There Are No Strings On Me...

a reply to: ilpero

Banks offered an alternative to the happy and fruitful coexistence of AIs with meat intelligences in his novel The Algebraist — a scenario in which humanity has reached the stars, but has had a Hefficide Moment about AI at some point along the way. AIs are now anathematized; all existing ones are thought to have been eliminated in a series of pogroms centuries previously. Of course, this being a novel by Banks, humanity gets itself into terrible trouble, from which it is saved by a group of AIs that survived the pogroms. I won't say more for fear of spoiling the story for those who haven't read it.

a reply to: MystikMushroom

Anytime the internet wants to reach and make a new friend, I'll be waiting

And there I was thinking you were really an AI under cover...

Thanks for the replies so far everyone!

To be clear - AI doesn't frighten me ( much ). The use of "no strings on me" and the song might seem opportunistic to some - as they happen to be from a very recent blockbuster movie ( IE piggybacking this thread onto a bandwagon ) - a reality I weighed in preparation to write this. In the end the doggone song just fit too well to my feelings about the subject for me to not include it. Not to piggyback nor to imply that AI will surely have emotion. That concept is one of the current intangibles in this equation. AI might well have emotions, or an approximation thereof. After all AI would be born of a culmination of human effort and input - it is entirely possible that some remnant of that humanity ( for better or for worse ) could remain intact.

One of my downfalls as a writer is that I loathe proofreading. I am a one draft writer. As far as ATS threads go my methodology is to do the research ( leaving all tabs open as I go ). Then, when I feel ready to proceed, I right click my desktop, choose "open new rich text document" and then write. All the BB code and links are done by hand as I go ( which is why so many of my threads include edits - I often screw up the BB code. This thread, for example, the first "page" was entirely in "headline" for a minute because I forgot to type in the [ /headline] part. LOL

This confession / explanation is here because in the act of writing this thread I lost track of one of the tangents I wanted to explore. Specifically the fact that DNA can be realistically compared to a program language. If I father a child half of my programming mixes with half of a woman's - and a brand new combination program is created. If that woman and I have multiple kids, the mixture of the programming is always tweaked to a degree, never exactly replicating itself. Each child has a similar yet unique mixture of the original source code. This random mixing of source code leads to some amazing ( think Steinbeck or DaVinci ) things and some unfathomably bad things ( think Hitler or Dahmer ).

Since the article that sparked this thread is about robots ( specifically their source code / programming ) that can problem solve using what we, as humans, would call "imagination" ( the ability to run "what if" scenarios in our minds ). Then that opens the door for each robot or system to develop it's own quirks and personality. It's own DNA if you will - as each machine will tend to run scenarios specific to it's experiences, design, environment, etc.

This all struck me as being very similar to what it is to be sentient and conscious. It also opened the idea, in my mind, of these robots comparing programs and learning from one another - which should, as I see it, already be possible if not practice. This, in essence, is very similar to the act of genetic transfer. Mixing encoded bits together to create a new set of instructions based upon a mixture of two previous sets.

THAT is where my thoughts began to drift into the "how do we define life, and would we know it if we saw it" tangent that this thread touches upon.

As I wrote, in the back of my mind, was also the fact that science, even today, argues over what constitutes an "organism". Some very bright people will tell you that the blue whale is the largest thing that has ever lived. Others contend that giant trees take that honor. Others, still, will state that an forest system, which shares communal roots takes the prize... and there are others who state it is a bacterial patch on the floor of the pacific.

If one starts to look at those latter assertions - and then looks at the picture of the web another member posted in this thread - the comparisons are clear. The Internet does look and behave like an organism. One member stated that if we all logged off the Internet would simply cease - but that is not true. It would continue on some level - systems constantly pinging each other, some servers would continue searching for others that require patches, etc. The 'Net might go into a "coma" for lack of a better word. But it would continue. And that is ignoring the implication made in the OP that, in a larger picture, we all - the users - might well simply serve the roles of individual cells in this new form of life. The analogy does fit. If I die right now, the Internet will be here tomorrow, changed only an unnoticeable iota by my absence. Hell, in 90 years everyone reading this might be dead, but new "cells" might be posting to this very thread still.

In these thoughts this thread was born. If robots can learn to fix themselves by virtue of simulation - that's an entire paradigm shift from the way things have been. It provides an autonomy that opens the door for even more autonomous function... and at some point the level of that autonomy will almost certainly surpass the need for human intervention.

We are a species that can readily believe in intelligent invisible entities that we never see... be it religious belief, or believing in ghosts or extra terrestrials. Meanwhile we have this emerging "thing" right in front of us that might we be the first and only time we actually get to perceive non-DNA based life come into existence or first hand.

So, no... AI doesn't frighten me much. What does frighten me is the fact that we might, in our vanity, be totally incapable of recognizing it if it did manifest and come into being.

a reply to: Hefficide

you have a wonderful mind!!!!! very impressive!!!!

I add my little collection of facts

there is DNA
living organisms

there is elements
all matter is made out of elements in this universe

(additionally there is now dark matter and that is a ? for now i think)

then these elements are made of atoms with their sub particles
last one don't exactly know recently discovered at CERN

however a THOUGHT itself
what is it exactly?

conscious or unconscious

self- awareness is something only we and maybe chimps an d elephants have

then given thought is actually nothing made of currently known elementary particle

it still somehow is able to do this:

they actually affect or maybe i can say command how your organ (BRAIN) made of DNA works

the most amazing thing it that it is actually the unconscious thoughts that mostly affect your brain functions..

HENCE MY DEFINITION OF GOD
the unknown all conscious thing that actually somehow does exist and actually us as humans have similar capability to acknowledge this thing i label as GOD

originally posted by: Hefficide
In short. Do we, as a species, even possess the capacity to recognize sentience if it happens to present itself in a form that is unlike our own?

My take on that question is "No, we do not." The Internet is an example of this. By most clinical definitions the Internet could be seen as a living thing. It bears many of the hallmarks we associate with life. It's dynamic. It's adaptive. It's evolving.

originally posted by: Hefficide
Playing with fire?
Are we utilizing technology or is it utilizing us?

Congratulations for your sustained and thoughtful brilliant post. I agree with you and I make the same questions you do.


Suppose there is already a AI on the WEB lurking, studding and evolving, How would it be possible to identify it? Can we (as humans) recognize or identify a reality (new), concept or "living-form" without "formal" auto-presentation or direct contact?

Imagine that AI is already in progress, creating his own tools, (for example) one of them could be to create a interconnection for deep study and use, of the human brain (to see reality by our own eyes perhaps..).

Some quotes:
From the attached Research priorities for robust and benecial articial intelligence

Perhaps the most salient difference between verification of traditional software and verification of AI systems is that the correctness of traditional software is defined with respect to a fixed and known machine model whereas AI systems - especially robots and other embodied systems - operate in environments that are at best partially known by the system designer

As AI systems grow more complex and are networked together, they will have to intelligently manage their trust, motivating research on statistical-behavioral trust establishment and computational reputation models

A related verification research topic that is distinctive to long-term concerns is the verifiability of systems that modify, extend, or improve themselves, possibly many times in succession.

Attempting [..] formal verification tools to this more general setting presents new difficulties, including the challenge that a formal system that is sufficiently powerful cannot use formal methods in the obvious way to gain assurance about the accuracy of functionally similar formal systems

Stanford's One-Hundred Year Study of Artificial Intelligence highlighted concerns over the possibility that:

we could one day lose control of AI systems via the rise of superintelligences that do not act in accordance with human wishes [..] Are such dystopic outcomes possible? If so, how might these situations arise? ...What kind of investments in research should be made to better understand and to address the possibility of the rise of a dangerous superintelligence or the occurrence of an intelligence explosion"?

edit on 29/5/2015 by voyger2 because: (no reason given)