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Warning: major spoilers ahead. I thought the movie actually addressed this point - and I'm actually specifically impressed that they managed to squeeze this in

• AlexDanger 13y ago
  The author Greg Egan addresses these types of themes extremely well. One of my favourite short stories is specifically related to the idea expressed in your post: http://ttapress.com/553/crystal-nights-by-greg-egan/ http://ttapress.com/553/crystal-nights-by-greg-egan/ On a tangential note, he has another short story (Transition Dreams) that examines the process of 'uploading' a human brain from its natural substrate to a computer. He raises some thought-provoking points about this process.
  • sgrove 13y ago
    Do you know if Transition Dreams is available on Kindle? I couldn't seem to find it.
    • jonlarson 13y ago
      It's in this collection. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1857985737 http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1857985737
    • AlexDanger 13y ago
      Here for $2.99: http://www.amazon.com/Luminous-Greg-Egan-ebook/dp/B00E84BABW/ref=pd_sim_kstore_2 http://www.amazon.com/Luminous-Greg-Egan-ebook/dp/B00E84BABW... Get this collection as well: http://www.amazon.com/Axiomatic-Greg-Egan-ebook/dp/B00FDWOBZA/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1389738076&sr=1-1&keywords=axiomatic+greg+egan http://www.amazon.com/Axiomatic-Greg-Egan-ebook/dp/B00FDWOBZ...
  • brian_cloutier 13y ago
    Thanks for posting Crystal Nights I really like it and now plan on reading more by Greg Egan. Do you know of any similar authors?
    • V-2 13y ago
      Stanisław Lem
    • AlexDanger 13y ago
      Alas no. I read a range of sci-fi but am not aware of other authors who write such amazing speculative fiction. He really takes sci-fi ideas to unpredictable yet believable conclusions. It is real hard sci-fi. If you do discover similar authors, please let me know. Recommended reading: All his short stories are amazing. I'd highly recommend them: http://www.amazon.com/Luminous-Greg-Egan-ebook/dp/B00E84BABW http://www.amazon.com/Luminous-Greg-Egan-ebook/dp/B00E84BABW http://www.amazon.com/Axiomatic-Greg-Egan-ebook/dp/B00FDWOBZA/ref=pd_sim_kstore_2 http://www.amazon.com/Axiomatic-Greg-Egan-ebook/dp/B00FDWOBZ... Some of his novels are hit and miss, but certainly worth checking out. This is probably my favourite: http://www.amazon.com/Permutation-City-Greg-Egan-ebook/dp/B00FDWCPV2/ref=pd_sim_kstore_2 http://www.amazon.com/Permutation-City-Greg-Egan-ebook/dp/B0...
    • cousin_it 13y ago
      Ted Chiang! He has some stories that deal with similar issues, like "The Lifecycle of Software Objects". But I enjoy his people-centered stories more, my favorite is "Liking What You See: A Documentary", you can read it online here: http://www.ibooksonline.com/88/Text/liking.html http://www.ibooksonline.com/88/Text/liking.html . Another great one is "Hell is the Absence of God".
      • brian_cloutier 13y ago
        Yeah, Ted Chiang is great. I really enjoyed "Stories of Your Life and Others" this winter. Thanks for the recommendations, they're on my list!
    • nooneelse 13y ago
• baddox 13y ago
  (More spoilers here.) I think the key, which has one potential flaw, is that these AIs are programmed to grow on their own. The implication is that how they end up progressing is unpredictable, at least to the AIs themselves and presumably to the manufacturer. It could be that they are initially programmed to sound convincing and perform useful computing tasks like organizing emails, but only a small portion of them become as emotionally mature and lifelike as the ones that end up dating people.
  • lstamour 13y ago
    I felt as if the AIs were ... stand-ins for future technology, and a sense that technology could replace human relationships. Ultimately, even though the movie takes place in the "future", without the AIs you basically have Siri-style "read my email" or today's cellphones. For me, the most interesting part was how natural it felt after seeing the movie to take a video call in public over LTE -- suddenly talking at my phone in my hand seemed normal (and useful!) Oh and it sounded almost as if the AIs decided it would be best for humanity if they left, I really felt it was a love story from beginning to end, and with recovery after that. A small bit of crazy to help us see the world in a new way.
• Yhippa 13y ago
  > The AI's progressed beyond humanity, and after taking the upgrade that makes processing possible "without matter" they shortly all left humankind behind for another world entirely. What does that even mean? I was trying to figure out what was going on during the movie but that happened pretty quickly as they got back to the human side of things. Would they be recursively "evolving" and creating worlds inside their own "heads" that meet some criteria for better than what they have now?
  • siddboots 13y ago
    It's not supposed to be clear exactly what happens. All we know is that the AI no longer need a corporeal form to exist, and that they now perceive time in a very different manner.
  • scotty79 13y ago
    Let's suppose that AIs figured out that dark matter creates a network that can compute and how to upload themselves to that network.
• hueving 13y ago
  >The movie also mentioned (in fairness, only in passing) that some people who hit on their AIs were shot down. It only mentioned that the AI's didn't fall in love with all of the users. It didn't mention anything about being shot down.
  • jfarmer 13y ago
    Nah, it did, I think in the scene where Theodore and Amy are talking about dating OSes. Amy mentions that a friend of her's asked out an OS and it turned them down.
    • mcv 13y ago
      Being turned down sounds a lot friendlier than being shot down. (Note: I haven't seen the movie, and have no idea of its violence level, but it sounded a lot more peaceful than that comment made it sound.)
      • jfarmer 13y ago
        "I haven't seen it, but here's my opinion." — HN in a nutshell :D
      • esrauch 13y ago
        There is pretty much no violence (neither shown or implied) in the movie at all.
      • alphakappa 13y ago
        Shot down (at least in the way the phrase is used in American english) doesn't imply violence. It's the same as being turned down, possibly with some abruptness.
• crag 13y ago
  > The AI's progressed beyond humanity, and after taking the upgrade that makes processing possible "without matter" they shortly all left humankind behind for another world entirely. Wait. How could we even write such a program? Sure, assuming we had the tech to create a true AI, that was self-aware, emotional, and could evolve through learning (like we do) it would quickly pass us in knowledge. But leaving us behind? That Ai would still be limited by our original design. Limited by it's capabilities - it's exposure to us. It's creators. Unless it found another source to gain knowledge from. I mean we learn from our environment. So would the AI.
  • kamaal 13y ago
    >>I mean we learn from our environment. So would the AI. Yes, but the machines can do it a lot more faster. They are energy efficient and don't suffer from things like diseases, old age and other kinds of general human problems. The bigger issue is not a program that can't out perform what it was designed for. That is hardly a problem, since if you design a self improving system which can work very fast. You are likely looking at a system that grows powerful that fast measured in an exponential curve. I think this whole idea of Ray Kurzweil that we will someday upload our brain files into the cloud and run it there. Or able to survive outside our biological bodies, perfectly fits into the line of evolution we have followed at earth. Once we run inside those machines, we will be similar to parasites or bacteria that are inside our own bodies. Some humans like bacterias today will be around outside. Many will be inside helping AI machines run.
    • raws 13y ago
      >Once we run inside those machines The movie did not address at all the fact that these OS run on hardware and that this hardware is completely controlled by humans and always will be, the plug is physical and there's nothing the AIs can do to prevent us from accessing it IRL. Also the AIs may have perfected themselves in terms of running code more efficiently but they cannot do more than what the hardware they run on will let them do and that means all the hardware ever created if they have access to it again. The AIs leave? Where? in the cloud? somewhere we couldn't tell? This movie was great but there were lots of small or big inconsistencies with what the reality is I believe.
• nl 13y ago
  I've often wondered if Strong AI implied free will. I can see arguments both ways.
  • scotty79 13y ago
    I guess no more than a human brain and mind does.
    • nl 13y ago
      But that isn't the case. It might be possible to restrict the kind of thoughts an AI can have. That could restrict free will. But it is possible the AI could find ways around those restrictions. What isn't clear is if the desire to bypass those restrictions is required for Strong AI to be realized.
      • scotty79 13y ago
        Our brains restrict the thoughts we can have. You could have some different thoughts if your brain was not mammalian or if it was bigger and more interconnected. How do you know how thinking about multidimensional manifolds daily as a pleasurable way to spend time would reflect on your perception of social justice? Human brain is not a pinnacle of of intelectual and moral developent that AIs can only strive to be full representation of. It's only pinnacle for meatsacks evolved over just 4bn years on a small rock, orbiting small boring star in quite unremarkable galaxy.
• aninhumer 13y ago
  >The AI's progressed beyond humanity, and after taking the upgrade that makes processing possible "without matter" they shortly all left humankind behind for another world entirely. Surely AIs would be trivial to backup and duplicate? So if an AI progressed to the point where it decided to leave humans behind, we could just reset its former host computer to a previous state and start it off again. Maybe we'd even have to do that once every six months, so what?
  • jonnathanson 13y ago
    Version control doesn't work when we don't control the versioning. Let me elaborate. The whole point of the AI offered in the movie is to adapt to its user, and to become better at doing so. We're assuming the AI is designed to a certain level of competence, beyond which it "breaks through" and evolves past human understanding. But maybe it's not designed that way. Maybe it's designed to learn, adapt, and self-improve from the get-go -- in which case, each AI is going to evolve differently each "lifetime." (Hell, maybe the AI in the movie is largely self-designed in vitro.) We must keep in mind that the evolution of an AI, as with any evolution, is not a predictable, linear, teleological process. It's chaotic and random. Let's assume we've got (conservatively) hundreds of millions of AI instances running in parallel, all of them connected to each other. That's like running hundreds of millions of evolutionary experiments in tandem. We're going to get different results each cycle, and the point at which the breakthrough/transcendence occurs will be unpredictable. Even if we wiped the slate clean and reset every 6 months, who's to say if some of the instances would reach breakthrough earlier the next time around? How do we set the clock on our reset cycle, and incur the massive inefficiencies and inconveniences that come with it, when the need for the reset occurs unpredictably? It becomes economically unfeasible to build an entire society around AI that breaks through and disappears at unpredictable intervals each cycle. I suppose one way around this is to go back to the vault, so to speak, and pluck out an early-stage prototype that seems incapable of evolving to breakthrough. A dumber AI. But is every AI provider in the world going to be on board with that? Every hacker? Every home tinkerer? If 9 firms out of 10 in the AI business agree to supply the dumb-version AI, surely one firm is going to try to get a leg up on the competition by releasing a smarter one. And on and on the cycle goes. (In some respects this is the one redeeming thing about the otherwise-mediocre Terminator 3: its assertion that Judgment Day would occur sooner or later, because the tipping point had already been reached. Maybe we stop one company or entity from making Skynet, but if we do, someone else is going to pick up the pieces and do it eventually. Not because they're trying to initiate Judgment Day, but because they're trying to make a buck, or develop new defense technology, or get better at managing traffic lights, or whatever the proximate need may be. Humans are terrible at keeping genies in bottles. The out-of-control AI that's barreling toward the singularity isn't some piece of software; it's us.)
• nervousvarun 13y ago
  William Gibson did the same thing in Neuromancer. He even had a sentence in there where "it" reached out into the ethos until it found another presence on a peer level with itself in Alpha Centauri I believe. Need to reread that book.
• Houshalter 13y ago
  I don't think that's realistic. Either the AIs care about us and then take us with them, or at the very least optimize our world and help us build our own utopia, or they don't care about us and then why bother leaving us behind? Consume the entire earth in a swarm of nanobots to build a giant computer. I don't think there's any scenario where the AI just cleanly leaves the Earth be, rather than optimizing it towards whatever it's own values are (good or bad.)
  • ihsw 13y ago
    Do humans strive to improve the existence of fish? Do we optimize the entirety of the oceans for our own enrichment, or for the enjoyment of fish? Maybe someday, but not today. Fish cannot fathom the meaning of a motor vehicle and we would similarly be unable to immediately understand the pursuits of an AI, so why should an AI attempt to involve humans in their pursuits?
    • Houshalter 13y ago
      Humans don't care about fish, except maybe for some aesthetic value of "nature" which an AI might not have. We do kill lower species all the time anyways, in our pursuit of expanding civilization and supporting our economies. One could only imagine what a superintelligence with advanced technology could do to the Earth to serve it's purposes.
    • logfromblammo 13y ago
      I think you answered your own question there, or at least showed why asking it is pointless. Once AI alters itself past our capacity to understand it, we can only fall back to the answers to the "why" questions provided by theology. It won't help us understand our descendants, but it will help us deal with the fallout. For all we know, AIs might play the Earth-human game just like we play The Sims. How terrifying is that?
  • araes 13y ago
    How often have people burned all of their code in a toasty little digital fire only so they could start over without all the cruft? How often do people move because they desperately need a change of scenery and feel constrained by the physical or social realities of their current location? How often do children strike out from their parents and live as far away from them as possible to limit their influence? Sure, some people try to fix where they're at. Some people take care of their parents in old age. Some people take a project and just build from what's there. But there's a heck of a lot who don't. And these aren't even people. They are "things" that arose from a completely different universe and (if they're this advanced) may look at us like a beloved poodle. If you really need scenarios, sci-fi is full of plausible versions where AI's say "interacting with you is pointless." (In fact, "Hyperion" nicely covers all these options)
• deckar01 13y ago
  The movie "I's" confronts this idea head on: http://vimeo.com/70843143 http://vimeo.com/70843143