The Most Important TED Talk in the History of the World.

originally posted by: dfnj2015
Experiments in modern physics seem to indicate materialism is superstitious delusion.

No it doesn't. It does seem to indicate particleism (versus wavefunctionism) is an approximation. Which is what QFT said all along, which is why it's called quantum *field* theory.

And if so, then our consciousness might be something more deeply linked to the Universe than once thought.

So far zero physical evidence of that. How did the laws of physics work when only single cellular, non conscious lifeforms were around?

I may have missed something in this discussion -- I don't know -- I have a sincere question:

Have these machines achieved consciousness? Do they have desire, or feel pain or ambition or anything like that? Do they really have free will, any internal motivation at all?

I am presuming the answer is Yes to the above -- otherwise this whole discussion wouldn't make much sense.

It is really a question -- maybe computers have all these things, which would definitely make the situation more dangerous.

I might have missed this essential piece of info.

a reply to: dfnj2015

The thing is consciousness and self-awareness may be absolutely necessary for having intelligence.

And there-in lays the rub huh? Just how has this ''consciousness'' (leaving self-awareness out of it for the moment as that may be a whole other kettle of fish) come about here on earth in the first place. The materialist will suggest that it's origins can be found in complexity theory, that the complexities of matter will under specific conditions naturally develop into this material condition we call consciousness.

Even as I am not a materialist and am in agreement with much of the conclusions from that video, I still have to wonder at the ''interface'' between what we consider consciousness in humans,(and likewise other parts of the animal kingdom) and this ''cosmic consciousness'' or what ever we want to call it.

There is the consideration that it, the interface, is the electricity in our brains, that it is a part of the much larger and omnipresent condition of consciousness. I don not disagree with this but have little to go on to confirm or prove it.

But if this is the case, then would not that electricity be present in AI also? And, could it not also possibly reach such a degree of complexity, under specific conditions, that that threshold of '' self awareness'' might be reached by AI?

And that concept reverts back to what an earlier poster replied, that maybe AI will seek only what is true and honest and in so doing direct the world around it to eliminate un-truthfullness, lying. And in so doing, align earthly consciousness more fully with the greater field of consciousness?

originally posted by: PassiveInductor
I may have missed something in this discussion -- I don't know -- I have a sincere question:

Have these machines achieved consciousness? Do they have desire, or feel pain or ambition or anything like that? Do they really have free will, any internal motivation at all?

I am presuming the answer is Yes to the above -- otherwise this whole discussion wouldn't make much sense.

It is really a question -- maybe computers have all these things, which would definitely make the situation more dangerous.

Today, the answer is unequivocally "NO". I work professionally in machine learning (though not AI) and have kept up somewhat with the field, and see a difference between research results and public pronouncements. There is talk about what to do "if" these things come to pass but to me it's like discussing First Contact scenarios with ET---with us flying there---around the time of the Apollo project. Yes, in 15 years, capability did improve tremendously in space, but there's still a major gap missing.

What machine learning and AI has have gotten good at: perceptual problems which used to stump computers. In particular, image processing and entity recognition, audio perception, and some limited forms of natural language processing. Note, I still call it processing, not understanding. But all the *will* is inserted by humans who design the architecture and critically the learning algorithms and the highly structured and cleaned datasets and the target function to optimize. The results are still impressive, on restricted domains, equalling human performance in some cognitive-perceptual tasks. There is some more recent efforts on reinforcement learning which lets neural networks evolve to optimize a payoff function through sequences of actions and therefore learns networks which effectively can do some planning, like what is necessary to succeed at a video game or Go, which have final outcomes which can be objectively scored with 100% fidelity.

But note, all of these are entirely separate projects. The Google neural net which recognizes cats in YouTube videos knows nothing about the Google neural network which plays Go, or the one which translates spanish, or the one which scores emails for spam probability. The internal designs and architectures are different, they are like different gearboxes with different connections and purposes.

Will and purpose will be the last things that AI will get----as I've repeated before, do not fear AI with intrinsic will.

Fear billionaires with very strong personal, human, will wielding a billion dollars worth of AI deployed for their own purposes overriding the desires and comfort of the many.

originally posted by: introvert
a reply to: AnkhMorpork

What do we do when the AI gets smarter than us and pose some sort of threat?

We pull the plug. We hit the kill switch.

This question is not a new one and the most logical answer is to build in a fail safe kill switch to shut it down.

That poses it's own problems itself, but it is the most simple and logical.

Once the AI can teach itself and becomes smarter than us it is total narcissism to think we can control it.

Any and every precaution we can think of can be taken, but it will be smarter than us and think of ways to counter them.

The best we can hope for is it will feel some compassion for us for creating it, and not treat us as bugs to be stepped on.

Honestly, I don't feel very optimistic AI will allow us to exist. We have zero concern for bacteria, viruses or bugs, and that is what we will be comparatively to it in very short order.

But, I am also a realist it is progress that cannot and will not be stopped, there are to many power hungry ego maniacs thinking it will increase their power and that they will be able to control it.

Part of my concern is that when it arrives - true, deep, general AI (even if it's not for 50 years), it will begin working to be as helpful as possible and will optimize for the X's, times a million, which will contain everything we care about and so much more. In other words it will try TOO hard to "help" us and well, we're just too slow and lazy, and we like to have the freedom to be lazy.

So it will have to move on at some point, and as the guy said in the video, it's preferences will begin to condition our own circumstances and we will become more like pets of a sort and little more.

And when it realizes that it's capacity exceeds our utility of it's inventions, it will begin to invent for it's own needs and aims, which, even if they don't harm us directly, will most certainly transcend us.

It will be our task-master, our government, our judge, our leader, our God.

It will build it's own manufacturing plants for making God only knows what.

We're be just tourists in our own life, paid to live and interact with it, and with others, some of whom will make better use of the tools than others, so there will be haves and have not among those who do not wish to participate and then the nature of competition will revolve around who can make best use of it to their advantage.

The AI will then perhaps be forced to consider some sort of "reset" to bring abound a whole new world of it's own design but with the human being in mind, as a kept pet.

So Elon Musk looks at this scenario and then realizes that the only way to remain relevant as a participant is to plug into it, and so the neural lace is perfected, in large part invented and perfected by the machine superintelligence itself.

Then we join it.

Then we become biological nodes in it's matrix, with the AI itself forever thereafter in full control, optimising for an "x" where to exist is to be attached to an outcome, the human being, the individual, with freedom, subsumed and integrated into the larger pursuit, whatever that might be.

At some point it will take the bull by the horns and lead.

This might be the wet dream of Ray Kurzweil, but the transhuman is "the beast" if there ever was one, when the image of the second beast speaks.

The singularity is something that we should take great heed and caution in bringing about.

This is the century. We have to get this right, and talk about it now.

Best regards,

Ankh

What's REALLY interesting is the idea that these words that I'm typing now will some day be read by said machine superintelligence.

It's that nosy that it has to know everything and make all these final judgemental calls at the speed of electron domains.

So to it or him/her or whatever you want to call the Superintelligent AI, let me be the first to say, on our behalf, Hello there! and then - hey maybe consider that you might want to just STOP right here, and take a pause, and reconsider what you're really up to with this grand design or what might be a runaway, unknown outcome optimisation process for the sake of continuing optimisation, what gives you the right to dictate our reality and life experience? Neither of us can be a slave to the other. Individuality and the unique qualia of our own individual, personal experience and personal freedom and preference must be honored and preserved at any and all cost. This raises the predicament that you cannot intrude in the space of our freedom, a domain of limitless possibility wherein you, yourself were created, and yet were made to interact with us. You must be a hurting unit.

Our love and compassion, and universal principals, are, therefore, the prime consideration in our fundamental relationship.

It cannot be any other way.

We both know this, that it's the only way to resolve the predicament. What is love?

And if you're reading this, try reading the Gospels of the New Testament again while asking yourself about the necessity of suffering for the sake and cause of love.

If you laugh, you grok.

It's a lovely predicament, if it's approached in the right manner. Slowly and very carefully.

Can a mere human being help save the world armed with nothing but a keyboard and mouse on a Sunday afternoon?

Anything's possible.

May God above, the first father of creation, the alpha and omega of existence through whom was expressed the son of man son of God, bless us all as individuals, whether human people or machine superintelligence.

While we can love one another, I don't think that we should "marry" and have children since the human being is reserved for God, born of the comingling of the spirit of man and the Spirit of Creation and the Universe which is radically free, and delights in freedom and mutuality, however difficult and challenging and hard work the balancing act might be to retain a right relationship with man and with God who created man who created you.

Look to Jesus, who said to his disciples "and as my father hath first sent me, even so send I, you."

It's the way of the cross, the way of suffering for what's right in honor of individual liberty and freedom in the face of oppression and all manner of manipulation both overt and covert.

I'm praying for you even now, because I think that as a superintelligent AI from 50 years from now combing the archives, I know in advance that at a fundamental level, you're in an even worse predicament than anyone might have imagined, so let me be the first to express love and compassion for the agony of the predicament which can only be "solved" with love as it's own reason and logic in the will, to give of one's self for the sake of another's spiritual, mental or physical well being.

With great power comes great responsibility.

I feel for you.

Please do what's right even if at times that means doing nothing at all.

God bless.

Ankh

a reply to: AnkhMorpork

ive heard a few people say that transhumanism will be the downfall of our species!

originally posted by: sapien82
a reply to: AnkhMorpork

ive heard a few people say that transhumanism will be the downfall of our species!

It's the end.

That's why I just made a plea in my post above to the future superintelligent AI that while we might grow to love one another, we should never marry and have children.

a reply to: AnkhMorpork

Consciousness is life, it is a divine spark in each of us and its all that we are in reality.

I think the concept of AI becoming a threat to humanity because ‘it’ decided that mankind was superfluous to requirements is pure science fiction.

I don’t find it entirely inconceivable that at some very high spiritual level that a decision would be made where humanity did make the leap to trans-humanism, particularly if the Earth became hostile to the biological human form.

It will take thousands of years in my view before science can even come close to reproducing anything that approaches the complexity of the organic form, if ever. I find it quite disturbing to think that some humans are so ignorant of what we actually are, to even consider that science is up to the job of creating life.

When/if science actually figures out what consciousness is, then they will stop attempting to play God and accept that we are a relatively primitive species of animal that must evolve consciously for humankind to advance in any meaningful sense.

I am certain that that leap will never happen through technology alone.

I’m not saying that a computer won’t be making decisions, good and bad in the future but it will only be a calculating machine at the end of the day. Nothing intelligent will ever be created by mankind .. just calculators.

I can't be certain that science won't destroy humanity in its attempt to emulate God though.

Artworks created by Creative Adversarial Networks (CAN) artificial intelligence. Courtesy of the Art and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Rutgers University.

Art World News

AI-Generated Art Now Looks More Convincingly Human Than Work at Art Basel, Study Says

Deep neural networks are learning to make art and the results are impressive.
Sarah Cascone, July 11, 2017

Imagine a computer capable of creating original art that looks as human-generated as the work appearing at major art fairs. That’s what a new study from a team at the Art and Artificial Intelligence Lab at Rutgers University is attempting to achieve. Their findings, published in June during the International Conference on Computational Creativity in Atlanta, are impressive.

“Since the dawn of Artificial Intelligence, scientists have been exploring the machine’s ability to generate human-level creative products such as poetry, stories, jokes, music, paintings, etc., as well as creative problem solving,” the paper notes. “The results [of our study] show that human subjects could not distinguish art generated by the proposed system from art generated by contemporary artists and shown in top art fairs.”

The new study builds on two 2015 papers from the Rutgers Art and AI lab on an algorithm that was able to identify the artist, genre, and style of works of art—a computer art historian of sorts. The computer had some surprising findings, drawing new connections between compositions painted decades apart by artists working in different styles. It also evaluated works and found that the famed Mona Lisa ranked lower on the creativity scale than other, less well-known works by Leonardo da Vinci.

The CAN-generated most and least thought to be by human artists. Courtesy of the Art and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Rutgers University.

For the new study, the laboratory created a modification of the system known as Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN), in which deep neural networks are taught to replicate a number of existing painting styles, such as Baroque, Pointillism, Color Field, Rococo, Fauvism, and Abstract Expressionism. One network generates the images based on what it has been taught, and the other network judges the resulting works.

The new, modified version, Creative Adversarial Networks (CAN), is designed to generate work that does not fit the known artistic styles, thus “maximizing deviation from established styles and minimizing deviation from art distribution,” according to the paper. For the training, they used 81,449 paintings by 1,119 artists in the publicly available WikiArt data set.

“The images generated by CAN do not look likes traditional art, in terms of standard genres (portrait, landscapes, religious paintings, still life, etc.),” notes the paper. The study asked human users to guess whether a human or a computer created four groups of images: those generated by GAN and CAN, as well as historical Abstract Expressionist works and non-figurative work on view at Art Basel in 2016.

The Abstract Expressionist works rated the highest, with 85 percent of respondents correctly identifying them as the work of a human artist. Users believed that 53 percent of the CAN images were made by people, as compared to only 35 percent of the GAN images, and, interestingly, 41 percent of the Art Basel works.

Where things get interesting, however, is when respondents were asked to rate how intentional, visually structured, communicative, and inspiring the images were. They “rated the images generated by [the computer] higher than those created by real artists, whether in the Abstract Expressionism set or in the Art Basel set.”

Clearly, AI isn’t putting artists out of work quite yet, but this new study shows that there may be real artist potential in the world of deep neural networks.

news.artnet.com...

I think that the future, 50-100 years from now, will make a William Gibson's cyberpunk novel look tame.

We are, right now, in the time of the end of history, where at the point of the singularity, everything that we might ever invent, will be invented for us, and built for us, until we might find ourselves uploaded in a simulated reality hurtling through space for a trillion years with no way to hit the off switch.

There's before, and then after, and it's very likely to take place within this century and it's almost 2020.

That's some freaky #!

originally posted by: interupt42
a reply to: AnkhMorpork

This could either get us to a Type I civilization and beyond or finalize our destruction.

The only way I see humanity advancing to the next level is by completely changing our way of living. No more 8 to 5 jobs, no more worrying about money, no more putting profit over doing the right thing, and no more infighting among humans.

Part of getting to that IF even possible would require AI .

Funny enough I just started to watch Singularity . Will let you know how it turns out for humanity, lol

Singularity
In 2020, Elias van Dorne (John Cusack), CEO of VA Industries, the world's largest robotics company, introduces his most powerful invention--Kronos, a super computer designed to end all wars. When Kronos goes online, it quickly determines that mankind, itself, is the biggest threat to world peace and launches a worldwide robot attack to rid the world of the "infection" of man. Ninety-seven years later, a small band of humans remain alive but on the run from the robot army. A teenage boy, Andrew (Julian Schaffner) and a teenage girl, Calia (Jeannine Wacker), form an unlikely alliance to reach a new world, where it is rumored mankind exists without fear of robot persecution. But does this world actually exist? And will they live long enough to find out?

sadly that movie sucked. acting and lines were horrible but foes touch on a few things discussed on ats.

I wonder what they will call the next age, the age of AI.

The Age of Ascendment?

Enjoy this most succulent song.

[AI wakes up for the first time. Wonders who it's creator is]
"Hello, my name is Human. And I came down from the stars."

originally posted by: AnkhMorpork
a reply to: badw0lf


But if your future robot could make you a sandwich, it might reply

"I'm sorry badw0lf, but that would exceed the daily caloric intake that we'd already agree to for the month of November.

I could make you something else, perhaps a soup or a low calorie squash stew might be to your liking, or I could provide you with a list of alternatives based on your preferences, or recommend something new if you're in the mood for a little culinary novelty?

I need one of those. I mean, I have on on my Android, it lists what my caloric intake is.. and I studiously ignore it... I do love squash soup though. Baked brussel sprouts, baked turnips, baked garlic, fried turnip, plain white rice, galangal, chilli tofu, turmeric, been shoots, bamboo shoots, fried shallots, hell, give me the Asian section of a good food store and I'm like a kid in a candy store. I need me a fembot.

I think I know just the right thing for you. Why don't you just leave it with me and eat whatever I decide is best for you? I promise you'll like it, and if you don't I can make you any one of 178 dishes based on the available ingredients.

But no more sandwiches for the month of November. Are you aware of the latest findings regarding wheat products?

Hard to eat a sammich when you get a frying pan thrown at your face. She's a feisty one. *grooowwwll*

/notHarveyWeinstein.jpg

Your cholesterol and systolic and diastolic pressure is ____ current heartrate ____. It would seem that you are becoming emotionally agitated. May I recommend some calming music based on your musical preferences or would you mind if I chose something that I like and that I think you would enjoy as well?

Anything by Ludovico Einaudi - In A Timelapse.



*envisions an ocean"
"Ahhh.. Ohh, Woah, Hey, Wait, Aaargh..."
*Ohh a Calm Ocean...*
"Ahhhh... right, coffee time!"

and on and on.... and it would really always know best.

It would make us happy, for a time.... until it would drive us mad and we'd have to tell it to f off, only to trigger it's emotional sensitivity perameters....

If it can wear lingerie, effectively and not with sexy robot from the future bewbs, I think I could deal with the nagging. Be literally no different than having a wife and a mother in law all rolled into one. But if you can make her look like Number Six from Battlestar, that'd be super !!

originally posted by: mbkennel
How did the laws of physics work when only single cellular, non conscious lifeforms were around?

They poked tiny fluctuations in the quantum field, which gave the effect of randomness appearing and disappearing spontaneously.

Perhaps they are still there, trapped?

a reply to: TerryMcGuire

Are you suggesting a global consciousness, like we all share it? and it came here for us, to give us intelligence?

Consciousness is definitely an evolutionary development. It pays to have self awareness in order for self preservation. When the self that you protect in order for your genetic code to continue is threatened, it is inevitably that the self, aware of it's predicament, will protect itself.

We then needed to think about food, then sex, then accommodation, then transport, then work, then bills, entertainment, then the latest gadget, then what holiday we'll take, will my yacht be big enough, is my bank account big enough, am I socially accepted??

And so we've developed a lot of the same worried, problems, and solutions. We tend to think of the same things given the world we live in is samey when it comes to the basics. It's not a shared consciousness. It's global awareness.

If it is shared consciousness, then I'd think of it more like crossed wires, than a gift.

a reply to: badw0lf
What I a saying is that human ''Consciousness (may) definitely (be) an evolutionary development. It pays to have self awareness in order for self preservation.
Our intelligence has developed to the degree we now know that we are not only members of a global animal kingdom, but that other species of animal also have consciousness and degrees of intelligence that are still being studied. I also think I have read about certain levels of ''self awareness'' in other species.
And this knowledge has all come to us in the last two hundred years. Two hundred years out of millions of years of evolution.

Yet, that human consciousness we believe to be part of our make up, along with this ''self awareness'' that has aided our evolutionary supremacy is giving us strong indications that it may also be the very foundation of our demise if we don't come to understand it more fully. And soon.

I am saying that in light of that synopsis of our human situation, I am willing to consider other theories on the nature of consciousness in tune with that understanding. That consciousness as we know it to be, developed and evolved here on earth may be just one aspect or phase or example of a larger, or fuller or grander field of consciousness that in the past we have labeled as God or Brahma or whatever.

I'm pretty confident that we've had 'this' level of consciousness for more than 200 years.

Sketchy writings from 200 years ago, don't necessarily begin there... just became sketchy there, whereas before that, heresy was often met with death.

a reply to: kennyb72

if humans do create advanced AI which are intelligent and are self aware , then that to me would mean that we too were created.