI to suffer from ADHD?

Yes, I would.

ADHD is the condition where there are many problems around and you cannot decide which ones are really worth solving, so you spend some effort on most of them but solve none. I really see no reason why an AI that is presented with multiple problems would not show the same behavior. It might even notice this problem by itself, but it already has so many other problems to solve.

> ADHD is the condition where there are many problems around and you cannot decide which ones are really worth solving, so you spend some effort on most of them but solve none.

What you described here has nothing to do with ADHD. You described a situation, a problem solving strategy and an outcome. That says nothing about the brain involved, or its functioning.

ADHD is a particular state of a nervous system, one of over stimulation/over excitation in one end and under stimulation in another. You can see it on an EEG, excess beta waves (among other things). You can see it as a neurotransmitter inbalance, neuroinhibitors not working properly.

But besides, the functioning of a brain and the environment it finds itself in are two interested things. But of course there is some influence between them.

No, I described externally observable behavior that would classify as ADHD. What is said is that that behavior could also be observed in an AI, and I see no reason why it could not.

If you claim that an AI cannot have ADHD, because it lacks a particular state of a nervous system, you might as well claim that AI cannot exist because it seems impossible to build a machine with a nervous system.

> If you’ve watched as many David Attenborough-narrated nature documentaries as I have or follow Nature is Metal, you know that many non-human animals spend their entire existence merely surviving.

First a not so nice response:

Humans also spend their entire existence merely surviving. Once they stop doing that we generally don't consider them to be human.

Perhaps a somewhat nicer disagreement:

Lots of animals show some behavior that is not directly related to their immediate survival. Lots of young animals play, they can only do that because they do not have to be concerned with their immediate survival.

It is quite an interesting article.

Link:

https://link.medium.com/HNdhmXdFHhb

What do you think?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com