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In my opinion, if humans were to create robots as intelligent as humans, then those robot would actually be human. What's the difference between passing inform

In my opinion, if humans were to create robots as intelligent as humans, then those robot would actually be human. What's the difference between passing information via DNA and passing information via some programming code? Are humans from 100,000 years ago less human than humans today, even if we have "improved" slightly due to natural selection?

devindotcom 12y ago
Something crafted with a purpose in mind is artificial, something created as a result of random natural processes seems fundamentally different.
- higherpurpose 12y ago
  What if we let AI "evolve" on its own within a simulation of life?
  - jostmey 12y ago
    There are fundamental differences between a machine designed by the hand of intelligence and that of a biological system. In the case of biology, the design is completely random although it still has a design, as strange as that sounds.
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
    - rqebmm 12y ago
      There's no "design", there's merely a stable result of random fluctuations in a constrained space. The constraints (i.e. water, oxygen/nitrogen atmosphere, other life forms, etc) are what's key.
  - teraflop 12y ago
    Greg Egan brought up this idea in his novel Permutation City, only to have a change of heart some years later. To quote his FAQ[1]: > What I regret most is my uncritical treatment of the idea of allowing intelligent life to evolve in the Autoverse. Sure, this is a common science-fictional idea, but when I thought about it properly (some years after the book was published), I realised that anyone who actually did this would have to be utterly morally bankrupt. To get from micro-organisms to intelligent life this way would involve an immense amount of suffering, with billions of sentient creatures living, struggling and dying along the way. Yes, this happened to our own ancestors, but that doesn’t give us the right to inflict the same kind of suffering on anyone else. > This is potentially an important issue in the real world. It might not be long before people are seriously trying to “evolve” artificial intelligence in their computers. Now, it’s one thing to use genetic algorithms to come up with various specialised programs that perform simple tasks, but to “breed”, assess, and kill millions of sentient programs would be an abomination. If the first AI was created that way, it would have every right to despise its creators. His more recent story "Crystal Nights"[2] examines the same idea with more focus on the moral implications. [1]: http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/PERMUTATION/FAQ/FAQ.html http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/PERMUTATION/FAQ/FAQ... [2]: http://ttapress.com/553/crystal-nights-by-greg-egan/ http://ttapress.com/553/crystal-nights-by-greg-egan/
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
- givan 12y ago
  evolution is not random, it's purpose is to adapt to the environment changes and become better
  - twelfthnight 12y ago
    Well, the process by which genes are passed with genetic mutations is random. If you looked backward in time it looks like animals developed fur to warm themselves. In fact, you're just not seeing all the animals who randomly didn't have fur that froze to extinction.
    - givan 12y ago
      random is just a word for too complex to compute/understand
      - lotsofmangos 12y ago
        No it isn't. Randomness, complexity, computability and understandability are related but distinct concepts. Some problems are simple and random, some others are complex and deterministic and you also even get some problems that are are simple to state, deterministic, provably uncomputable, yet still understandable, such as the Wang tiling problem.
        givan 12y ago
        What problems are simple and random? can you give some examples to prove your argument?
        lotsofmangos 12y ago
        Emit a single photon at a piece of glass angled at 45 degrees with two detectors, one behind the glass, the other at 90 degrees to the emitter. Which detector is the photon going to trigger?
        12y ago
deleted 12y ago
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TheOtherHobbes 12y ago
Because being human is about a lot more than being intelligent, for whatever definition of intelligence you happen to be using. Roughly half the human population has below-average intelligence, but carries right on being human regardless. Inventiveness is possibly more of a species marker than raw IQ. We're not actually that great at being intelligent. But we're very good at using our intelligence to create experiences, invent new things, and pass both to offspring through indirect external memory structures. >Are humans from 100,000 years ago less human than humans today, even if we have "improved" slightly due to natural selection? It may be hard to find anyone who accepts that Paranthropus or Homo Erectus were just as human as modern Homo Sapiens. Homo Erectus died out around 150kybp, which is close enough, I guess.
- twelfthnight 12y ago
  I think this is a good point. I'm out of my depth talking about evolution, so I don't know when we would stop classifying a species as Homo Erectus and start calling it Homo Sapien. That is probably what would say about these robots: they are a new species. But in a lot of ways, since we are products of a natural world, so are they. Just a little more indirectly.
  - stillsut 12y ago
    > I don't know when we would stop classifying a species as Homo Erectus and start calling it Homo Sapien Unlike other animals where the key factor is morphology (horse -> giraffe) for humans it is the ability to operate as a group and ultimately as a society. 30kya sees hominids adapt to most areas of the world (northern asia, americas) and 10kya civizaltion starts. Although not the traditional biological definition, I would say that's the most salient factor.
hawkice 12y ago
> In my opinion, if humans were to create robots as intelligent as humans, then those robot would actually be human. What's the difference between passing information via DNA and passing information via some programming code? Well, they would be intelligent in whatever way we mean it. But there's an issue of software -- 'human' implies quite a lot of it (for instance, things like the Westermarck effect, which I don't imagine AIs will have for quite a few reasons), and replicating that is pretty hard, so it's anyone's guess whether we do that or try to find a math-based software foundation.
eastbayjake 12y ago
There's more to being human than intelligence. It's important to remember that sentience actually refers to "the ability to feel sensations," not merely the quality of being an intelligent entity. Our future robots may be very good at passing information via some programming code... but will they love? Will they be sad? Will they read literature to empathize with the experience of other beings? I would argue that "being human" is inextricably linked to the isolation of our existence (what David Foster Wallace described as being "marooned inside our own skulls", and why he argued that humans make literature to "give imaginative access to other selves"[1]) and the knowledge that our existence is finite. All humans -- from the cavemen all the way down to you reading this on you computer -- make life decisions knowing that our time on Earth is short. Do you share the same human experience if you know you will live forever? [1] http://hudsonreview.com/2014/02/on-david-foster-wallaces-conservatism http://hudsonreview.com/2014/02/on-david-foster-wallaces-con...
- r00fus 12y ago
  I'll take the converse argument - there might be more to intelligence than being human (of course, it would be hard for us as "thinking meat" to recognize it). What if the full range of emotions and sensations could be a superset of what humans can actually experience? It could very well be that we wouldn't even know that kind of intelligence exists - perhaps we're the ones crawling around in the ant farm?
  - eastbayjake 12y ago
    That's an interesting point! I still think that non-human intelligence would be... non-human. Maybe the Snorgblats will find us in space and ask themselves, "Can these 'humans' share our Snorgblat experience if they can't feel wzinx, yowfli, or even writznok?"
- terrence_giggy 12y ago
  > Our future robots may be very good at passing information via some programming code... but will they love? Will they be sad? Will they read literature to empathize with the experience of other beings? That sentence gave me a flashback to my favorite literature reading robot - Orphu of Io (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilium/Olympos http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilium/Olympos)
lotsofmangos 12y ago
If a dolphin was found to have the same level of reflective intelligence as a human, it would not be a human, it would mean that we would have to extend personhood to include other species.
mikeash 12y ago
Maybe I misunderstand, but you seem to be saying that anything with equivalent intelligence is "human" and that doesn't make any sense to me. If we discover intelligent aliens which evolved completely separately from us, they may be smart but they would never be human. An intelligent machine would be the same.

devindotcom 12y ago

Something crafted with a purpose in mind is artificial, something created as a result of random natural processes seems fundamentally different.

higherpurpose 12y ago
What if we let AI "evolve" on its own within a simulation of life?
- jostmey 12y ago
  There are fundamental differences between a machine designed by the hand of intelligence and that of a biological system. In the case of biology, the design is completely random although it still has a design, as strange as that sounds.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - rqebmm 12y ago
    There's no "design", there's merely a stable result of random fluctuations in a constrained space. The constraints (i.e. water, oxygen/nitrogen atmosphere, other life forms, etc) are what's key.
- teraflop 12y ago
  Greg Egan brought up this idea in his novel Permutation City, only to have a change of heart some years later. To quote his FAQ[1]: > What I regret most is my uncritical treatment of the idea of allowing intelligent life to evolve in the Autoverse. Sure, this is a common science-fictional idea, but when I thought about it properly (some years after the book was published), I realised that anyone who actually did this would have to be utterly morally bankrupt. To get from micro-organisms to intelligent life this way would involve an immense amount of suffering, with billions of sentient creatures living, struggling and dying along the way. Yes, this happened to our own ancestors, but that doesn’t give us the right to inflict the same kind of suffering on anyone else. > This is potentially an important issue in the real world. It might not be long before people are seriously trying to “evolve” artificial intelligence in their computers. Now, it’s one thing to use genetic algorithms to come up with various specialised programs that perform simple tasks, but to “breed”, assess, and kill millions of sentient programs would be an abomination. If the first AI was created that way, it would have every right to despise its creators. His more recent story "Crystal Nights"[2] examines the same idea with more focus on the moral implications. [1]: http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/PERMUTATION/FAQ/FAQ.html http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/PERMUTATION/FAQ/FAQ... [2]: http://ttapress.com/553/crystal-nights-by-greg-egan/ http://ttapress.com/553/crystal-nights-by-greg-egan/
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
givan 12y ago
evolution is not random, it's purpose is to adapt to the environment changes and become better
- twelfthnight 12y ago
  Well, the process by which genes are passed with genetic mutations is random. If you looked backward in time it looks like animals developed fur to warm themselves. In fact, you're just not seeing all the animals who randomly didn't have fur that froze to extinction.
  - givan 12y ago
    random is just a word for too complex to compute/understand
    - lotsofmangos 12y ago
      No it isn't. Randomness, complexity, computability and understandability are related but distinct concepts. Some problems are simple and random, some others are complex and deterministic and you also even get some problems that are are simple to state, deterministic, provably uncomputable, yet still understandable, such as the Wang tiling problem.
      - givan 12y ago
        What problems are simple and random? can you give some examples to prove your argument?
        lotsofmangos 12y ago
        Emit a single photon at a piece of glass angled at 45 degrees with two detectors, one behind the glass, the other at 90 degrees to the emitter. Which detector is the photon going to trigger?
        12y ago

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

TheOtherHobbes 12y ago

Because being human is about a lot more than being intelligent, for whatever definition of intelligence you happen to be using. Roughly half the human population has below-average intelligence, but carries right on being human regardless. Inventiveness is possibly more of a species marker than raw IQ. We're not actually that great at being intelligent. But we're very good at using our intelligence to create experiences, invent new things, and pass both to offspring through indirect external memory structures. >Are humans from 100,000 years ago less human than humans today, even if we have "improved" slightly due to natural selection? It may be hard to find anyone who accepts that Paranthropus or Homo Erectus were just as human as modern Homo Sapiens. Homo Erectus died out around 150kybp, which is close enough, I guess.

twelfthnight 12y ago
I think this is a good point. I'm out of my depth talking about evolution, so I don't know when we would stop classifying a species as Homo Erectus and start calling it Homo Sapien. That is probably what would say about these robots: they are a new species. But in a lot of ways, since we are products of a natural world, so are they. Just a little more indirectly.
- stillsut 12y ago
  > I don't know when we would stop classifying a species as Homo Erectus and start calling it Homo Sapien Unlike other animals where the key factor is morphology (horse -> giraffe) for humans it is the ability to operate as a group and ultimately as a society. 30kya sees hominids adapt to most areas of the world (northern asia, americas) and 10kya civizaltion starts. Although not the traditional biological definition, I would say that's the most salient factor.

hawkice 12y ago

> In my opinion, if humans were to create robots as intelligent as humans, then those robot would actually be human. What's the difference between passing information via DNA and passing information via some programming code? Well, they would be intelligent in whatever way we mean it. But there's an issue of software -- 'human' implies quite a lot of it (for instance, things like the Westermarck effect, which I don't imagine AIs will have for quite a few reasons), and replicating that is pretty hard, so it's anyone's guess whether we do that or try to find a math-based software foundation.

eastbayjake 12y ago

There's more to being human than intelligence. It's important to remember that sentience actually refers to "the ability to feel sensations," not merely the quality of being an intelligent entity. Our future robots may be very good at passing information via some programming code... but will they love? Will they be sad? Will they read literature to empathize with the experience of other beings? I would argue that "being human" is inextricably linked to the isolation of our existence (what David Foster Wallace described as being "marooned inside our own skulls", and why he argued that humans make literature to "give imaginative access to other selves"[1]) and the knowledge that our existence is finite. All humans -- from the cavemen all the way down to you reading this on you computer -- make life decisions knowing that our time on Earth is short. Do you share the same human experience if you know you will live forever? [1] http://hudsonreview.com/2014/02/on-david-foster-wallaces-conservatism http://hudsonreview.com/2014/02/on-david-foster-wallaces-con...

r00fus 12y ago
I'll take the converse argument - there might be more to intelligence than being human (of course, it would be hard for us as "thinking meat" to recognize it). What if the full range of emotions and sensations could be a superset of what humans can actually experience? It could very well be that we wouldn't even know that kind of intelligence exists - perhaps we're the ones crawling around in the ant farm?
- eastbayjake 12y ago
  That's an interesting point! I still think that non-human intelligence would be... non-human. Maybe the Snorgblats will find us in space and ask themselves, "Can these 'humans' share our Snorgblat experience if they can't feel wzinx, yowfli, or even writznok?"
terrence_giggy 12y ago
> Our future robots may be very good at passing information via some programming code... but will they love? Will they be sad? Will they read literature to empathize with the experience of other beings? That sentence gave me a flashback to my favorite literature reading robot - Orphu of Io (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilium/Olympos http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilium/Olympos)

lotsofmangos 12y ago

If a dolphin was found to have the same level of reflective intelligence as a human, it would not be a human, it would mean that we would have to extend personhood to include other species.

mikeash 12y ago

Maybe I misunderstand, but you seem to be saying that anything with equivalent intelligence is "human" and that doesn't make any sense to me. If we discover intelligent aliens which evolved completely separately from us, they may be smart but they would never be human. An intelligent machine would be the same.