Re: How Robots Will Steal Your Job

[Roedy Green]

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

Humans put themselves VOLUNTARILY through all manner of painful
ordeals. Does this mean they are not conscious?

If you are a duck, if you DON'T get off your ass and fly south you
die. You don't really get much choice.

Maybe we are using the word "conscious" in different ways. Are you
suggesting for example if you roasted a duck alive over a fire there
is nothing that actually experiences discomfort?

Does this also apply to horses, cats, dogs, whales, black people?
What is your rule for plopping creatures into the two categories?
Why do you even think there are two categories? What evidence is
there for that?

How do you know that any human but yourself is conscious?
This universe could be a giant holographic projection just for your
amusement. You may be the only one here. That is taking your point of
view to its extreme.

 

[Roedy Green]

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.

What about vet visits? Do some animals have a calendar good enough to
predict them?

 

[Constantinople]

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

I like to speak loosely in just the way you speak, because I take it as a
given that I am using words by process of analogy with the "home base" of
the words. Words like "purpose" have a "home base" (an original birthplace)
in talk about people, in social talk. We talk about people's purposes.

However, even though I like to speak this loose way about natural
phenomena, by using social words like "purpose" to describe evolutionary
processes and products, it does cause difficulties. When we use the word
"purpose", people are apt to think that we mean that there is a person, or
self, or agent, who consciously and purposely intends the purpose. When you
take a word out of its home base and use it somewhere else, the word is apt
to take a lot of baggage with it, baggage that you don't necessarily want.

I have no advice because I can't offer any better words, but consider all
the enormous amount of posting that went on recently just because people
took you the wrong way.

 

[Roedy Green]

Most people won't notice in time anyway and will
never really know what hit them.

Once they are smarter than us, and they take charge of their own
evolution, they won't have to wait for us. They can take off. It will
catch us completely off guard because the transition will be so rapid.

Perhaps much of the early work of the new intelligences will be in
helping us deal with the changes.

The more pessimistic view is that AI will develop out of corporate AI
programs whose basic value is conquest and control.

One of the very first things AI will do is read every newsgroup post
and webpage, since that will be the most accessible source of raw
information. We might as well put in our requests.

I for one would like to see a world where every species has some
guaranteed pristine habitat. I'd like to see humans reproduce less
often so the population gently drops back to perhaps 1 billion.
I'd like an end the supremacy of the human species, and have the needs
of other species considered as well when planning projects.
I'd like to see a fair economic system that rewarded people
proportionately to the effort and benefits they gave others.
I'd like to see the salmon spawning streams restored. I'd like to see
the lakes cleaned up so they could support the variety of life they
did a few hundred years ago. I'd like old houses to continue to look
the way they do now, just retrofit them to be energy efficient.
Perhaps we can live again in smaller communities where we know each
others, rather than crammed into cities out of economic necessity.

 

[Roedy Green]

However, it does not rule out the possibility that "feeling" will turn
out to be something in addition to the vigorous reaction. The answers to
such questions, however, await a future time when we finally understand
how the human mind works.

What I find interesting is how extremely solid people's beliefs are
about what is conscious and what is not, even though they cannot
formulate any sort of rule for classification.

It almost seems you are more certain the less evidence you have.

It may have to do with emotional attachment. I particularly like
rabbits, turtles, fish and frogs and thus tend to presume they have
consciousness. Other people strongly dislike reptiles, especially
snakes, and so presume them unconscious.

As a child I played with snakes, bees, worms, earwigs, beetles, ants
salamanders, frogs, fish, rotifers, paramecia... I watched them try
to escape. I watched their intent activities. Presumably I made my
assumptions they were all conscious back then. There were all
certainly BUSY doing something. They all appeared to have intent.

I puzzle often over just what this inner experience is made of. It
seem so unlike anything else in the universe. Perhaps consciousness
is something fundamental like time or space. What we need to do is
stop asking WHAT it is and start asking "How can we measure it?" "How
can we classify it?"

There is agreement that bigger brains (e.g. more neurons) implies
greater likelihood of consciousness, based mainly on the observation
that one's self is conscious, and one has a large brain. So one
possible logical assumption would be consciousness would be
proportional to brainsize/neural system size. On the other hand,
human brains go TOTALLY unconscious when brain activity drops too low,
and POP BACK into full consciousness when it hits a certain threshold.
This hints you need a certain minimum amount of brain activity to
create a consciousness. Then on the other hand, unconscious humans are
unresponsive. The animals are are curious about are quite responsive.

Religion has taught us falsely that we are special. So I figure it
safest to add a little anti-special bias into my own attitudes about
mankind. Chances are we will find we are more like other species than
we now believe.

 

[R. Steve Walz]

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.

-----------
Nonsense.
If these moving things were a new class of food altogether, we'd
arrive at just the same criteria as I stated for whether they are
conscious and aware, versus simply motile and reactive to stimulus
in a motile manner. We'd insist they prove they're "like us" in
that they think and suffer the sense of their own terror of death,
or we'd eat them.

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

-------------------------
I'd use the same criteria on robots as on animals, absolutely the same,
and I don't eat robots.

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

 

[Roedy Green]

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

I saw the experiment on a video I borrowed from the Victoria library.
It would likely have been put out by the National Geographic people.

 

[R. Steve Walz]

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

x> Canadian Mind Products, Roedy Green.

 

[R. Steve Walz]

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

 

[R. Steve Walz]

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

Dan.

 

[Constantinople]

I should point out that

1) I am not skeptical about the "self awareness" of nonhuman primates.

BTW, I didn't mean anything by putting "self awareness" in quotes.

 

[Constantinople]

Seems you're just making stuff up. Migratory birds are built to fly really
long distances; it seems absurd to talk about them as if migrating were
something far worse than what they're built to handle.

Your argument is really no different from this other, absurd argument: fish
live underwater, and yet we don't see them suffering the way a human would
suffer if he stayed underwater for several minutes. Since they easily
tolerate much longer underwater immersion than humans do, they must be non-
aware.

Or, here's another absurd argument which is closer to your migratory bird
argument: whales stay underwater without coming up for air for much longer
than humans would. How can they tolerate this? They must not be aware.

 

[R. Steve Walz]

Humans put themselves VOLUNTARILY through all manner of painful
ordeals. Does this mean they are not conscious?

-----------------------
It means you have an inflated notion of human suffering. We don't,
because we won't, which is probably our most powerful impetus to
evolve memetically rather than genetically.

If you are a duck, if you DON'T get off your ass and fly south you
die. You don't really get much choice.

------------------------------
Yup, but we stay for the winter.

Maybe we are using the word "conscious" in different ways. Are you
suggesting for example if you roasted a duck alive over a fire there
is nothing that actually experiences discomfort?

-----------------------
If it doesn't know it exists as we do, a conscious awareness of our
being, past, identity, and destiny, then it is not "there" as WE are!

Does this also apply to horses, cats, dogs, whales, black people?

----------
Don't be facetious. YOU know the line.

What is your rule for plopping creatures into the two categories?
Why do you even think there are two categories? What evidence is
there for that?

----------------------
I'm aware, they're not.

How do you know that any human but yourself is conscious?

----------------------
I can talk to them about it and come to a belief.

This universe could be a giant holographic projection just for your
amusement.

-------------------
That's solipsism, but it has nothing to do with whether animals are
aware in "magical" ways that there is absolutely NO evidence for.

You may be the only one here. That is taking your point of
view to its extreme.
Canadian Mind Products, Roedy Green.

--------------------
I'm a subjectivist.
I don't even think *I* exist, proper, or that the supposed physical
universe exists, but that only stories in the Imagination exist anyway,
and these stories are all possible Lifetimes and Experiences, and that
edible animals don't have any imagination, they are just animate edible
furrniture in these stories.

If you ask me if a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to see
what happens I look at you and say: "What 'forest' again now?" I don't
even believe that my brain exists, but that it is just a graphically
depicted representational story of how perception works in this
Lifetime.
-Steve

 

[R. Steve Walz]

-------------------------
Sorting/counting objects on command is not math. We do math for OUR
purposes when WE WANT to. Parrots do not, because they don't HAVE
"purposes"!!! ONLY *WE* Do!

 

[R. Steve Walz]

Religion has taught us falsely that we are special. []
Canadian Mind Products, Roedy Green.

 

[Roedy Green]

I watched a dolphin practice for days until he could balance a ball
under his chin. I would say he had a purpose to his actions.

The main thing that convinces us that humans are special is speech.
For example, nobody came up with a way a non-speaking animal could
convincingly demonstrate it had a notion of past and future.

I worked in a research lab on a dolphin communication project.

Dolphins can communicate complex information to each other. You can
prove this by putting two dolphins in two different pools and giving
some information to one dolphin and seeing if the other dolphin knows
it. You connect the two by high bandwidth hydrophones. As you reduce
the bandwidth, the ability to communicate disappears.

What gets really baffling is listening in. Sometimes the total
conversation will be extremely short, and sounds the same for
different information transmitted.

If you study delphinic communication with an FFT, you can see it is
very rich. Lilly estimated they communicate ten times as many bits
per second as we do.

Other cetacean species have complex sounds as well, and also have
gigantic brains. Presumably they too communicate.

 

[Airy R Bean]

Beyond which the number of Parroty errors increases?

 

[Airy R Bean]

Could still be a sophisticated automaton response, the sort of
automaton responsiveness that might have to be there before
self-awareness can be an emergent behaviour.

Consider the way in which you automatically respond when
stung by a wasp/hornet/bee/mosquito/tax inspector....
Your hand goes immediately to the painful area to brush away the
offending intrusion without conscious thought on your part.

 

[Hans-Georg Michna]

Yes, but still I don't see how you could use the highly ambiguous
natural language to write the next parallel AI system. Maybe you are
referring to mundane applications such as database client apps?

Eray,

it is initially ambiguous, but you can (a) try to avoid
ambiguities from the start, and (b) clarify them later, when the
computer finds them.

Hans-Georg

 

[Hans-Georg Michna]

To date, nothing passes the Eliza test.

Do you mean the Turing Test? I think that's not true. Eliza-like
programs have passed the Turing Test many times.

It depends a lot on the intelligence and knowledge of the test
person.

Hans-Georg