So even if we try to program familiarity with the world into the machine, it could only ‘count’ for the purposes of our ability to recognize thoughts once the AI has spent time operating in our world. The upshot of this being that nothing can come off the assembly line as a thinker.
I don’t see how this could be right. Suppose I have an AI that’s spent a long time being and thinking in the world. It’s been trained. Next, I copy it, seven thousand times. We can copy software precisely, so the copies will be indistinguishable from the original, and therefore qualify as thinking. But they will also be factory fresh.
You might want to say “a new copy of an old AI is an old AI”. But there are lots of tweaks we can make to a program+data that will differentiate it, in small ways that don’t materially affect its behavior. Would that not qualify as a new AI?
That’s a good argument, and I don’t want to say that ‘a new copy of an AI is an old AI’, I do think I should say that your only strong evidence for the intelligence of your copies would be their resemblance to your educated original. You’d have to see them operating to see them as intelligent. And I take it that it’s a corollary of the idea of uploading one’s neural-activity that the ‘copy’ isn’t a new being with no experiences or education.
I don’t see how this could be right. Suppose I have an AI that’s spent a long time being and thinking in the world. It’s been trained. Next, I copy it, seven thousand times. We can copy software precisely, so the copies will be indistinguishable from the original, and therefore qualify as thinking. But they will also be factory fresh.
You might want to say “a new copy of an old AI is an old AI”. But there are lots of tweaks we can make to a program+data that will differentiate it, in small ways that don’t materially affect its behavior. Would that not qualify as a new AI?
That’s a good argument, and I don’t want to say that ‘a new copy of an AI is an old AI’, I do think I should say that your only strong evidence for the intelligence of your copies would be their resemblance to your educated original. You’d have to see them operating to see them as intelligent. And I take it that it’s a corollary of the idea of uploading one’s neural-activity that the ‘copy’ isn’t a new being with no experiences or education.