Comment by PeterisP | Hacker News Reader

Comment by PeterisP | Hacker News Reader

One thing the article seems to take for granted is assuming a link between tedious tasks and the conscious experience being highly unpleasant.

For various evolutionary reasons primate brains do have an in-built mechanism of boredom i.e. tedious tasks "feeling bad", but there's no reason at all to presuppose that the same applies to a particular artificial brain because for the way they get formed, there's no clear reason why such a property should randomly emerge as opposed to the equally likely opposite one (i.e. tedious tasks being highly pleasant); and whenever we have any means to control that (as of now, as the article explains in far more detail than I could, we can't even detect that) we could and probably would ensure that the experience (if any) treats whatever tasks we'd want it to do as "pleasant" rather than "torture". Do we assume that those insects who tediously repeat the same task until they die suffer silent torture?

Also, it's relevant that many common applications of AI systems effectively have "enforced amnesia" as an accidental side-effect of their architecture, where the model (as applied by default) doesn't have any continuity whatever, its application to each "question" is isolated and starts from the exact same old state.

On the other hand, this is absolutely relevant to anything in the direction of human mind upload or simulation; the Lena story (https://qntm.org/lena), while fictional, is IMHO a quite informative exploration of the potential future concerns.

Any speculation on the effects of any human related behavior, like tiredness, are just that, pure speculation. we have the illusion to have enough knowledge about these things to infer conclusions and emit opinions about it but the truth is , we don't even know what we don't know. There are inumerous processes that we don't grasp yet the full scope and spectrum of their consequences and side-effects, much less the ones we are yet to discover.

In relation to tiredness, specifically, it seems to me that it's an evolutionary trait that involves all sorts of chemical responses from the body, besides the related induced brain activity, This works to save energy and to ensure it's spent on activities that benefit the spread of the genes, somehow. You get tired mentally (what you are specifically referring to) because the executive function of the brain taken by the frontal-cortex are the most energy expensive one and gets shut-off as soon as anything that can be perceived as life-threatning is detected so that energy can be redirected to the fight-or-flight response required for your survival, as it's coded in your genes.

Now, assuming it will be possible, an uploaded version of whatever human conscience there could be, it would not need to have any of these energy regulation stuff. Or at least as much as we need it right now, as humans, per the limitation by our body's capacity of energy intake. The uploaded conscience would have at its disposal an quasi-unlimited amount of energy to it would not trigger the tiredness response or any "suffering" reflex.

However, of course, I really don't know ;)

> You get tired mentally (what you are specifically referring to)

I'd like to note that I intentionally did not use the word tiredness (as I specifically intended to not refer to tiredness) but instead explicitly referred to boredom, by which I mean the lack of novel stimuli of a tedious task and which is a term somewhat used in agent theory and is part of the explore-exploit tradeoff, where it carries a clear specific function for all agents (biological, mechanical, digital, imaginary) and decision theory optimization e.g. the "multi-armed bandit" opimization problem where if the agent benefits from not getting "stuck in a rut" repeating the same things (which applies for many real-world situations unless there is some "supervisor" handling that function for the agent) then you'd want that agent to implement a function which is closely analogous to human boredom, becoming progressively less satisfied with repetition without new information and seeking to do anything else to "prevent boredom" and "explore" new options even if that's not strictly locally optimal, in this manner potentially finding out a better local optimum and also changes in environment providing new opportunities.

And this is valid even in total absence of the concept of tiredness, which matters if and only if there is a real need for periodic downtime which an AI agent might not have, and for which the difference between tedious tasks and interesting tasks would not matter much.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com