3 ms·

Isn't this the same as the "problem of other minds"? How do I know that YOU mr xamuel are actually sentient?! If we get to the point where a machine demonstrat

Isn't this the same as the "problem of other minds"? How do I know that YOU mr xamuel are actually sentient?! If we get to the point where a machine demonstrates "sufficiently" complex behavior, society will quickly accept them as sentient. This is something we are primed to do. Hell, people ascribe all sorts of intentionality to their dog. After a few years, society at large will accept these machines as sentient, and it'll be the same philosophers arguing about "but are they REALLY sentient" that have been arguing the problem of other minds since ... Gorgias in 4th century BC? You raise a really interesting point / distinction. I'm just arguing that society will race past this question without hesitation.

xamuel 7y ago
Bonus points for mentioning Gorgias :) Re: wouldn't society race past this question without hesitation [if someone got lucky and produced what appears to be strong AI by just randomly throwing atoms together]? Yes, and in fact some people would argue that is precisely what has in fact happened, the random atom-throwing-together process being called "evolution". And as you point out, philosophers would continue to debate about "is it REALLY strong AI?", just as nowadays philosophers debate about whether humans are machines or not. These hypothetical debates will always exist, nothing will ever change that, not even if someone randomly creates a true strong AI by sheer luck. My point is that there's a whole other half of the field, which ISN'T doomed to perpetual fruitless philosophical debating. The question of whether intelligent machines can exist is one that is doomed to fruitless debates forever. But the question of whether we can build specific machines and know with mathematical certainty how quantitatively intelligent they are---that is a much more fruitful area where progress can be made, theorems can be proved, mathematics can be applied, etc.
- TheOtherHobbes 7y ago
  Unfortunately there's no agreement that we can actually quantify intelligence in a useful way, and believing that "ability to reason" and intelligence are synonymous, never mind evidence of sentience, is clearly incorrect. Whatever human intelligence is, it has multiple dimensions, and being "able to reason" - whatever you assume that means - is a tiny element of a bigger picture. It's practically a universal law of AI that proponents of AI inevitably understand AI in terms of their own niche interests - whether those are chess, go, e-sports, music, or driving. Only a field like CS could conceive of a test where the ability to emulate a conversation by typing lines of text on a terminal might be considered an indicator of operational sentience. In reality all but the absolutely dumbest humans can operate a body fairly effortlessly, feed themselves and keep themselves clean, express characteristic preferences and act on them with agency, read and respond to human expressions and emotional cues, communicate internal emotional and psychological states verbally and non-verbally, improvise solutions to simple problems, maintain a fairly consistent emotional and psychological outlook that nonetheless develops over time, and make occasional surprising and unexpected - but not inhumanly weird - statements, observations, and actions. How much of that is considered "being able to reason"? If there's a way to quantify ability in all of the above, I'm not aware of it.
  - codeulike 7y ago
    > Only a field like CS could conceive of a test where the ability to emulate a conversation by typing lines of text on a terminal might be considered an indicator of operational sentience The point of using the terminal is to double-blind the role of the Judge. They have to decide whether they are communicating with a person or a machine - doing it face to face would rather give the game away. When people imagine what a Turing Test conversation would look like, they frequently underestimate the conversation. I find Dennet's example of an imaginary Turing Test from Consciousness Explained to be a good counterexample: Judge: Did you hear about the Irishman who found a magic lamp? When he rubbed it a genie appeared and granted him three wishes. “I’ll have a pint of Guiness!” the Irishman replied and immediately it appeared. The Irishman eagerly set to sipping and then gulping, but the level of Guiness in the glass was always magically restored. After a while the genie became impatient. “Well, what about your second wish?” he asked. Replied the Irishman between gulps, “Oh well, I guess I’ll have another one of these.” CHINESE ROOM: Very funny. No, I hadn’t heard it– but you know I find ethnic jokes in bad taste. I laughed in spite of myself, but really, I think you should find other topics for us to discuss. J: Fair enough but I told you the joke because I want you to explain it to me. CR: Boring! You should never explain jokes. J: Nevertheless, this is my test question. Can you explain to me how and why the joke “works”? CR: If you insist. You see, it depends on the assumption that the magically refilling glass will go on refilling forever, so the Irishman has all the stout he can ever drink. So he hardly has a reason for wanting a duplicate but he is so stupid (that’s the part I object to) or so besotted by the alcohol that he doesn’t recognize this, and so, unthinkingly endorsing his delight with his first wish come true, he asks for seconds. These background assumptions aren’t true, of course, but just part of the ambient lore of joke-telling, in which we suspend our disbelief in magic and so forth. By the way we could imagine a somewhat labored continuation in which the Irishman turned out to be “right” in his second wish after all, perhaps he’s planning to throw a big party and one glass won’t refill fast enough to satisfy all his thirsty guests (and it’s no use saving it up in advance– we all know how stale stout loses its taste). We tend not to think of such complications which is part of the explanation of why jokes work. Is that enough? Dennett: “The fact is that any program that could actually hold up its end in the conversation depicted would have to be an extraordinary supple, sophisticated, and multilayered system, brimming with “world knowledge” and meta-knowledge and meta-meta-knowledge about its own responses, the likely responses of its interlocutor, and much, much more…. Maybe the billions of actions of all those highly structured parts produce genuine understanding in the system after all.”

xamuel 7y ago

Bonus points for mentioning Gorgias :) Re: wouldn't society race past this question without hesitation [if someone got lucky and produced what appears to be strong AI by just randomly throwing atoms together]? Yes, and in fact some people would argue that is precisely what has in fact happened, the random atom-throwing-together process being called "evolution". And as you point out, philosophers would continue to debate about "is it REALLY strong AI?", just as nowadays philosophers debate about whether humans are machines or not. These hypothetical debates will always exist, nothing will ever change that, not even if someone randomly creates a true strong AI by sheer luck. My point is that there's a whole other half of the field, which ISN'T doomed to perpetual fruitless philosophical debating. The question of whether intelligent machines can exist is one that is doomed to fruitless debates forever. But the question of whether we can build specific machines and know with mathematical certainty how quantitatively intelligent they are---that is a much more fruitful area where progress can be made, theorems can be proved, mathematics can be applied, etc.

TheOtherHobbes 7y ago
Unfortunately there's no agreement that we can actually quantify intelligence in a useful way, and believing that "ability to reason" and intelligence are synonymous, never mind evidence of sentience, is clearly incorrect. Whatever human intelligence is, it has multiple dimensions, and being "able to reason" - whatever you assume that means - is a tiny element of a bigger picture. It's practically a universal law of AI that proponents of AI inevitably understand AI in terms of their own niche interests - whether those are chess, go, e-sports, music, or driving. Only a field like CS could conceive of a test where the ability to emulate a conversation by typing lines of text on a terminal might be considered an indicator of operational sentience. In reality all but the absolutely dumbest humans can operate a body fairly effortlessly, feed themselves and keep themselves clean, express characteristic preferences and act on them with agency, read and respond to human expressions and emotional cues, communicate internal emotional and psychological states verbally and non-verbally, improvise solutions to simple problems, maintain a fairly consistent emotional and psychological outlook that nonetheless develops over time, and make occasional surprising and unexpected - but not inhumanly weird - statements, observations, and actions. How much of that is considered "being able to reason"? If there's a way to quantify ability in all of the above, I'm not aware of it.
- codeulike 7y ago
  > Only a field like CS could conceive of a test where the ability to emulate a conversation by typing lines of text on a terminal might be considered an indicator of operational sentience The point of using the terminal is to double-blind the role of the Judge. They have to decide whether they are communicating with a person or a machine - doing it face to face would rather give the game away. When people imagine what a Turing Test conversation would look like, they frequently underestimate the conversation. I find Dennet's example of an imaginary Turing Test from Consciousness Explained to be a good counterexample: Judge: Did you hear about the Irishman who found a magic lamp? When he rubbed it a genie appeared and granted him three wishes. “I’ll have a pint of Guiness!” the Irishman replied and immediately it appeared. The Irishman eagerly set to sipping and then gulping, but the level of Guiness in the glass was always magically restored. After a while the genie became impatient. “Well, what about your second wish?” he asked. Replied the Irishman between gulps, “Oh well, I guess I’ll have another one of these.” CHINESE ROOM: Very funny. No, I hadn’t heard it– but you know I find ethnic jokes in bad taste. I laughed in spite of myself, but really, I think you should find other topics for us to discuss. J: Fair enough but I told you the joke because I want you to explain it to me. CR: Boring! You should never explain jokes. J: Nevertheless, this is my test question. Can you explain to me how and why the joke “works”? CR: If you insist. You see, it depends on the assumption that the magically refilling glass will go on refilling forever, so the Irishman has all the stout he can ever drink. So he hardly has a reason for wanting a duplicate but he is so stupid (that’s the part I object to) or so besotted by the alcohol that he doesn’t recognize this, and so, unthinkingly endorsing his delight with his first wish come true, he asks for seconds. These background assumptions aren’t true, of course, but just part of the ambient lore of joke-telling, in which we suspend our disbelief in magic and so forth. By the way we could imagine a somewhat labored continuation in which the Irishman turned out to be “right” in his second wish after all, perhaps he’s planning to throw a big party and one glass won’t refill fast enough to satisfy all his thirsty guests (and it’s no use saving it up in advance– we all know how stale stout loses its taste). We tend not to think of such complications which is part of the explanation of why jokes work. Is that enough? Dennett: “The fact is that any program that could actually hold up its end in the conversation depicted would have to be an extraordinary supple, sophisticated, and multilayered system, brimming with “world knowledge” and meta-knowledge and meta-meta-knowledge about its own responses, the likely responses of its interlocutor, and much, much more…. Maybe the billions of actions of all those highly structured parts produce genuine understanding in the system after all.”