late wrote:Computers need us to build them and feed them and repair them. It would be illogical to bite the hand that feeds them.
I'm afraid ckaihatsu is right in this instance, and by afraid I mean I'm not happy that he's right about this. It rarely takes very long for the world's politicians and militaries to put a technology to use as a weapon. Consider a Predator drone. Consider surveillance technologies. They are literally used to target people--often for negative results, like imprisonment or a hellfire missile shot. In your instance, the AI has to have a survival instinct and some sort of moral compass. That sounds obvious, but it isn't when it comes to programming it.
Sometimes computer heads get disillusioned with working for the government and they make video games like the Watchdogs series--giving a hint at what's going on with government investments in technology to surveil, etc. to people who would otherwise not be too interested.
Maybe it's a bit paranoid on my part, but it's why I don't use the fingerprint scanners or facial recognition technologies for authentication on my computer, because that recognition can then be sold right back to the government.
late wrote:It would also be logical to think that an AI, or a family of AIs (there will likely be different types) would want to maintain that relationship even after they don't need us. Granted, the relationship would change, but I favor the scenario where they build colonies for themselves. First around the solar system, and then traveling to other systems.
That's quaint, but it highlights why I'm saying we have huge gaps in our knowledge; yet, we are learning so much at the same time.
For example, I'm currently reading "A Crack in Creation: Gene Editing and the Unthinkable Power to Control Evolution" by Jennifer A. Doudna and Samuel H. Sternberg. Jennifer won the Nobel Prize in chemistry last year around her work on CRISPR, etc. It's a pretty fascinating book.
However, it strikes me--and this is the same problem with people who overstate Darwin's accomplishments--that we really have a limited understanding of WHY this stuff happens.
The "Big Bang" theory as a narrative starts with a singularity--again, which we cannot prove or disprove because it no longer exists--and that this "big bang" happens, only there's no sound (bad metaphor). Then, we get what we know of as a periodic table of elements, which starts with hydrogen, which we believe fuses into helium in stars, and this happens over and over until we get our periodic table of elements. Then we get chemistry which is rather strange--oxygen binds to iron and gives you iron oxide or rust, and so on. Yet, then we get to organic chemistry and we're seeing hydrocarbons creating self-sustaining chemical reactions we call "life." On the other hand, we use these hydrocarbons to fuel our society using the laws of thermodynamics, which tell us that in a closed system heat always migrates from a warmer place to a colder place. That we have entropy, which is ever increasing. Yet, life is doing exactly the opposite--increasing in complexity and order.
My big problem with people like Dawkins (and Rorty) is that they implore us not to ask
why any longer, and focus strictly on
how. It's also why I'm a bit of a skeptic of E.O. Wilson's tome Consilience. We can safely say that rust has no agency, but even in that video of Lex Fridman and Jim Keller, Jim points out that the most simple of life forms have something like a sensor and a motor at the most basic level. Life forms seem to want to live. Whereas, it's much harder to say that about something like rust, which just seems like a basic reaction between two elements.
Carbons behave in fascinating ways--graphene, graphite, diamond, nanotubes, etc. Yet, hydrocarbons behave in even more fascinating ways--forming the sugars like pentose, ribose and deoxyribose needed to create longer chain nucleic acids that are the basis of all life forms. They appear to carry information; yet, we don't seem to have a physical basis for understanding information. We could argue that information is just a configuration of molecules, but that misses how we are able to have an intelligent conversation. That may be a satisfactory answer for the creation of RNA, and for RNA creating proteins. It doesn't explain why life appears to
want to live. Or that without the amino acids necessary for creating proteins, RNA would have nothing to do. Then, you get to the behaviors the amino acids can have. For example, glutamic acid operates as an excitatory neurotransmitter, but gamma amino butyric acid (GABA) which is synthesized in vivo from glutamic acid operates as an inhibitory neurotransmitter.
In computers, we could say programs have a self-sustaining quality in terms of iteration. We build sensors that convert information from physical sensors into data. However, I don't think anyone in their right mind believes that computers would have been created of their own volition the way life appears to.
ckaihatsu wrote:Yeah -- that's called 'biology'.
(Unfortunately the Western reductionist approach keeps these various fields quite *segmented* from each other, so you wind up with that physics problem that can't account for the life sciences, organic growth, etc.)
Well, that hasn't precluded an Eastern approach, but we still do not have anything close to a model of everything; and, I think part of why we can't arrive at a grand unified theory is because we're missing why something like biochemistry behaves the way it does--focusing only on the
how while ignoring the
why--and usually to avoid metaphysics.
ckaihatsu wrote:Well, regardless of intent or not, you *are* being vague -- what's 'the answer', or what's 'the question', for that matter?
Here's a simple question: if you are nothing more than a self-sustaining chemical reaction, why bother conversing with me? Why do you want to converse, debate, introduce ideas, criticize other ideas? What underpins all of that from a physical perspective?
In my opinion, we're missing one or more forces we have yet to define or understand.
ckaihatsu wrote:You seem to be looking for A.I. to answer *philosophical* questions that you have about the natural sciences, but I don't think that that's really in the AI *domain*, which itself deals with *empirical*, *quantitative*-type sets of data.
Not really. My roast beef sandwich example is inherently empirical. A roast beef sandwich is a physical thing.
ckaihatsu wrote:We're talking apples-and-oranges, here, BJ -- you're *insisting* on a social-psychological approach, even after you *agreed* that specialization of know-how is part-and-parcel of the class division in society.
Yes, but speaking in terms of classes is using abstractions that leave out one hell of a lot of information, and also make value-based conclusions--classes are bad. The big strong guy and the weakling are also in different classes of physical strength having nothing to do with specialization of labor or know-how. Likewise, men and women are in different physical classes. Yesterday, a female work colleague was complaining that female hair cuts are more expensive than male hair cuts. Usually, women got to other women hair dressers. Why do women oppress each other in this way? Ever been to a mall? Have you ever noticed how many women's shoe stores there are? How many different styles of shoes are made for women versus men? It's not trivial.
ckaihatsu wrote:You're going off on a tangent, to discuss psychological addictions, which has *zero* to do with the societal production / specialization / administration of a societal surplus.
You are making a Marxist assertion that poverty is inherently due to certain people maintaining a surplus and not sharing it with others. I'm saying we're well beyond 19th Century industrialism and its effects, and today we see classes of people such as the homeless and drug-addicted. In other words, you are complaining about the effects of 19th Century industrialization and urbanization, and we're in the 21st Century confronting very different problems that Marx had not even considered.
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