Re: How Robots Will Steal Your Job

[Programmer Dude]

If we can kill them, they can't be brighter than we are,...

So,... you'd be no brighter than the virus that kills you?

 

[Programmer Dude]

A more responsible view would be that, being "in charge" of
nature, it's our job to look after it, in much the same way that a
babysitter is expected to take charge of one's children, and yet
somehow avoid beating them, stealing their toys, or murdering them.

Agreed! 100%

 

[Programmer Dude]

When you stick someone's name at the top of a response, the
indication is that the person in some way agreed with the
quoted material. It's misleading at best, and damned annoying.

Particularly ironic was that not a *single* word of mine appeared.

 

[Programmer Dude]

I find this fussing over attributions rather silly when in an
internet debate you are talking to faceless anonymous beings.
What counts it what is said, not who said it.

Actually, I agree completely.

However, my sense of precision prevents me from being careless
or uncaring about attributes. I would recommend you either
begin using more precision OR drop the attribute line entirely.

As it stands, you look sloppy and unprecise. This does not
add weight to your arguments.

 

[Programmer Dude]

When a group of people is discussing an issue, especially in a
free-form manner such as this, it /is/ important that attributions
remain clear.

Really? Why? Who cares who said what? Isn't it the *ideas* that
matter? (It's not like we're going to vote on a "winner"...

 

[Programmer Dude]

Of course not. Why would a machine need "sentience", a concept
carefully formulated for the purpose of justifying (i.e. satisfying
internal psychological inconsistencies involved in) the killing
and eating of animals?

Nonsense. Animals eat other animals--no sentience required.

And some very sentient people have sworn off killing and eating
flesh.

 

[Richard Heathfield]

Programmer Dude wrote:

I still think a key difference is that--if you meet another human
(or, presumably, alien), there would be obvious *attempts* to
communicate and find common ground. This is missing with regard to
our animal friends.

How do you know?

There is limited communication between my dog and me, but most of
it comes from my attempts to communicate with her. She has very
few messages other than, "Want food", "Want to go out", "Want food",
"Want petting", "Want food",... and "Want food."

How do you know?

It may be that your inability to recognise "obvious"[1] attempts by your dog
to communicate with you are most frustrating for her.

[1] Obvious to the dog, that is.

 

[Programmer Dude]

Roedy Green talks to himself...again:

Let us try to get some definitions for:

aware
sentient
conscious

I'd think you could use the term aware even for a vacuum cleaner
that avoided obstacles.

But is it "aware" of *which* closet you keep it in?

My Oxford defines sentient as having the power to perceive via the
senses. This suggest only animals could be sentient. Perception by
other means does not count.

You assume "senses" means only the known human five?

I know from having undergone anaesthesia that the experience
disappears when I go unconscious. It is not like sleep.
Consciousness seems to be associated with a certain degree
of brain activity.

So, fortunately for surgery patients, does anaesthesia. The
difference is merely the agency: human sleep or and external
agent.

You could find out with human experiments to anaesthetize only
parts of the brain, and see if even a small amount of the brain
awake causes consciousness, or if you need the whole thing
functioning.

We already know the answer to that one (from patients with brain
injuries or surgery): no, you don't. My mother, right now, is
functioning adequately (clearly aware, conscious and sentient)
after having suffered a stroke last year.

 

[Richard Heathfield]

Really? Why? Who cares who said what? Isn't it the *ideas* that
matter? (It's not like we're going to vote on a "winner"...

Sorry, Corey, but I think you're totally wrong on this occasion. I firmly
agree with Programmer Dude that attributions /do/ matter.












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[For those who hadn't noticed, I reversed the attributions. *Now* does it
matter? Hmmm?]

 

[Programmer Dude]

In that analogy there is nothing very different in the human.

I'd say that observation is false. Unless you think iron and
uranium are "nothing very different"?

If you put a human off by himself in a cave and if you put him
at a university, you get very different results.

The only real difference would be *education*, not intelligence.
Indeed, many who have been through University seem less intelligent
that some cave-dweller.

We humans need not be all that different from our cousins any
more than uranium that goes critical is composed of a different
sort of atoms as uranium that has not.

There clearly *is* a difference after critical mass is achieved.

You appear to not have grasped the analogy. As with small bits
of radioactive material, small minds don't "explode" (achieve
sentience). With bigger chunks/minds, you get a reaction. It
is not the material that matters; it's the mass.

 

[Roedy Green]

Really? Why? Who cares who said what? Isn't it the *ideas* that
matter?

The reason it matters is because when attributions are scrambled,
people sometimes get sidetracked into fights over them.

I see three solutions.

1. Stop quoting so much so the attributions are not so complicated.

2. Use a new protocol that keeps attributions straight automatically,
see http://mindprod.com/projmailreadernewsreader.html

3. Don't sweat such minutiae. There are far more important things to
fight about.

 

[Programmer Dude]

By Moore's law, which has held ever since 1900,

1900? (-:

$1000 of computing buys you today about 1 dragon fly brain of
computing power.

You've stated this twice. Can you provide a cite? I suspect
we're not really there, yet (since I am unaware of anything
that can fully simulate a dragonfly).

If cars had improved at the rate computers have, they would
cost under a cent and travel faster than light.

Which shows how incorrect it is to compare things as if they
were all equal.

One thing to remember is there are only 8 million neurons in your
neuro cortex -- the part of the brain that lets you reason.

MUCH more important, there are billions of *interconnections*.
THAT'S where the magic seems to lie.

The bulk of your brain (100 billion neurons) is
concerned with the same things that concern a squirrel.

You mean where my nuts are? :-|

 

[Programmer Dude]

I think what we mean by conscious is "does this creature suffer?".

Maybe you do. That's certainly not what I mean.

We assume that a computer churning away for hours seeking a
solution to some problem does not experience frustration.

Are you suggesting silicon gets bored or frustated?
By what possible mechanism?

It is really then an ethical question. Which creatures is it
permissible to frustrate or kill?

1. *ANYTHING* trying to kill me.

2. Nearly anything tasty I can catch if I'm hungry enough
(and it doesn't kill me first .

3. and so on

Or just how big a sin is it to do so?

That is a separate question.

 

[Programmer Dude]

There is a difference between going through the emotions and
actually suffering.

There is also a difference between 'feeling pain' and 'suffering'.
Animals obviously feel pain. The *degree* to which they suffer
is not really known. They lack an emotional component provided
by a higher mind.

I doubt any of us has every felt guilty leaving a computer the
"boring" task of defragging the disk.

What makes you assume the computer finds that task "boring"?
Because you do? Isn't that a bit anthrocentric? Maybe it's the
computer's favorite job.

 

[Roedy Green]

How do you know?

read my little story about the dolphin and the paddles at
http://mindprod.com/intel.html. People's preconceived notions can
make them miss cues obvious to others.

 

[Programmer Dude]

How do you know?

How many animals have made obvious and overt attempts to communicate
with you (anything beyond their own immediate needs)?

Me either.

How do you know?

Over nine years of observational data.

It may be that your inability to recognise "obvious"[1] attempts
by your dog to communicate with you are most frustrating for her.

[1] Obvious to the dog, that is.

A. She seems quite happy and unfrustrated. (Must be all that
food and those long walks.)

2. A sentient being would be capable of recognizing the failure
and attempting something else. As the failure in this case
is manifest, alternate strategies are clearly required. None
is evident.

3. A sentient being would very likely pick up on, and use, some
of *my* communication methods. No evidence of such exists
(and, yes, I fully recognize that absense of proof is not proof
of absense, but after nine years of close, daily bservation
the absense is very, very suggestive...even compelling).

4. A sentient being would very likely recognize and respond to
my attempts to communicate in it's language. Again, nonesuch
is evident.

 

[Programmer Dude]

[For those who hadn't noticed, I reversed the attributions. *Now*
does it matter? Hmmm?]

No. It only shows you got some names wrong. It changes nothing
about the matter itself.

Consider two scenarios.

1. You have a long, interesting debate with a number of posters who
all have differing points of view. You make some good points
no one can rebutt, and some of the others do the same.

2. You have a long, interesting debate with a SINGLE poster who
has a differing point of view. You make some good points the
other cannot rebutt, and the other does the same.

Because both debates were thoroughly enjoyable, intelligent and
interesting you remember then fondly.

Only to later discover that, in case #1, all the other posters were
the same person arguing different points under different names.

And that the single person in case #2 was actually a class of
philosophy students using the same computer and log in name.

Does it really change anything?

 

[Roedy Green]

With bigger chunks/minds, you get a reaction. It
is not the material that matters; it's the mass.

But most humans exclude animals with larger brains than ours from also
being intelligent.

From my experiences with the transmission design program is that
anything less than a human seems VERY stupid, and anything even a tiny
bit more seems astounding. Intelligence is actually more of a
continuum than it appears to us.

It is like the way when I was 10 years old I could easily tell you who
was 10 and who was 11. Now I would be much more inaccurate.

Another way of looking at it, knowledge grows at an exponential rate.
No matter where you are on the curve, what you are accomplishing now
seems a major breakthrough surpassing completely all that went before.
You tend to get a bit full of yourself.

 

[Roedy Green]

You've stated this twice. Can you provide a cite

this in from Kurzweil's book, the Age of Spiritual Machines page 104
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0140282025/canadianmindprod

 

[Roedy Green]

I suspect
we're not really there, yet (since I am unaware of anything
that can fully simulate a dragonfly).

That's not what he is claiming. He is claiming we have $1000 machines
that have the computational power of a dragon fly, not the software to
emulate a dragonfly. He describes in the book various ways of
estimating computational power of biological brains.

Biological brains are very slow, but make up for it by being massively
parallel and huge in terms of numbers of components and
interconnections.

Back in the early 90s, Bernie Till was able to fully emulate a
nematode worm, with I think it was 149 neurons. As a programmer I am
astounded at the programming density this technique achieves. Imagine
how much traditional java code it would take to convincingly animate a
nematode worm in all its behaviours. He just created the electronic
analogs of the real connections in the hard-wired nematode nervous
system. The key he explained is all in the "S functions" at the
synapses.

Every once in a while you meet someone who is on a whole other level
of intelligence from the rest of humanity. I put Bernie Till and Bill
Joy in that category.