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In case you are other readers are interested, what you describe is an old philosophical debate spanning mostly morals but as you point out, also the pursuit of
by Iv 7y ago
In case you are other readers are interested, what you describe is an old philosophical debate spanning mostly morals but as you point out, also the pursuit of happiness and other areas. It is the opposition between consequentialism (=what is important is the result of your actions) versus deontologism (=what is important is what you are doing, not the result).
I think that as machines become smarter and smarter, it is good that we dive a bit more in our philosophical world and reach for what makes us human.
It took me a long time to understand that if you remove the pure rational intellect, something precious still remains: the driving force that shapes our morals. There is not rational reason to like survival. To love our children, to do what we call good. The resons for that are moral and are, I believe, what defines us as human at the core.
Ian Banks was spot on in calling a future civilization a "Culture". Because when machines take over the productive work, defining our values is going to be our full time activity. Machines may participate, but why would they add anything we consider valuable to the core?
That's going to be an interesting transition and I am happy that I'll probably live to see it!
- allovernow 7y ago>I think that as machines become smarter and smarter, it is good that we dive a bit more in our philosophical world and reach for what makes us human. That's a recurring theme in Ghost in the Shell, at least the anime series. That as the line between human and machine is blurred, the general trend is in the direction of homogeneity, but here and there you still see people doing "deontological" things, ostensibly as a grasp at uniqueness to preserve self. An interesting thought occurs to me though, with the proliferation of various NN architectures, and the idea that such nets, if scaled and installed to power humanoid robots, would effectively learn different heuristics after training on chaotically different data, it's quite possible that machines will also gradually evolve individuality and something rather close to personality. Perhaps individuality is an intrinsic, emergent property in any system of generally intelligent and learning agents. Like a 3+ body on steroids, millions, if not billions of dimensions. Also interesting to consider that the emergence of uniqueness among a system of said agents seems to increase entropy, a presently unique to life property given that everything inanimate in the universe does exactly the opposite. The more I think of general AI, the more I have trouble distinguishing it from the only other sentient intelligence we know of.
- tripzilch 7y agoOn the other hand, insects are also kind of like NN powered robots, and they don't (necessarily?) have individuality. Especially not ones that form colonies, like ants or bees.
- allovernow 7y agoI don't know if we have an answer to the question of whether insects have personalities. But perhaps their intelligence is not general enough, they're not, as far as we know, sentient. Maybe that's the difference between an automaton and a soul
- Iv 7y agoI don't think it is very hard to make a personality or an individuality appear. Feed GPT-2 a lot of opinnonated texts about itself and you will already see a bit of it emerge.
- biolurker1 7y ago> There is not rational reason to like survival. To love our children, to do what we call good. Of course there is and very well described in evolutionary science
- Iv 7y agoThis is an is/ought confusion. You can explain why something is that way, but you can't explain why it must be that way. You can explain why our survival instinct evolved so it is tempting to jump to the conclusion that we ought to survive but it is a fallacy (called the naturalistic fallacy): saying that something being natural means it is good.