From: Colin Hales (colin@versalog.com.au)
Date: Sun Mar 10 2002 - 00:32:51 MST
nanowave relates.........
> *Chuckle* I clipped the below quote from this really crappy article on
> Stephen Hawking I stumbled across at
> http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/21414.html. Given that
> google has now
> cached/immortalized it, I suppose it's found it's time capsule. Poor
Thomas
> C Greene in Washington. Now your children and grandchildren can access
your
> pompous stupidity for all eternity. May they be entirely successful in
their
> future efforts to pretend they never heard of you.
>
> "We humans invented such delicious and decidedly un-mechanical things as
> religious awareness, dance, language, visual arts and literature (and I
say
> in that order). We are religious creatures; we are artistic creatures; and
> when we're exceptionally cool, we're literary creatures.
>
> No machine will be. Put this article in a time capsule and let it be read
> fifteen centuries from now. I tell my remote descendants with absolute
> confidence that they will not have built a religious, artistic, or
literary
> machine. With advanced genetic engineering they may duplicate a human
being,
> fine; but they will never, never ever, simulate one. It can't be done."
>
> Russell Evermore
> Independent Researcher/Polymath
>
He'll catch us with the fine print. Literary: Yes, Artistic Yes. Religious?
I'm not sure yet whether an AI will have to invent things to rationalise
it's place in the universe. Also - who wants to 'simulate' a human. Sensible
funcational emulation maybe.
In 1500 years he may be 100% right but 100% not useful. Let's get him to
debate the issue with the first few AI we make.
:-)
Colin
PS. I ran across this interesting musing 'aside' in yet another Iain M.
Banks SF 'Look to Windward'. (the ocr did pretty well I thought).
story ....yada blah blah yada........page 126
"Most civilisations that had acquired the means to build genuine Artificial
Intelligences duly built them, and most of those designed or shaped the
consciousness of the Als to a greater or lesser extent; obviously if you
were constructing a sentience that was or could easily become much greater
than your own, it would not be in your interest to create a being which
loathed you and might be likely to set about dreaming up ways to exterminate
you.
So Als, especially at first, tended to reflect the civilisational demeanour
of their source species. Even when they underwent their own form of
evolution and began to design their successors -with or without the help,
and sometimes the knowledge, of their creators -there was usually still a
detectable flavour of the intellectual character and the basic morality of
that precursor species present in the resulting consciousness. That flavour
might gradually disappear over subsequent generations of Als, but it would
usually be replaced by another, adopted and adapted from elsewhere, or just
mutate beyond recognition rather than disappear altogether.
What various Involveds including the Culture had also tried to do, often out
of sheer curiosity once AI had become a settled and even routine technology,
was to devise a consciousness with no flavour; one with no metalogical
baggage whatsoever; what had become known as a perfect AI.
It turned out that creating such intelligences was not particularly
challenging once you could build Als in the first place. The difficulties
only arose when such machines became sufficiently empowered to do whatever
they wanted to do. They didn't go berserk and try to kill all about them,
and they didn't relapse into some blissed-out state of machine solipsism.
What they did do at the first available opportunity was Sublime, leaving the
material universe altogether and joining the many beings, communities and
entire civilisations which had gone that way before. It was certainly a rule
and appeared to be a law that 'perfect Als always Sublime'.
Most other civilisations thought this perplexing, or claimed to find it only
natural, or dismissed it as mildly interesting and sufficient to prove that
there was little point in wasting time and resources creating such flawless
but useless sentience. The Culture, more or less alone, seemed to find the
phenomenon almost a personal insult, if you could designate an entire
civilisation as a person.
blah blah..............marklar marklar on with the story......
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