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Self driving car, image / voice recognition, or even getting the classification / meaning of language texts is a far simpler task than a full self-conscious AI,

Self driving car, image / voice recognition, or even getting the classification / meaning of language texts is a far simpler task than a full self-conscious AI, or even an AI that can simulate a conscious mind but not really have one (e.g. a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie, i.e. such an AI can talk about art all day, perhaps even create art and pass a turing test, but it never "experienced" art). Were there any advances in cognitive AI that justify all this "AI revolution" talk? didn't we simply get really good at deep learning and better at image recognition / voice recognition / language translation that is definitely laudable but still far from the "Ex Machina" depiction?

chriswarbo 11y ago
> Self driving car, image / voice recognition, or even getting the classification / meaning of language texts is a far simpler task than a full self-conscious AI, or even an AI that can simulate a conscious mind but not really have one I disagree. Self-driving cars, image/voice recognition and classification/meaning-extraction for text are well-defined problems, with associated benchmarks, competitions, etc. These are hard problems. On the other hand "full self-conscious AI" and "AI that can simulate a conscious mind but not really have one" are collections of words whose main reason for existence is to allow their user to keep redefining them arbitrarily in order to win arguments (see, for example, John Searle). I define "self-conscious" as being able to reason about onesself, where "reason" means performing some nontrivial computation and "onesself" means the pattern of information consitituting the agent (human, device, program, etc.). Hence, I declare the multi-quines at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quine_(computing)#Ouroboros_programs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quine_(computing)#Ouroboros_pr... as examples of "full self-conscious AI". Further, I define "mind" as a computational process taking place in physical matter, and a "conscious mind" as a mind capable of reason. Hence I declare that the text "1 + 1" is an AI that can simulate a conscious mind (when given to an interpreter like python) without really having one (since the text performs no computation).

chriswarbo 11y ago

> Self driving car, image / voice recognition, or even getting the classification / meaning of language texts is a far simpler task than a full self-conscious AI, or even an AI that can simulate a conscious mind but not really have one I disagree. Self-driving cars, image/voice recognition and classification/meaning-extraction for text are well-defined problems, with associated benchmarks, competitions, etc. These are hard problems. On the other hand "full self-conscious AI" and "AI that can simulate a conscious mind but not really have one" are collections of words whose main reason for existence is to allow their user to keep redefining them arbitrarily in order to win arguments (see, for example, John Searle). I define "self-conscious" as being able to reason about onesself, where "reason" means performing some nontrivial computation and "onesself" means the pattern of information consitituting the agent (human, device, program, etc.). Hence, I declare the multi-quines at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quine_(computing)#Ouroboros_programs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quine_(computing)#Ouroboros_pr... as examples of "full self-conscious AI". Further, I define "mind" as a computational process taking place in physical matter, and a "conscious mind" as a mind capable of reason. Hence I declare that the text "1 + 1" is an AI that can simulate a conscious mind (when given to an interpreter like python) without really having one (since the text performs no computation).