Re: How Robots Will Steal Your Job

[Programmer Dude]

One experiment you may not be aware of goes like this.

(I was aware of it, but not of any details.)

You put two dolphins in separate ponds and connect them by a
hydrophone. You tell dolphin A some "secret" and then test
to see if dolphin B knows it.

Important at this point is a description of what was the "secret"
and how was dolphin B tested for it.

But what is perhaps even stranger is the terseness of binary secret
sharing. Researchers could detect no difference in the word for
"yes" from the word for "no".

Important here is what they looked for. E.g. did they check for
such things as phase shift. Wouldn't surprise me at all that a
sonar-using creature would be expert at using phase shift.

Humans typically try to treat dolphins like dogs. If they obey
commands then they are considered intelligent. Try that same
criteria on prisoners in isolation cells, which is effectively
what dolphins are.

The difference I believe I see is what I pointed out before.
Spend a year with even an isolated prisoner who speaks another
language, and you'd be able to communicate pretty darn well.
I do recognize that part--even a large part--of that is due to
shared *human* experience, but I don't believe all of it is.

It might be much harder with, say, aliens that had just landed,
but I'd bet you that after a year we'd communicate fairly well.

That just doesn't happen with animals. After nine years with the
same animal, we understand each other pretty well in the very
limited area where we do communicate, but the absense of real
communication is very apparent.

[sigh] But I'd give a lung (and a kidney) to spend nine years
with a dolphin. :-( I envy you your experience with them!

 

[royls]

So, you think the default should be euthanasia when a person is unable
to communicate?

That is an idiotic strawman. Euthanasia (deliberate termination of
life) should be only for those who have requested it. And clearly if
people want to pay for treatment themselves or have the insurance or
HMO coverage to pay for it, one can hardly justify witholding it. But
in the middle there is the place where treatment would be paid for by
taxpayers, and IMO when a patient has entered an irreversible decline,
and has permanently lost the capacity for meaningful participation in
society, society has every right to restrict the treatment it provides
such patients to palliative measures only.

That's a decision that cannot be undone. My own
presumption would be that a person who does not want to be kept alive
would make that known when they can still communicate.

Ideally, everyone would communicate their preferences while still able
to do so. But few do.

And I have personal experience of a person who was thought by
relatives (and at least one physician) to be hopeless, until she
recovered and confronted them with the things they had been saying at
her "deathbed." She lived another eight years, and enjoyed all eight,
though there were some relatives she no longer spoke to ;-)

Problem is, we spend about a billion dollars prolonging the terminal
cases that _won't_ recover for every one that does. Given that we
cannot escape trade-offs of money for life expectancy, that is a
colossal waste.

-- Roy L

 

[Roedy Green]

Problem is, we spend about a billion dollars prolonging the terminal
cases that _won't_ recover for every one that does. Given that we
cannot escape trade-offs of money for life expectancy, that is a
colossal waste.

It would make more sense to reorient medicine in the last year of life
from heroic efforts at prolonging life to efforts to make that life
comfortable. It would cost less. It would allow people to die in
dignity. The biggie is we should not push costly, painful heroic
efforts at life extension on those who don't want them.

To me the nicest possible way to die would be surrounded by friends.
The saddest would be alone in some hospital with a uncomfortable tubes
up my nose and penis.

The controversial issue, is this. Should people be permitted to
request help committing suicide to avoid the suffering of terminal
illnesses. Do people have the right to decide if they have had more
than bearable suffering or does the state/church?

This is quite a different issue from whether you personally should
stick it through to the bitter end. Just as in the abortion issue,
you may be in favour of choice for others, but never take that option
yourself.

 

[Roedy Green]

I simply point out that in all wars children are maimed, and in the
absence of war children are also maimed.

Not so. This war has been targeted at civilians. Now troops are on
the ground, there is even less excuse for targeting children. Saddam
is gone, so you can't use that as an excuse for CONTINUING the war.

If you drop by alt.impeach.bush or one of the other political topics,
we could go into this in more depth.

 

[Roedy Green]

Important here is what they looked for. E.g. did they check for
such things as phase shift. Wouldn't surprise me at all that a
sonar-using creature would be expert at using phase shift.

When I was working on this in 1979 we were doing simple fourier
transforms and looking at them.

People speculated about phase, also that possibly the language could
even be holographic -- painting a sonic picture of sorts.

Funding with pretty sparse. The people doing most research are the
Navy who use dolphins to deliver explosives.

 

[Roedy Green]

Spend a year with even an isolated prisoner who speaks another
language, and you'd be able to communicate pretty darn well.

Have you read Pinker's The Language Instinct?
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0060976519/canadianmindprod

It argues our grammar is hard wired. There are just a few tweaking
configuration parameters. It would be a bit much to expect some other
species to deal with it without the hardware.

The communication schemes of cetacea may be equally inaccessible to us
because we lack the wetware.

 

[Michael Olea]

When I was working on this in 1979 we were doing simple fourier
transforms and looking at them.

People speculated about phase, also that possibly the language could
even be holographic -- painting a sonic picture of sorts.

Funding with pretty sparse. The people doing most research are the
Navy who use dolphins to deliver explosives.

"Barn owls, which are especially good at localizing prey by acoustic cues
alone, have timing difference thresholds as low as one microsecond. There is
no question that the temporal information essential to these discrimination
tasks is carried in the phase locking of the auditory nerve, and in the case
of the barn owl it has been possible to identify the neural circuits
responsible for making the precise temporal comparison between phase locked
spikes coming from the two ears. For a review of the work, see Carr and
Konihisi (1990).

from "Spikes: Exploring The Neural Code", Rieke, Warland, de Ruyter van
Steveninck, Bialek.

The paper referenced is:

Carr, C. E., and M. Konishi (1990) A circuit for detection of interaural
time differences in the brain stem of the barn owl, J. Neurosci. 10,
3227-3246.

Rieke et. al. also discuss echolocation in bats (and give plenty of
references), but nothing on dolphins.

-- Michael

 

[Michael Olea]

Have you read Pinker's The Language Instinct?
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0060976519/canadianmindprod

It argues our grammar is hard wired. There are just a few tweaking
configuration parameters.

This summary of a 400 page book, itself a popular summary of much more
voluminous technical work, might overstate a wee bit what Pinker argues.
"Hard wired" is a bit much, but aside from such quibbles I'm sure you'll
find universal agreement on usenet with Pinker's thesis. ;-)

I'm waiting for the collected works of Nim Chimpsky, but in the meantime
"Wild Minds: What Animals Really Think", M. Hauser is a strong alternative
to reruns of "The Simpsons".

-- Michael

 

[Gerry Quinn]

Not so. This war has been targeted at civilians. Now troops are on

That is simply a lie.

the ground, there is even less excuse for targeting children. Saddam
is gone, so you can't use that as an excuse for CONTINUING the war.

Unfortunately Saddam seems to be still around for now, but that is
beside the point. Are you proposing that occupation forces in Iraq
just stand down?

If you drop by alt.impeach.bush or one of the other political topics,
we could go into this in more depth.

There are sufficient lunatics for my taste on the mainstream groups I
frequent.

- Gerry Quinn

 

[Alan Balmer]

Not so. This war has been targeted at civilians. Now troops are on
the ground, there is even less excuse for targeting children. Saddam
is gone, so you can't use that as an excuse for CONTINUING the war.

Tell that to the insurgents.

What evidence do you have that children (or civilians in general) are
"targeted" by our forces? It would be an incompetent commander who
deliberately wasted resources on non-combatant children. The
terrorists, on the other hand, *are* targeting civilians. That's why
we call them terrorists.

 

[royls]

It would make more sense to reorient medicine in the last year of life
from heroic efforts at prolonging life to efforts to make that life
comfortable. It would cost less. It would allow people to die in
dignity. The biggie is we should not push costly, painful heroic
efforts at life extension on those who don't want them.

More than that: we should not provide them at taxpayer expense to
those who have no reasonable expectation of measurably benefiting by
them, even if they _do_ want them.

The controversial issue, is this. Should people be permitted to
request help committing suicide to avoid the suffering of terminal
illnesses.

There are a lot of other controversial issues, too.

-- Roy L

 

[George W. Cherry]

Here's my stab at defining intelligence.

Intelligence:
The ability to choose in every commonly encountered
type of situation an executable action which produces
a desirable (satisfactory, useful) consequence.

Intelligent computer programs work on a domain of
situation types to produce behaviors that are desira-
ble (satisfactory, useful).

(I would appreciate criticisms and improvements of
this definition.)

George W. Cherry
http://sdm.book.home.comcast.net

 

[Les Cargill]

Here's my stab at defining intelligence.

Intelligence:
The ability to choose in every commonly encountered
type of situation an executable action which produces
a desirable (satisfactory, useful) consequence.

Intelligent computer programs work on a domain of
situation types to produce behaviors that are desira-
ble (satisfactory, useful).

(I would appreciate criticisms and improvements of
this definition.)

George W. Cherry
http://sdm.book.home.comcast.net

What if you s/desirable/optimal/ ? That resolves
conflicts between two strategies in a fashion that
makes 'em well-ordered.

 

[George W. Cherry]

What if you s/desirable/optimal/ ?

Les, I couldn't parse the above sentence (on
which the next sentence seems to depend).

George Cherry

 

[Richard Heathfield]

Here's my stab at defining intelligence.

Intelligence:
The ability to choose in every commonly encountered
type of situation an executable action which produces
a desirable (satisfactory, useful) consequence.

Here's mine:

The ability to obey the Three Laws of Robotics.

This would necessitate some rewriting if we were discussing, say, dolphin
intelligence ... "nor by inaction allow a dolphin to come to harm", etc,
but its original form would be good enough to cover both humans and
robots/computers built by humans.

Note that I am associating intelligence with the *ability* to obey the three
laws; that doesn't necessarily imply a *willingness* to obey them, nor the
*necessity* of obeying them. For example, I am (reluctantly) ready to
concede that the UK Prime Minister, Mr Blair, qualifies as "intelligent",
even though he has undoubtedly broken at least two of Asimov's three laws
during the course of his political career.

 

[Fred Mailhot]

What if you s/desirable/optimal/ ? That resolves
conflicts between two strategies in a fashion that
makes 'em well-ordered.

If you're looking to maximize satisfaction over the long term, then choosing
the optimal action in every state won't always be your best net...there's
tonnes of stuff about this in the reinforcement learning literature...


Fred.

 

[Calum]

I guess my question is this- Are emotions a prerequisite to intelligence? OR
is intelligance a pure objective science?
And finally- If animals have intelligence- Why don't they fight back to what
we are doing to the planet?
Is their intelligance created merely in communities? Perhaps if they are
mammals(gregarious)- then intelligance is created on a smaller scale?

I would define intelligence as the ability to solve new problems. By
this definition, computers are not intelligent because they cannot
program themselves.

Isn't intelligence something gradual? I mean, since humans (by
definition intelligent) evolved from amoebae (not intelligent), at some
point along the way, a threshold of "intelligence" was crossed. But I
don't think it would be like flicking a switch. Rather, I think
consciousness, like intelligence, is on a greyscale.

Animals don't realize what we are doing, because nobody can tell them,
and they are probably insufficiently intelligent. And given that
"intelligent" humans can't be bothered to rectify the planet and create
a just society, why should animals bother? Animals just look out for
themselves, just like humans. No, human intelligence still has a way to
go, at least judging by the chimp the Americans chose as their president.

 

[gswork]

Here's mine:

The ability to obey the Three Laws of Robotics.

This would necessitate some rewriting if we were discussing, say, dolphin
intelligence ... "nor by inaction allow a dolphin to come to harm", etc,
but its original form would be good enough to cover both humans and
robots/computers built by humans.

A computer program can test an entity for these conditions to see if
they are broken. Some time needs to be spent in defining the actors
and environment, but this is plausible.

Note that I am associating intelligence with the *ability* to obey the three
laws; that doesn't necessarily imply a *willingness* to obey them, nor the
*necessity* of obeying them.

But these rich contextually informed assessments are not so conducive
to a program. You could probably emulate it via a huge list of
conditioals and definitions....perhaps at some point that simply stops
being emulation and in every way that's meaningful becomes
intelligence.

 

[Gerry Quinn]

Here's mine:

The ability to obey the Three Laws of Robotics.

This would necessitate some rewriting if we were discussing, say, dolphin
intelligence ... "nor by inaction allow a dolphin to come to harm", etc,
but its original form would be good enough to cover both humans and
robots/computers built by humans.

Note that I am associating intelligence with the *ability* to obey the three
laws; that doesn't necessarily imply a *willingness* to obey them, nor the
*necessity* of obeying them. For example, I am (reluctantly) ready to
concede that the UK Prime Minister, Mr Blair, qualifies as "intelligent",
even though he has undoubtedly broken at least two of Asimov's three laws
during the course of his political career.

Can anyone obey the three laws of robotics? It appears to me that, even
if we could agree on the definitions of "harm" and "human" (and we
can't) situations would arise in which any action or inaction would
change which individuals were harmed. In which case some individual
could always claim to be harmed by the action or inaction.

- Gerry Quinn

 

[Bent C Dalager]

I would define intelligence as the ability to solve new problems. By
this definition, computers are not intelligent because they cannot
program themselves.

Well, they can, but someone has to make the program that programs
them.

I am sure you can make a self-modifying program that is sufficiently
complex that you cannot predict how it is going to end up. In this
case, will it be correct to say that it was _you_ who created the end
product?

Cheers
Bent D