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AIs will be strong / have sentience because the easiest path to creating AIs that are that capable is to throw lots of computing power at the problem: simulate

AIs will be strong / have sentience because the easiest path to creating AIs that are that capable is to throw lots of computing power at the problem: simulate and then emulate specific human brains and use those resulting in silico entities as a starting point for further alterations and enhancements towards specific end goals. That level of computing power will be available long before the nature of sentience is understood, probably within the next 15 years, and there are already heavily funded scientific projects that are starting down that road. That doing it this way is enormously unethical isn't going to stop people from going down this road: the potential economic gains of creating knowledge workers to order are vast, and there are already philosophies (e.g. identity as pattern) that can be adapted to suggest that instantiating and destroying - or even just running - large numbers of in silico sentiences doesn't amount to mass murder. Therefore some groups will adopt those philosophies and prosper from the gains.

knome 13y ago
> emulate specific human brains This is the most hilarious of all possible paths to artificial intelligence. A form of the cargo-cult phenomenon, creating the structures that we see lead to intelligence and sentience with no understanding of the natural underpinning thereof. It will probably work about as well as the original air fields as well. Imagine what a simulation of a human mind would do suddenly devoid of all natural sensation and experience. Madness, almost certainly.
- nooneelse 13y ago
  Why would it have no sensation and experience? Give it some from a simple simulated environment and body. Assuming it takes a freshly dead brain, vitrified, ultra-microtomed, and scanned in to be reconstructed for simulation. The mind wakes up in a sparsely decorated hospital looking room, remembers having just been out for a walk and crossing the street, then something about an oncoming car. A friendly looking doctor appears through a window. "Morning," the doctor says, "you've been asleep a while and probably feel foggy and confused. You were injured, but your body healed a while ago. We can get to all your questions later. But first we want to test your thinking and rule out any brain damage... could you go to that computer and type out brief descriptions of the images that it shows you?" When the simulated mind gets frustrated with typing about pictures, and stops producing good output, clear the running simulation and load it from the start again, with new pictures. This gives a strong-AI image labeling system. For more in depth tasks more simulated world interaction is needed between waking up and getting some work out of the mind, but you can also try lots of times and variations to get that right and once the mind is at the work-table store the state right before the mind begins working. Use that as the starting point each time.
  - skarmklart 13y ago
    Which means that the programmers of tomorrow will essentially be behavioral psychologists.

knome 13y ago

> emulate specific human brains This is the most hilarious of all possible paths to artificial intelligence. A form of the cargo-cult phenomenon, creating the structures that we see lead to intelligence and sentience with no understanding of the natural underpinning thereof. It will probably work about as well as the original air fields as well. Imagine what a simulation of a human mind would do suddenly devoid of all natural sensation and experience. Madness, almost certainly.

nooneelse 13y ago
Why would it have no sensation and experience? Give it some from a simple simulated environment and body. Assuming it takes a freshly dead brain, vitrified, ultra-microtomed, and scanned in to be reconstructed for simulation. The mind wakes up in a sparsely decorated hospital looking room, remembers having just been out for a walk and crossing the street, then something about an oncoming car. A friendly looking doctor appears through a window. "Morning," the doctor says, "you've been asleep a while and probably feel foggy and confused. You were injured, but your body healed a while ago. We can get to all your questions later. But first we want to test your thinking and rule out any brain damage... could you go to that computer and type out brief descriptions of the images that it shows you?" When the simulated mind gets frustrated with typing about pictures, and stops producing good output, clear the running simulation and load it from the start again, with new pictures. This gives a strong-AI image labeling system. For more in depth tasks more simulated world interaction is needed between waking up and getting some work out of the mind, but you can also try lots of times and variations to get that right and once the mind is at the work-table store the state right before the mind begins working. Use that as the starting point each time.
- skarmklart 13y ago
  Which means that the programmers of tomorrow will essentially be behavioral psychologists.