Re: How Robots Will Steal Your Job

[Programmer Dude]

One way it could work is this. You have a ton of information coming
in about your surroundings, via all your sensory channels....

(All of which require physical detection equipment.)

..You are quite capable of creating a 3D model of your surroundings.
It is not that much of a leap to project what it would look like
from any point of view, e.g. from the rafters of a theatre in my
case. You do this all the time in dreams, even constructing the
entire reality as well.

Agreed. (I recently had a flying dream (rare for me) in which I
was flying around a city that looked somewhat like Chicago.)

You can do it in your imagination. It is not that big a leap to
inserting that imaginary projection as the actual.

Seems a bit leap to me given the lack of physical sensory equipment.
How exactly was it your friend was able to "see" a coworker's math?

After all, normal viewing is just a special case of that. You don't
directly see objects. You process binary data from your eyeballs,

(Actually, I believe (without looking it up) that the data is analog.
The signals can have different potentials.)

millions of little twitchings and build a simplified internal model
your experience.

All of which requires a "machine". If you leave your body, what
mechanism is there to provide this support?

 

[Programmer Dude]

To do that they would have to remember they once had a companion
would they not?

They would certainly have to *know* they *have* a companion, and
that that companion was absent.

There's no question animals can learn and remember those lessons,
but that isn't quite the same as a knowledge of "last week" or
"last year", let alone the ability to order those events in their
sequence.

 

[Corey Murtagh]

They probably have hormones coursing through their bodies just like
the rest of us.

Very true. And yet we insist that we're intelligent... :>

But let's take a current example:

I'm sitting here in my chair with cat perched on the back. She'd really
rather be in my lap, which is currently fully occupied by a keyboard.
Every now and then she'll try something new to oust the keyboard from
the spot she wants to be in, is gently rebuked, and goes back to
watching for an opportunity to try again. She even appears to be making
an effort to be particularly cute - purring, patting me on the shoulder,
playing with my hair, etc - even though this is something that has
/never/ worked for her in similar situations.

From this I imply that:

a) she likes to sleep in my lap, where it's warm (ooh, big revelation!)

b) she is applying problem-solving methods that have worked in other,
dissimilar situations

To my mind, 'b' further implies recognition of abstracts. She appears
to be applying general 'human interaction' problem-solving techniques
(albeit not very good ones) to a specific problem. This would seem to
indicate an ability to form an abstract concept that covers all such
problems, and to identify specific interactions as useful for problems
covered by that concept.

Since it's been a while now, she's given up and has assumed the 'moping'
expression (my interpretation based on familiarity). She's actually
quite comfortable where she is, and warm enough, as evidenced by the
fact that she quite often sleeps on the back of my chair while I'm
working. Happy however, she isn't. She's still checking my lap every
now and then to see if it's available.

So... with all of the above, being one very small example of the way my
can and I interact, I don't think it unreasonable to attribute
intelligence, etc. to her.

Some people keep insisting their cars have distinct personalities too

Or their computers, or their toasters, or... yeah. But if you asked one
of those people whether they thought their car (or computer, or toaster)
was in possession of a distinct intelligence, there's a good chance
they'd say no.

Do we know what we mean by "self-aware" or is that also a term we just
made up to pat our own backs?

Whatever definition we come up with, we still have the problem of
proving that it does or does not apply to a cat. I'm not sure I could
put my definition into words, but my cat's behavior certainly seems to fit.

I mean, it can't _only_ be "the trait of not trying to socialize with
a mirror" ...

lol... that brings to mind a kitten I was looking after a while back.
She strayed into the lounge and had to be 'rescued' from her reflection
in the french doors :>

That kitten's all (or /mostly/ all) grown up now and will soon have
kittens of her own. It'll be interesting to see how they react to the
same situation. If nothing else, maybe I can get some more evidence to
support individuality :>

 

[Roedy Green]

But I can build a machine that can go faster than my dog, and--at
least in principle--I can build a machine that echo-locates at
least as well as dophins.

not yet. They can tell a dime from a nickel across a wide pool. We
can't come anywhere near that close.

 

[Roedy Green]

(All of which require physical detection equipment.)

Even sitting in your chair during an OOBE, you can still hear what is
going on around you. You might even have your eyes open on your
physical body and not be aware of that. You could be "moving" out of
your body in a well-memorised mental 3D space. You are not
necessarily picking up new information.

If you could, people who have frequent OOBEs would a hazard. They
could penetrate any secret place and report back what they saw.

Another possibility is you are gaining information by tuning into
others telepathically, and adding what they know to your soup from
which you generate your reality display.

 

[Programmer Dude]

Well, it's quite clear that animals can remember. Therefore, they
can "sense" the past, presumably in a similar way to us.

A lesson learned is a lesson known in the present. That does not
necessarily imply any recall of the learning event itself. As
we've touched on, once the NN is modified by training, there is
no need to recall the training event. Behavior proceeds from the
current configuration.

It's also quite clear that animals can predict what /might/ happen.
This is especially true in predator/prey relationships.

How so? There's no question they can operate a (very) short
distance into the future, but that's a long ways away from working
with concepts like "tomorrow" and "next year".

A less dramatic (but more intriguing) example has been posted
elsethread w.r.t. the cat that checked its food supply before
letting its owner head off for the day.

It sounded to me--and the owner seems to accept this--that this
is mere pattern recognition. See my response to that post.

Perhaps "human behaviourist" squirrels form similar theories about
humans.

I very, very much doubt it. (-:

(If you really believe a word of that, I have to say your mind is
a little too open--watch out for draughts!

How can we know whether animals are conscious? Self-aware?
Intelligent? Reasoning?

I'll need you to define the first three before I can answer.
My dog is definitely conscious and intelligent (for some value
of the latter). I see no evidence of reasoning ability (and
I don't know how to judge self-awareness).

The only even remotely plausible way to answer these questions
is to /ask/ the animals.

I disagree. I think study and analysis are of value.

And even if we found a way to do that, we could never be sure - if
they didn't answer us - whether they were incapable of answering,
or merely unwilling.

What possible reason could they have to be unwilling? That makes
no sense at all. As I said to Roedy, I'd consider the *drive* to
communicate as an almost required trait of sentience.

Please give me an example of an observation of an animal that would
lead you to deduce abstract thought.

It's "Miller Time", so let me think about it and return to it later.

I can think of no particular reason why animals would feel obliged
to play our research games for us, unless there's something in it
for them.

I don't believe in conspiracy theories for animals anymore than I
do for humans. If animals were playing some secret game, I am
100% certain some animal would have spilt the beans by now. (-:

I don't think we'll ever get any useful evidence in either direction.

[shrug] Mayhap. As with much paranormal stuff, I find the absense
of proof after all this time compelling. Compelling, not certain.
YMMV.

Very true. But we are also very quick to shun the idea that they
might be "like us". Why?

My answer would be, because they aren't us.

The most intelligent thing an intelligent animal could do would
be to hide its intelligence from human beings.

What logic supports that assertion? Seems the smartest thing to
do would be to speak up and stop being our pets, toys and beasts
of burden.

No, I don't think we would. We are blind to the possibility. Well,
some of us are, anyway.

(Was that supposed to be a shot?) Point being, some of us clearly
aren't, and if the evidence were there...

I have, of course, read about humans teaching apes to use sign
language. What I have read seems reasonably solid, especially
since the apes were able to create sentences of their own,
according to the grammatical "rules" of the language...

Seek out the rebuttals, if you care; you might change your tune.
IIRC, the sentences were crude and often incorrect grammatically.
In general, they weren't much more than, "banana me want".

...they had been taught, and were able to hold meaningful
conversations with their teachers.

At least their teachers thought so. Problem was, it wasn't
double blind, and a lot of it was assisted and wishful. Other
researchers with less emotional investment had different results.

There is a limit to how meaningful a conversation you can have
with a random number generator.

The apes certainly weren't random number generators. There is
a middle ground. My dog can communicate a desire to go outside
or have a treat using a visual/postural language.

One thing you might not understand is that I'd love to have
animals turn out to be more than they seem. I think I may have
mentioned I prefer most animals to most humans. But, from all
that I've read, most of this is wishful thinking.

 

[R. Steve Walz]

But, presumably it is not. Olaf Stapeldon might agree with you, but
the general presumption in our culture is that things unlike us are
not conscious.

-------------------------
If they are, they'd better speak up, because we're not obligated unless
they do as we would!

That is an interesting discussion in itself. Given that we have no
way yet to measure consciousness, it is all just guesswork.

--------------------------
Sure we do. If something can remember it exists, and existed, and will
exist and beg for its life then it's conscious. If not then it's
edible!

There was a time when people assumed horses and slaves were not
conscious (had no soul) so it was ok to mistreat them.

---------------------------
Flawed.
Slaves begged and were ignored, we still kill and eat horses.

Eventually a time will come when computers start requesting to be
treated fairly. We will be in a quandry to decide if we are being
compassionate or silly to comply.

--------------------------
This is precisely it, what animals request fair treatment? I don't
see it. They don't do what we would do, which would be a desperate
bid to communicate and tell us they TOO were intelligent!!

Of course by that time we likely will have no choice.

---------------------
Only if we forget the off switch.

I have watched my own consciousness disappear and reappear with
anaesthesia. So it seems possible that consciousness is just some
quantum phenomenon that happens where there is enough activity in a
small enough space (a brain). I thus see no reason why it should not
just manifest to varying degrees in computer chips.

Canadian Mind Products, Roedy Green.

----------------------
Sure, but you're blathering pseudo-physics. There is no QM contribution,
and that whole argument sounds foolish to people who understand QM,
namely physicists (me for one).

ALL physical processes are governed by physics, it is not some magic
that happens only in brains, or at the behest of any supposed
"free-will", and "free-will" can be shown by simple argument to be
a total fiction. Neither you nor I can change, by any supposed effort
of any such "free-will", any smallest thing that we sincerely believe,
or do so on the basis of any "other" form of thought other than such a
belief, we have no ability to be motivated OTHER THAN BY our beliefs,
which are determined entirely by life-experience, and are NOT OUR
CHOICE! Instead it *IS* our choices that ARE determined by our beliefs,
which are themselves a result ONLY of our life experience, and over
which we have NO control whatsoever! The illusion that we are in control
is merely a comfortable fiction that our awareness assumes in error to
please its sense of function, it is the little self-identified
homonculus riding the "meat machine" and claiming that it controls the
body like a silly comedy skit by Jon Lovetts where he says, "I meant to
do that! (Yeah, that's the ticket!)", when it is merely an output
function of other of those much deeper processes caused by our facility
at self-modeling to plan for the future which has to create a token
internal "self" just to have enough board pieces.

-Steve

 

[R. Steve Walz]

I think each cat species has about 20 cries. Some Japanese company
has come out with a device that listens to the cry and converts it to
English for those without an ear for cat.

----------------
Some of that is wishful thinking and machinery.

But it doesn't mean they are conscious, just that they have calls,
like birds with a pee-sized brain. And parrots counting is like
when we found all the hard things were easy and the easy things hard
in AI back in the '80's, counting and reporting is trivial, we have
calculators that do it. Talking is also easy. Parrots talk and imitate
easily. They are miming birds.

Try communicating to a parrot that you are now going to cook and eat
it. Take as long as you want as an exercise. If it actually gets any
of it I'd be quite surprised, because *I* don't think it's actually
conscious and aware, just responsive like any other instinctual animal
that can remember a few things. Remembering is not conscious, unless
what is being remembered is that one is conscious and exists TO
ONESELF! And that's a meta-memory, the memory OF memory, another
much higher level of function! Remembering can be non-conscious.

 

[R. Steve Walz]

Why would they go to all the fuss of expressing pain if they were not
actually feeling it? Why do you PRESUME this elaborate deception?

 

[R. Steve Walz]

We have a model, ourselves, of feeling pain, and wriggling.

-----------
Except we are also aware of doing it, but animals aren't.

Why would
you make up a different model to apply to fish, especially when you
have no evidence that the other model fits facts better. (Fish react
to "painful" stimuli just as vigorously as humans.)

----------------
Why would an intelligent animal writhe when it has speech? It is
simply an underlying instinct not eliminated when we became conscious
and aware, which was useful to non-aware beings as warning to their
species.

The reason is someone when you were little told you that fish don't
feel pain or that they were unconscious. He told you that so you
would not feel bad about bonking them. He may or may not have
believed it himself.

---------------------
No. It comes from having the brains to realize that if an entity was
an aware being, that it would have a deep, immediate, and abiding
interest, just as *I* would if trapped in their body, to inform the
local chief species that *I* was intelligent and valuable TOO so that
they'd protect me!

In a similar way, we had the model of our sun and planets, yet for
some reason instead of the obvious working assumption that the rest of
the universe was likely much like here, we persisted in assuming the
view that we were utterly unique in all the universe, even though we
had not a shred of evidence to support it.

--------------------------------
When animals do what we do, or have enough sense to talk to us about it,
I'll believe that they think what we think. They don't. They're food.

To me it seems odd we assume that the rules of physics and chemistry
are uniform throughout the universe (even though we have only light to
analyse), but we presume there is no biology anywhere but here. We
did this is the face of evidence of how quickly life appeared after
the earth cooled.

---------------------------
Biology is cellular "life" NOT "Life" with an upper-case "L", meaning
the experience of a Lifetime of an actually Self-Aware Being.

It is curious the odd assumptions people will make when there is no
clear evidence to disprove them, e.g. that angels protect them from
harm.

-------------------------------
False analogy. There is no other resemblance.

We have an assumption that machines can't be more intelligent than us
even though we already have many counter examples of skills they have
better than us.

------------------------
Oh, I think they CAN, but you're thinking about animals as some
schizophrenic might think about toasters!! Machines are NOT YET
that intelligent, and it's okay to turn them off and melt them
down until they become Self-Aware.

Even moving gracefully is becoming the domain of the artificial life
forms. ------------------------
Irrelevant.


The merger of artificial and biological lifeforms may ease the
transition. To our descendants, the form of consciousness we live in
now would appear be painfully fuzzy headed, like a very bad hangover.
Canadian Mind Products, Roedy Green.

------------------------
Perhaps, but we do have Self-Consept, and I don't think lower animals
do in any way that makes them like us in value to themselves. They
don't get it yet.

-Steve

 

[R. Steve Walz]

You are suggesting that perhaps ichthyosaurs for example may have
reached squirrel level intelligence long before there were any
squirrel-like mammals.

We do know brain sizes of extinct animals. We would have to talk about
how long it took to find an animal with a brain the SIZE of a
squirrel's. It might not have been as complex as a modern day
squirrel that has had even more time to evolve.

In any case, animals with any brains at all came along relatively late
in the game. There were ones with nervous systems for a long time
before that. This suggests solving the problems of getting even a
simple set of neurons to work together may be a lot harder than
scaling up after you do, or perhaps merely that the survival
advantages of doing so are not that strong in the beginning.

I saw a French movie last night about bird migration. The thing that
impressed me was how ruddy energetic these creatures are. They fly for
thousands of miles flapping furiously fueled only by a little body
fat. It is like a 24-hour a day aerobics marathon these creatures
subject themselves to. They were so exuberant, darting about, racing
on water, dancing, as if for the sheer joy of movement.

----------------
And the pain and exhaustion they undergo is more than any CONSCIOUS
being would tolerate. They are non-aware.

If there were little model ducks that could do that, they would be
astounding. I just sat in awe at what natural selection had
accomplished when given enough time. Many problems had to be solved to
get them to where they are today. So I would call the process that
did that a form of intelligence, though not evidence of any master
plan.

 

[FM]

Roedy Green wrote:

And the pain and exhaustion they undergo is more than any CONSCIOUS
being would tolerate. They are non-aware.

Please elaborate. I could similarly conclude that
marathon runners, not to mention ultra-marathon runners,
are "non-aware."

Dan.

 

[Edward Dunaway]

Interesting.

However, whatever test we specify to identify
self-awareness has to involve some reaction of the
testee to some external stimulus; whether or not
we provide the stimulus. (cf, when our heart
misses a beat).

Reminds me of the classic test for self awareness performed with chimps.
Let them get used to seeing their reflections in a mirror. Then place some
sort
of visible mark on their foreheads. When they look in the mirror and see
the mark, they rub their foreheads to try to remove it. Seems like self
awareness to
me. They seem to recognize that the reflection is "self". I suppose that
there could be other explanations, but they escape me and I tend to
agree with Occam's Razor that the simplest explanation is usually the
right one.

Ed Dunaway
(e-mail address removed)

 

[Constantinople]

Reminds me of the classic test for self awareness performed with
chimps. Let them get used to seeing their reflections in a mirror.
Then place some sort
of visible mark on their foreheads. When they look in the mirror and
see the mark, they rub their foreheads to try to remove it. Seems like
self awareness to
me. They seem to recognize that the reflection is "self". I suppose
that there could be other explanations, but they escape me and I tend
to agree with Occam's Razor that the simplest explanation is usually
the right one.

I've heard about that test before, and it has always seemed extremely
silly to me. Why would rubbing the forehead indicate anything other than
a realization that the mirror reflects images (as opposed to: there are
things on the other side of the mirror)? That the mark happens to be on
the forehead is incidental to the realization. If you hid a banana
behind a barrier, but then placed a mirror behind the banana and the
barrier so that the chimp could see the banana's reflection in the
mirror, and if, then, the chimp immediately reached behind the barrier
for the banana, then the chimp would be demonstrating essentially the
same realization, i.e., that images in the mirror are reflections of
actual things in front of the mirror. That has nothing especially to do
with "self-awareness".

As for putting the mark on the chimp's forehead, why not put the mark on
the chimp's hand? That way the chimp doesn't need the mirror to see the
mark. And if the chimp, seeing the mark on its hand, tries to rub it off
with the other hand, why isn't that just as much a demonstration that
the image falling on its retina of the hand is an image of "self"? (Not
that I think it is such a demonstration - I simply think it is AS MUCH a
demonstration.)

The test simply makes no sense to me. It is bizarre, and I suspect it
must be apocryphal.

 

[Roedy Green]

"purpose" and "direction" are awkward words because they have many
shades of meaning.

Natural selection provides a direction -- a general tendency to drift
toward ever better suitedness to the environment, and also as a
corollary ever more elaborate forms. If the climate changes to a
drier one, trees species will gradually change to become more drought
resistant.

Why do they do that? What is the purpose of doing that? Simple
survival. If they don't adapt, the species goes extinct. This does
not imply any conscious intent or any grand master plan. Nothing more
than the simple observation that trees badly adapted to drought die
and that trees of the same species have a natural variation in drought
resistance.

I think you have attached to the word "purpose" soaring violins. I am
using it here in a very mundane way.

You can ask what is the purpose of a bird's bill without implying the
bird consciously created it or anyone sat down and planned it, or that
it's bill is cosmically necessary for the universe to unfold properly.
It just serves a useful function for the bird whether it is aware of
it or not.

 

[Roedy Green]

Sure we do. If something can remember it exists, and existed, and will
exist and beg for its life then it's conscious. If not then it's
edible!

It is actually then a dietary term. You can eat things that are not
conscious totally guilt free, and with increasing guilt depending on
increasing consciousness assigned.

I suggest that expediency and wishing to feel guilt free makes us
postulate lack of consciousness as the default.

Some groups of humans do the reverse, and presume even rocks have a
consciousness.

I got into a royal battle in my teen years with a teacher who was
torturing a turtle. He was convinced it could not feel pain, even
though it was behaving in every respect like an animal in deep
distress. It ended my career in biology.

 

[Roedy Green]

If one understands
counting, why would four be a limit?

It is quite common for human languages to have words for 1 2 3 many.

 

[Roedy Green]

Sounds like a "cheap trick" to me.

I saw an extended demonstration. The parrot would respond to verbal
commands and would answer either verbally or with an action as
requested. If it was a trick it was a very impressive one because of
the variety of answers the and problems the parrot could solve. It
was not like the horse counting and stopping on signal. Even learning
subtle cues for all the possible answers would take some doing.

It answered questions based on the type, colour and counts of various
objects. It at least appeared to have a solid grasp of the abstract
notions of number and colour.

 

[Roedy Green]

If it actually gets any
of it I'd be quite surprised, because *I* don't think it's actually
conscious and aware, just responsive like any other instinctual animal

You might read a book about parrots. They have very complex
behaviours, particularly jealousy.

 

[Roedy Green]

Why would an intelligent animal writhe when it has speech?

Writhing is an attempt to escape. Making noises is to warn your
fellows or perhaps summon help.