Credit: iStockphoto
So now the big question is: will those emotions be real or just a very sophisticated simulation? Will they be the same kind of stuff as our own emotions? All I can give you is my hypothesis: the robot's emotional behaviour can be seen as the real thing. We are made of biomolecules; the robots will be made of something else. Ultimately, the emotions created in each medium will be indistinguishable.
In fact, one of my dreams is to develop a robot that people feel bad about switching off, as if they were extinguishing a life. As I wrote in my book Flesh and Machines (Pantheon, 2002), "We had better be careful just what we build, because we might end up liking them, and then we will be morally responsible for their well-being. Sort of like children."
Many of the advocates of the singularity appear to the more sober observers of technology to have a Messianic fervour about their predictions, an unshakable faith in the certainty of their predicted future. To an outsider, a lot of their convictions seem to have many commonalities with religious beliefs.
Many singularitarians believe people will conquer death by uploading their consciousnesses into machines before their bodies give out. They expect this option will become available, conveniently enough, within their own lifetimes.
But for the sake of argument, let's accept all the wildest hopes of the singularitarians and accept that we will somehow construct an AGI in the next three or four decades. My view is that we will not live in the techno-utopia future that is so fervently hoped for. There are many possible alternative futures that fit within the themes of the singularity but are very different in their outcomes.
One scenario often considered by singularitarians, and Hollywood, too, is that an AGI might emerge spontaneously on a large computer network. But perhaps such an AGI won't have quite the relationship with humans that the singularitarians expect. The AGI may not know about us, and we may not know about it.
In fact, maybe some kind of AGI already exists on the Google servers, probably the single biggest network of computers on our planet, and we aren't aware of it.
So at the 2007 Singularity Summit, I asked Peter Norvig, Google's director of research, if the company had noticed any unexpected emergent properties in its network — not full-blown intelligence, but any unexpected emergent property. He replied that they had not seen anything like that.
I suspect we are a long, long way from consciousness unexpectedly showing up in the Google network. (Unless it is already there and cleverly concealing its tracks!)
Here's another scenario: the AGI might know about us and we know about it, but it might not care about us at all. Think of chipmunks. You see them wandering around your garden as you look out the window at breakfast, but you certainly do not know them as individuals and probably do not give much thought to which ones survive the winter. To an AGI, we may be nothing more than chipmunks.
From there it's only a short step to the question I'm asked over and over again: will machines become smarter than us and decide to take over?
I don't think so. To begin with, there will be no "us" for them to take over from. We, human beings, are already starting to change from purely biological entities into mixtures of biology and technology. My prediction is that we are more likely to see a merger of ourselves and our robots before we see a superhuman intelligence.
Our merger with machines is already happening. We replace hips and other parts of our bodies with titanium and steel parts. More than 50,000 people have tiny computers surgically implanted in their heads with direct neural connections to their cochleas to enable them to hear.
The singularity.
While I agree with Robin Brooks starting point,that we are essentially machines we have escaped being predictable machines via the unpredictable emergent properties of our highly complex brains.
It is from this source that conscious thought and personality arise.
Thus that while the deterministic model is self evidently true, the enhancing effects of emergent properties transmutes us into an indeterminable condition of open ended possibility.
The proposition that humans are predetermined is a logical brain twister in the same class as that old chestnut
"I always tell lies"
So if we can do this with a machine then by definition the result will be unpredictable.
Question, please Sir is this a GOOD idea?
Answer, maybe not
Q When?
A Not soon
Q will it like us/ be like us?
A which do you prefer?
Q are you?
A guess
Ron Horgan.
Be careful what we instill
Rodneys comments on what we instil into AI raise the key issue on AI - you instill what you are. That is the problem. we will instill human nature its strengths and frailties. Someone, somewhere will instill the capacity for war in their intention to protect themselves from other humans. Then we let the "children" protect us. Well we know how that goes down.
ok
It all sounds very nice, creating ourselves in our own image stepping back and patting each other on the shoulders. Just like the boys down at the Manhattan project did 50 years ago. But let me get this straight mankind currently is drowning in our own apathy, watching species after species disappear, "talking" about global warming and twiddling our thumbs, not really giving a shit about the world now nor since the dawn of the first singularity, when we started clubbing animals with bones. And you expect AI to clean up our mistakes live in some sort of quasi-utopia with Nano bots that clean up our toxic waste, plug ourselves into the matrix, blah blah blah. Get over this ridicules god complex that all these futurists cling too. It’s now, not maybe, grow up and take stock of the current world and its problems not some AI 40 years from now. i mean Jesus thinking and talking about this stuff is cool, but actually giving funding to these pipe dreams only divides the reasonable from the absurd. The best part of life is that we die, who wants to be uploaded into a computer, life isn’t a cyberpunk game there are certain responsibilities humans have, and one of them is to die, not continually consume for eternity. Get a grip.
Super-human intelligence
I believe there is a fundamental blocking to what we can know about
a super-human intelligence. Simply, we can't know what such an entity will
think or do, because per definition we can't think like superhumans.
So no matter what precautions we take, we can't predict the actions of these creatures. We can't even say "low probability of killing us" or something like that.
Exceeding our design
It is easy to believe that the creation of AGI will happen soon, or happen at all for that matter. From reading countless science fiction books, it would be a fantastic concept to visualise, humans and robots co-existing peacefully.
I would like to point out however, that it is a rather selfish act to design AGI in our own image. Given that we would be recreating our own mistakes, in efforts to conceal or solve our current problems. We would be re-developing the laws that govern us, and programming these traits according to our functions and needs. There will still remain many characteristics and faults at large which we wouldn't be able to predict.
I'm offering that human control does not offer greater possibilities.
I gather that this production would be a slow process to the 'ideal' final design. But what this fantasy result (of an AGI) consists of exceeds our human abilities to fathom. So it is only realistic to be able to replicate ourselves in the form of synthetic matter, if we ever do get there. However unrealistic to think mankind (primitive as it still is in its development) can create something beyond comprehension, and beyond the human "ideal".
In light of this discussion I would love the idea of a self emergent AGI from the depths of a network such as the world wide web.
( This reminds me of the same idea sparked in a novel by Orson Scott Card, called "speaker for the dead". Embedded in this text, an immaterial super intelligence emerges as a "network of ansibles" capable of awareness, sentience and a million performances at light speed.)
-19, female, aus
Would this cause the intelligent design camp to win?
By recursive logic?