Because they are not weaknesses necessarily and exactly what did i say that will be copied that is bad.

A machine that doesnt have a sense of ego and even some megalomania to change the world is close to a totalitarian slave soldier and that is a problem.

There is nothing wrong with being a human if society is organized properly and if all our needs are met to proper measure. When you grow up a great human being because your environment and genetics helped you the weaknesses you have are not a big deal if the environment is fine tuned to extract from you maximal greatness. In my opinion almost all people can be great by the way if proper care is taken over all their lives.


Some machine that is like a human but thinks 10^6 times faster and can do abstract calculations without paper and computer screens and can remember 10^9 more things and doesnt need rest very often is already a strong "person" that tops the best humans that ever lived in performance of their specific fields. It takes little effort actually to vastly improve on a human specimen that we agree is super thinker. And it has the option to downgrade itself to human level to see the perspective if needed.

Can you imagine a machine that can ask itself all kinds of questions and perform the calculations of related ideas and very fast offer opinion about possible theories and find their errors/inconsistencies or conseqences faster than the usual time it takes in real life? If a human could do all this and still had all the usual feelings and drives and addictions, it still would be an enormous advantage.

Getting a breakthrough theory is a lot easier if you know all the math that was ever developed for example. You may be able to see a connection where others cant and intuitively arrive at a breakthrough (eg an Einstein that already knew differential geometry would be able to get what is going on with the deviation from flat spacetime faster for example). And of course in applied science/technology you can innovate and design new machines and tools faster than any inventor that ever lived.

Ah, Sparta. Which by the way greatly influence Plato. That explains, at least partially, why his comic book Republic is what it is. Some took it seriously; a really silly mistake.

You are making the same silly mistake. But you are in good company in doing so, so don't take it personally.

I am and forever will be a Physicist and an Athenian first, above Greek or American. Sparta is nowhere near scientific society. Athens on the other hand (the old one) is very close to the core beginning of it and in fact US is as far from Athens as Sparta were then. They are both totalitarian systems. Sparta is a totalitarian state system close to communism and its culturally light and barbaric moreover its good qualities and patriotism/bravery/self sacrifice etc and US is a totalitarian system with the tyrant elite being money itself with all its corruptions and restrictions and disorientation that has hijacked democracy. US has also its advantages but it fails to reach its true potential because of the tyrant.

And that is all there is to it. Some people see the world as is and ask why. I see the world as it will inevitably be one day and ask why not bloody sooner before i die and before registering another monumental opportunity loss?


PS: I am not exactly fond of Plato or Socrates or Alexander the Great for that matter although i respect all of them. They are not strong/positive enough for my style of what qualifies as confident, math oriented, natural philosopher/thinker and wisdom based evolving ethical person that doesnt require excessive wealth or putting down other people to be happy. They do add to the picture though but kids of the real spirit of Athens exist everywhere well after the city was gone like in Archimedes, Eratosthenes etc that are more like my kind of buddies. Odysseus is also my friend and so are Perseus, Theseus and Goddess Athena from the earlier times and mythology (i do not particularly enjoy the rest of the gang). Now you know me a bit better.

Don't think I'm not impressed, Brian. I expect your contribution to this discussion to be valuable. Maybe you could tell me why you think self-awareness should be limited to just awareness of one's own existence and not further awareness of one's self through introspection. Why shouldn't I consider a poet, a writer, a scientist, each who look deeply at life from their own perspectives with the tools they've developed through their intellect and with help from others who relayed their own perspectives and knowledge to them through a social exchange of ideas, and each of whom continuously, probably even unconsciously and iteratively took said experiences and used them to better understand themselves, become more aware of their wants, needs, what drives them and why (which also helps them understand the same traits in others, and can create a feedback loop of general and self awareness), and their unique place in the universe, how to improve their lot, perhaps even create an AI who can do the same - why shouldn't I consider them more self-aware than a baby*?


Great question. It might be that these weaknesses are inherent to self-aware beings due to a constant moral struggle to improve ones own self and situation vs the desire to do right by others. Not sure how this plays out though without any emotional component.

* I am aware that I just Masqued out on you there, and furthermore that I'm stealing your trademark asterisk witticism stylee, this is because I'm so mega self-aware

The largest problem we have is that people are emotional (read: have conscious awareness). The amount of processing power necessary to deal with the individual's emotions and the emotions of others is a massive waste.

It is not close at all to a slave. To be a slave, one must be forced against ones wishes.

Let's say, as a first approximation of this AI machine, a vehicle that it is tasked to get me from LA to San Francisco for a nice dinner in the most efficient way possible (with an eye toward fuel economy, time of travel, and safety). It is given the finest training in physics and math, topography, general traffic patterns and driving instruction. It will be given the ability to find patterns and try out different solutions through logic, simulation and trial and error.

At this level our machines will be the same. Completely autonomous in creatively determining the best solution. I stop there.

You go on further (no need to be concerned with the details on how) to give it emotional/qualitative/conscious awareness of its fate.

My machine will find a solution. Yours will spend most of its time at various body and paint shops and finally determine that it would prefer to drive to Baja for a low rider competition where you will end up dying in a shoot out between rival drug gangs. (I'm being oddly specific in the prediction to make the point light-heartedly)

Yes, well you make this guy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Rogers seem like a pessimist.

I would take issue that greatness is the mark of a properly lived human life. It is certainly something to be celebrated, but a quiet life of fishing is also perfectly good. Greatness (in humans) requires a restless dissatisfaction. This dissatisfaction is not required for a machine to be great.

I don't disagree at all, other than a machine would be greater still.

I didn't say that it ought to be limited. I am saying that you are looking at distinct things when you are considering (1) the qualia of self-awareness and (2) introspection about those qualia and (3) the stuff of problem solving, pattern recognition, math and statistics.

The second requires the first in the individual. The third requires neither the first nor the second in the individual.

At the bolded, regarding qualia, do you mind if I make you 100 times as smart and remove your penis, have you eternally neither hungry nor full, and then ask you to write some poetry or do some science stuff for us? How about if, to make up for it, we allow you to have fake mental orgasms and fake mental hamburgers at will to make up for the penis removal? You signing up for that? Why would you want to put a machine through that?

At the rest, of course that is all fine stuff.

How much more would get done by an individual with no need for motivation; if instead of emotional drives (whether competitive/cooperative as you mention or the other motivations) it simply had an on-off switch?

If all living things are conscious by varying amounts from humans to dogs to birds to single celled organisms, then consciousness isn't something that arose from biological evolution it seems. Just the varying qualities of subjective conscious experience.

If computers can do all the things we can, why is consciousness needed.

If all living things metabolize by varying amounts from humans to dogs to birds to single celled organisms, then metabolism isn't something that arose from biological evolution it seems...

If all living things reproduce in varying quantities from humans to dogs to birds to single celled organisms, then reproduction isn't something that arose from biological evolutions it seems...

If all plants photosynthesize by varying amounts, then photosynthesis isn't something that arose from biological evolution of plants it seems...

...

A slightly more important criticism of the thought is that "all living things are conscious by varying degrees" is true to the same extent as "all living things have psychology degrees by varying degrees."

I apologize for this being so long after the fact, but I'm really interested in the C64 programming that you would do.

So, for example, when it's your C64 versus me, and there is a cover that is lifted at random from both of our mirrors, I would obviously spot myself, but I'm wondering how the C64 would spot itself?

Don't mean to derail, but I think it's important to disprove pointing at a reflection of myself with your C64 programming.

I would program it to flash an outwardly facing light at random intervals and produce an output of "that is me" if it detects the same sequence.

And guess what, if you add another 2000 tests taking place simultaneously about all kinds of patterns of the image, it will probably operate the same way we recognize ourselves in the mirror anyway. We already have computer face recognition systems now. That they identify the person with names from database and not themselves is a matter of programing adjustment or giving each computer a "face".

Of course pretty soon a computer may be able to recognize a person in the dark as well or behind a thin wall or in disguise, surpassing us.


When we recognize something its a very basic operation if you analyze it and allow it to be flexible enough.


What we are (consciousness) is the result of feedback, self programming for a very long time and the law of large numbers. Eventually also observing "our" thoughts as part of the overall world input, as the self programming trial and error make them more complex, is part of the process and enforces the idea of ego as conclusion that will be endlessly verified and accepted as fact! We are truth (scoring) accumulation/convergence machines.

We probably do it a bit different. I was just giving the least computationally complex method I could think of off the top of my head for a read out of "that is me." I used the flashing light as a sort of proxy for proprioception.

You do know that object detection was really difficult for computer scientists to work out, right? They still haven't really perfected it.

Specifically, humans are amazingly good at facial recognition. If you think about it, your ability to recognize a friend at 100 meters is nearly unthinkable given the complexity of the task. Yet you do it with great ease and are greatly upset when you can't, for instance, pick them out in a crowded restaurant!*

I can already easily pass that test! So can you!!!

Most of the earlier advances in robotics and computing were figuring out how to build complex things out of simple things.

The more recent developments have been more statistical in nature. This is more close to how brains actually work! It is really cool.

I doubt that complexity is the super special secret ingredient.

*This is probably worth more than a footnote. Where's Waldo?

Majjjjor grunch, but looking for a good recommendation on singularity/AI/superintelligence reading. I find this stuff fascinating. Is the book in OP still good?

I've been reading the book. It's very interesting. I'm a grad student right now in machine learning (doing an MS at GATech and probably trying to transfer to a phd program next year), and you can tell he's an extremely sharp and prescient guy who knows a lot about CS. Reading it now, you can see a few cases where he was spot on, and a few where he was wrong.

Most of his critics probably haven't read his book, as a lot of the most common criticisms I hear (progress is a sigmoid function, hardware improves exponentially but knowledge does not) are addressed quite early in a convincing fashion. His arguments on the subject are pretty strong, but what I have issue with is the degree of certainty he gives his forecasts is extremely high. We don't know how difficult the problem is, and while he goes into this issue and I don't know enough about the brain to argue with him (plan on learning more), it just seems hard to believe that one can forecast this with the level of accuracy he claims.

Interestingly, if you look at Google, it seems like from their quotes and actions, a big part of their vision has to do with highly advanced AI
-the ultimate version of search "would be like the mind of God" -Sergey Brin
-"if you had all the world’s information directly attached to your brain, or an artificial brain that was smarter than your brain, you’d be better off.” -Brin again, doesn't that sound like something Kurzweil would say?
-"Google will fulfill its mission only when its search engine is AI-complete." -Larry Page
-if you look at the Deepmind guys (acquihired by Google earlier this year for $500m), you can see cofounder Shane Legg's blog talks a lot about human level AI and beyond, and singularity talks by both founders
-Larry Page helped setup Singularity University

The problem is that Kurzweil is highly specific in his predictions and that he is an idea guy.* Will there be progress? Yes. Will it go the direction he thinks it will? Probably not. Will the future be cool? Probably. Will you, if you think about this enough, have nightmares about grey goo? Definitely.

Hints: Concentrate on probability and statistics and learn some cognitive science.

Request: Come back here 10 years from now and thank me.

Further hint: Learn how google's translate thingy works.

*This hardly counts as a problem. Idea guys are cool. The idea guy checker outer guys have to sort through the piles of poo the idea guys excrete to find the gems that they lay like the goose and the golden egg story except for with the addition of poo and gems instead of eggs. I really need to hire an editor who can eliminate mixing metaphors, analogies and folk stories, btw.

Computer passed turing test for the first time yesterday http://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-new...-human-n125786. They cleverly gave themselves an advantage by pretending to be a 13 year old Russian boy, but it's still quite impressive.

5-minute conversation is a crappy rule. Maintain it for 6 months and I'd be impressed.

Thinking about it, not so much. There are several posters who occasionally show up here that I'm not so sure about.

Impressive find. But I'd like 50% clearly better, in fact, why the 30-33%? I'll wait for for the 90%. How the test is done clearly has an impact. How many % would guess a real 13 year old is a computer?

Five minutes and 30% are Turing's predictions for 2000. Obviously it's very far from true AGI, but it's a nice moment in history and does suggest progress in the field.

I'd like a more detailed article with samples otherwise this sounds quite a bit over-hyped. Did they knowingly try to bust the bot and 33% failed?

Rik Mayall passed the test back in the 1980s. He was able to using face-to-face conversation.

Slightly off topic, but seeing headlines of "Rik Mayall Of Drop Dead Fred Dies Age 56" is a bit upsetting.

That is like saying "Smrk2, A Man Who Once Took a Poo In Charlotte TN Dies Age [spoiler]Yeah, like I'm going to tell you when you are going to die.[/spoiler]."

Also. ****. Rik Mayall ****ing died. Fairly good poet:

Why did your spoiler fail? Looks good to me.


I concentrate on the small things nowadays. Big picture can basically go to hell

You got your mojo working; that and free will. Now you can start kicking some Ass.

We don't even have to get the computers for finding beings better than us:

twoplustwo.com/29/news-views-gossip/news-chimps-scientifically-proven-better-than-nvgrs-poker-1451051/

My contribution is post 16. Guess it proves my inferiority?

Waitbutwhy two posts on the topic:

http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artifi...olution-1.html
http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artifi...olution-2.html