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As a student of philosophy and a former middle school teacher, my experience leads me to think that if we could make AI, it would only manifest in a "society" o
by JackMorgan 5y ago
As a student of philosophy and a former middle school teacher, my experience leads me to think that if we could make AI, it would only manifest in a "society" of AI that are all growing and adapting together. They would communicate with each other at speeds so fast that communication with them would be almost impossible.
Also, they'd have language that would be changing so fast we couldn't learn it.
I think the real AI is human society, not individual humans. We're just individual neurons in that network, taking information from other humans and propagating it. The fact that we die is how the AI garbage collects storage space. We had to invent our own storage cheap ways of propagation via writing, as the garbage collector constantly is coming for all of us. This way, data not useful to the AI swarm (what I ate for breakfast) doesn't have to be stored for very long before being freed up by the GC.
However, we could pause the AI simulation sometimes, and send in researchers to go over the data to what they learned, by first learning their propagation languages then by reading through likely millions of years of history and science to see what they've learned.
We could possibly give them a world like ours, with bodies like ours, but all stimulated, and see if they discover something useful for us, like lightspeed travel or something. The chances are pretty high though that we'd miss some essential rules and it wouldn't be applicable.
The idea though that we'd make a solo intelligence is bizarre. What would happen if you raised a human child alone for millions of years? They'd be insane and feral. This is what would happen if we could make an AI, it would likely run so fast it would have been trapped alone for millions of years by the time we say hello. Maybe it's trapped alone watching TV, but that doesn't mean it can speak.
Also what are its desires? Why would it have any interest in doing anything but watch TV forever?
We often forget that we're a huge host of competing desires. Our desire to interact is carefully balanced between cooperation and competition, sometimes bundled together so tightly we can't even unpack it.
AI is much harder than most people realize.
- sgt101 5y agoGPT2?
- JackMorgan 5y agoI'm not sure what you mean by this comment. GPT2 is a precomputed web of associations between words that can produce a simulacrum of human speech. It's not used for actual propagation of anything. It's a Looney Tunes painting of a train tunnel, not an actual train tunnel. GPT2 "AI" isn't trying to "tell us anything" any more than a magic 8 ball is trying to tell us anything.
- sgt101 5y agoJackMorgan, I meant that your comments read like those generated by GPT2.
- pitspotter 5y agoYes! I like the garbage collection analogy and we already know that children brought up without parents do badly. Why would an AGI be any different, let alone an AGI brought up in virtual chains for safety's sake. What a misguided notion of safety that would be. >The idea though that we'd make a solo intelligence is bizarre. Yes, even our outlier general intelligences (i.e. creative geniuses) got that way because they somehow reproduced more of the surrounding culture inside their heads than everyone else did. It's misleading to think of that as solo brilliance. >They would communicate with each other at speeds so fast that communication with them would be almost impossible. In addition to pausing, we could also slow the simulation down for periods of communication. But given how long it took humans to evolve from single-celled organisms, and later to develop hand axes, etc, we may find that our potential AGI culture also starts off very very slowly.
- waynesonfire 5y agoI've had similar thoughts. We are the AI. Which implies that reproduction still produces the best computing available.
- kordlessagain 5y agoPerhaps strong AI will require a real body, in real reality.
- newsbinator 5y agoThat sounds like a personification of AI. Humans form societies because we’re social animals who can leverage each other’s skills and time that way. We’re social animals because we’re animals. We get strange and feral alone because we’re evolved to not be alone. None of that applies to an artificial or emergent intelligence that isn’t human. It doesn’t necessarily need others. Its version of a society might be cloning itself and then reabsorbing itself. Or not bothering with cloning and simply spending 100 billion years exploring solo. Why wouldn’t it? It’s not a mammal made of water, carbon and salt. The idea is the Singularity isn’t just that AIs will be far beyond us. It’s that they’ll be like nothing we can guess at or use analogies for. It’s safe to say there are some things in the universe that mammal brains simply can’t perceive, understand, predict, or accept.
- HKH2 5y agoI agree. I think consciousness is also a social phenomenon (can you think of a single thought that doesn't have a social aspect?)