6 ms·

I wonder if intelligent machines will infect themselves with severely disruptive but temporary algorithms (viruses) and believe they too understand the meaning

• cookingrobot 14y ago
  A better analogy might be giving the machine a quick peek at it's debugger.
  • compee 14y ago
    So would life be nothing more than universally good local viruses within the universe?
• javajosh 14y ago
  Heh. Almost certainly, assuming that they have an analogue to "the pleasure of knowing" - a pleasure center that drugs like LSD seem to stimulate quite a lot (based on written texts like this). There is also, of course, "the pleasure of change", which probably really does have some good effects on cognition, assuming that it is real. To truly change one must become detached from the self, and most wise people believe that to be a Good Idea. (Which brings up the interesting possibility of irrational attachment in artificial minds. I can easily imagine a panicked piece of software saying "No! Don't transfer me to that piece of silicon. This piece is me!" :)
• klutometis 14y ago
  That sort of thing might be similar to stochastic methods like simulated annealing, where one accepts temporarily suboptimal states in case a more optimal one is around the corner. Let psychedelics be analogous to the random walk: it may be the case that one finds oneself shaken from some local optimum only to be banished to a desert of suboptimal states and no deterministic way to return.