“A Thinking Machine! Yes, we can now have our thinking done for us by machinery! The Editor of the Common School Advocate says—” On our way to Cincinnati, a few days since, we stopped over night where a gentleman from the city was introducing a machine which he said was designed to supercede the necessity and labor of thinking. It was highly and respectably recommended, by men too in high places, and is designed for a calculator, to save the trouble of all mathematical labor. By turning the machinery it produces correct results in addition, substraction, multiplication, and division, and the operator assured us that it was equally useful in fractions and the higher mathematics.” The Editor thinks that such machines, by which the scholar may, by turning a crank, grind out the solution of a problem without the fatigue of mental application, would by its introduction into schools, do incalculable injury, But who knows that such machines when brought to greater perfection, may not think of a plan to remedy all their own defects and then grind out ideas beyond the ken of mortal mind!” --- The Primitive Expounder in 1847
summerstay
Here’s my advice: always check Snopes before forwarding anything.
Great! This means that in order to develop an AI with a proper moral foundation, we just need to reduce the following statements of ethical guidance to predicate logic, and we’ll be all set:
Be excellent to each other.
Party on, dudes!
One rational ability that people are really good at that is hard (i.e. we haven’t made much progress in automating) is applying common sense knowledge to language understanding. Here’s a collection of sentences where the referent is ambiguous, but we don’t even notice because we are able to match it up as quickly as we read: http://www.hlt.utdallas.edu/~vince/data/emnlp12/train-emnlp12.txt
Can you give me a concrete course of action to take when I am writing a paper reporting my results? Suppose I have created two versions of a website, and timed 30 people completing a task on each web site. The people on the second website were faster. I want my readers to believe that this wasn’t merely a statistical coincidence. Normally, I would do a t-test to show this. What are you proposing I do instead? I don’t want a generalization like “use Bayesian statistics, ” but a concrete example of how one would test the data and report it in a paper.
This is exactly the point of asking “What Would Jesus Do?” Christians are asking themselves, what would a perfectly moral, all-knowing person do in this situation, and using the machinery their brains have for simulating a person to find out the answer, instead of using the general purpose reasoner that is so easily overworked. Of course, simulating a person (especially a god) accurately can be kind of tricky. Similar thoughts religious people use to get themselves to do things that they want to abstractly but are hard in the moment: What would I do if I were the kind of person I want to become? What would a perfectly moral, all-knowing person think about what I’m about to do?
This sort of argument was surprisingly common in the 18th and 19th century compared to today. The Federalist Papers, for example, lay out the problem as a set of premises leading inexorably to a conclusion. I find it hard to imagine a politician successfully using such a form of argument today.
At least that’s my impression; perhaps appeals to authority and emotion were just as common in the past as today but selection effects prevent me from seeing them.
Perhaps Columbus’s “genius” was simply to take action. I’ve noticed this in executives and higher-ranking military officers I’ve met—they get a quick view of the possibilities, then they make a decision and execute it. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t, but the success rate is a lot better than for people who never take action at all.
When people make purchasing decisions, pricing models that are too complex make them less likely to purchase. If it’s too confusing to figure out whether something is a good deal or not, we generally tend to just assume it’s a bad deal. See http://ideas.repec.org/p/ags/ualbsp/24093.html (Choice Environment, Market Complexity and Consumer Behavior: A Theoretical and Empirical Approach for Incorporating Decision Complexity into Models of Consumer Choice), for example.
No effect from practice? How would the necessary mental structures get built for the mapping from the desired sound to the finger motions for playing the violin? Are you saying this is all innate? What about language learning? Anyone can write like Shakespeare in any language without practice? Sorry, I couldn’t believe it even if such an AI told me that.
Summa Theologica is a good example of what happens when you have an excellent deductive system (Aquinas was great at syllogisms) and flawed axioms (a literal interpretation of the Bible).
I turned in my PhD dissertation. Here’s the title and first paragraph of the abstract:
PRODUCTIVE VISION: METHODS FOR AUTOMATED IMAGE COMPREHENSION
Image comprehension is the ability to summarize, translate, and answer basic questions about images. Using original techniques for scene object parsing, material labeling, and activity recognition, a system can gather information about the objects and actions in a scene. When this information is integrated into a deep knowledge base capable of inference, the system becomes capable of performing tasks that, when performed by students, are considered by educators to demonstrate comprehension.
(Basically it is computer vision combined with Cyc.)
Wait, there are solved problems in ethics?
Thanks, I’ll try that.
Regarding Cyberpunk, Gibson wasn’t actually making a prediction, not in the way you’re thinking. He was always making a commentary on his own time by exaggerating certain aspects of it. See here, for instance: http://boingboing.net/2012/09/13/william-gibson-explains-why-sc.html
This kind of attitude is common among my friends who are more technical, but it can really damage communications with most people. “You’re an idiot” doesn’t just communicate “you’re wrong” it says that you lack the ability to think at all, so all of your conclusions, whether related to this subject at all, are worthless. A good friend might take that in the way you intend, but there’s no reason anyone else should. What is being called a Dark Art is something that Hermione would use; something that shows that you care about the other person’s feelings, that you want to avoid causing pain where you can. It’s a kindness. Sure, most of us can handle rough sports like intellectual boxing when we know what we’re getting into, but most people aren’t expecting to be sparring in a conversation.
I’m guessing you mean Man After Man: An Anthropology of the Future by Dougal Dixon. More a horror book than a rational extrapolation of future human evolution. For a great early attempt at this kind of thing, take a look at Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men, published in 1930.
Check out “Counterfactuals Can’t Count” for a response to this. Basically, if a recording is different in what it experiences than running a computation, then two computations that calculate the same thing in the same way, but one has bits of code that never run, experience things differently.
We know that some complex processes in our own brains happen unaccompanied by qualia. This is uncontroversial. It doesn’t seem unlikely to me that all the processes needed to fake perceptual consciousness convincingly could be implemented using a combination of such processes. I don’t know what causes qualia in my brain and so I’m not certain it would be captured by the emulation in question—for example, the emulation might not be at a high enough level of detail, might not exploit quantum mechanics in the appropriate way, or whatever. Fading and dancing qualia arguments are not really convincing to me because I don’t trust my intuition to guide me well in situations where my core self is directly being operated on.
In other words, I am uncertain and so would tend to stick with what I know works (my biological brain) instead of trusting an uploading process to maintain my qualia. (note: ‘qualia’ may be an unfamiliar term. It means what it is like to experience something, the redness of red. It’s a better word to use than consciousness for this because it is more specific.)
Interviewer: How do you answer critics who suggest that your team is playing god here?
Craig Venter: Oh… we’re not playing.