14 ms·

AI: Is pain the key?

3 points by codecurve 15y ago

mistercow 15y ago
Nope. AI is a big, complicated field into which tons of man-hours have been poured, and you aren't going to stumble upon the "secret ingredient" with your vague armchair philosophizing about the nature of cognition. Look, for example, at audio compression. The last few decades have seen a lot of progress in this field, which lately has tapered off as most of the low-hanging fruit has already been picked. Now, say I come along with nothing but the most cursory understanding of how sound is encoded digitally, and say "Well, until we figure out how to give a computer the qualitative experience of harmony, I feel that we will never have truly effective audio compression." Would you say I was contributing anything of value to the discussion?
Apocryphon 15y ago
Once again, the giants of sci-fi have beaten the scientists to the punch. From Douglas Adams' Mostly Harmless: A robot was programmed to believe that it liked herring sandwiches. This was actually the most difficult part of the whole experiment. Once the robot had been programmed to believe that it liked herring sandwiches, a herring sandwich was placed in front of it. Whereupon the robot thought to itself, `Ah! A herring sandwich! I like herring sandwiches.' It would then bend over and scoop up the herring sandwich in its herring sandwich scoop, and then straighten up again. Unfortunately for the robot, it was fashioned in such a way that the action of straightening up caused the herring sandwich to slip straight back off its herring sandwich scoop and fall on to the floor in front of the robot. Whereupon the robot thought to itself, `Ah! A herring sandwich..., etc., and repeated the same action over and over and over again. The only thing that prevented the herring sandwich from getting bored with the whole damn business and crawling off in search of other ways of passing the time was that the herring sandwich, being just a bit of dead fish between a couple of slices of bread, was marginally less alert to what was going on than was the robot. The scientists at the Institute thus discovered the driving force behind all change, development and innovation in life, which was this: herring sandwiches. They published a paper to this effect, which was widely criticised as being extremely stupid. They checked their figures and realised that what they had actually discovered was `boredom', or rather, the practical function of boredom. In a fever of excitement they then went on to discover other emotions, Like `irritability', `depression', `reluctance', `ickiness' and so on. The next big breakthrough came when they stopped using herring sandwiches, whereupon a whole welter of new emotions became suddenly available to them for study, such as `relief', `joy', `friskiness', `appetite', `satisfaction', and most important of all, the desire for `happiness'. This was the biggest breakthrough of all. Vast wodges of complex computer code governing robot behaviour in all possible contingencies could be replaced very simply. All that robots needed was the capacity to be either bored or happy, and a few conditions that needed to be satisfied in order to bring those states about. They would then work the rest out for themselves.

3 points by codecurve 15y ago

Nope. AI is a big, complicated field into which tons of man-hours have been poured, and you aren't going to stumble upon the "secret ingredient" with your vague armchair philosophizing about the nature of cognition. Look, for example, at audio compression. The last few decades have seen a lot of progress in this field, which lately has tapered off as most of the low-hanging fruit has already been picked. Now, say I come along with nothing but the most cursory understanding of how sound is encoded digitally, and say "Well, until we figure out how to give a computer the qualitative experience of harmony, I feel that we will never have truly effective audio compression." Would you say I was contributing anything of value to the discussion?

Apocryphon 15y ago

Once again, the giants of sci-fi have beaten the scientists to the punch. From Douglas Adams' Mostly Harmless: A robot was programmed to believe that it liked herring sandwiches. This was actually the most difficult part of the whole experiment. Once the robot had been programmed to believe that it liked herring sandwiches, a herring sandwich was placed in front of it. Whereupon the robot thought to itself, `Ah! A herring sandwich! I like herring sandwiches.' It would then bend over and scoop up the herring sandwich in its herring sandwich scoop, and then straighten up again. Unfortunately for the robot, it was fashioned in such a way that the action of straightening up caused the herring sandwich to slip straight back off its herring sandwich scoop and fall on to the floor in front of the robot. Whereupon the robot thought to itself, `Ah! A herring sandwich..., etc., and repeated the same action over and over and over again. The only thing that prevented the herring sandwich from getting bored with the whole damn business and crawling off in search of other ways of passing the time was that the herring sandwich, being just a bit of dead fish between a couple of slices of bread, was marginally less alert to what was going on than was the robot. The scientists at the Institute thus discovered the driving force behind all change, development and innovation in life, which was this: herring sandwiches. They published a paper to this effect, which was widely criticised as being extremely stupid. They checked their figures and realised that what they had actually discovered was `boredom', or rather, the practical function of boredom. In a fever of excitement they then went on to discover other emotions, Like `irritability', `depression', `reluctance', `ickiness' and so on. The next big breakthrough came when they stopped using herring sandwiches, whereupon a whole welter of new emotions became suddenly available to them for study, such as `relief', `joy', `friskiness', `appetite', `satisfaction', and most important of all, the desire for `happiness'. This was the biggest breakthrough of all. Vast wodges of complex computer code governing robot behaviour in all possible contingencies could be replaced very simply. All that robots needed was the capacity to be either bored or happy, and a few conditions that needed to be satisfied in order to bring those states about. They would then work the rest out for themselves.