From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Fri Mar 12 1999 - 01:31:39 MST
(Let's at least keep the SUBJECT lines clean enough that a 12-year old
can read this without Mom noticing anything wrong, okay?)
Billy Brown wrote:
>
> Of course, this raises an important moral issue. Any reasonably functional
> sexbot is already going to be at least as smart as your cat. Once you start
> adding speech comprehension, personality software, domestic skills, and
> other cognitive functions you're getting uncomfortably close to having a
> real person - and different people will draw that line in different places.
I disagree. A cat is a cat, even a cat with speech recognition,
personality software, and domestic skills. (WHAT an idea! Probably
more profitable than the ACs, if someone pulled it off.) In fact, the
level of intelligence is more analogous to that of a spider.
The really ironic thing in most discussions of Artificial Intelligence
is that the pundits treat emotions as a great mystery, and talk about
AIs with human intelligence who still don't understand emotions. What
rot! Dogs have emotions. Rats have emotions. Lizards have emotions.
Emotions are easy. We'll have emotional AIs long before we can
duplicate the simplest rational thought. We could make them right now,
if anyone wanted them.
Personality interface? ELIZA, integrated with HEARSAY II, a Cyc DB, and
a gigabyte archive of all the conversation from the most well-written
erotic stories on the Internet. The AC won't be able to discuss
Epictetus, but it will be able to respond to the vast majority of
stunningly unoriginal comments with considerably more touching returns.
All it really needs is a NL parser and Cyc DB that can figure out the
analogy between something it hears and something it's stored. The ELIZA
rules operate on keywords in the rough model instead of the speech, and
the return volley derives from a vast database instead of being made up
on the spot. When you consider how well the original ELIZA worked, how
it was perceived as being human when it was just a terminal instead of
pseudoflesh, there's plenty of tolerance for simply ignoring any
ambiguous remarks.
How much actual intelligence does this require? Answer: None. There
is no component here which is capable of original thought. At most, the
sophistication would equal that of the Structure Mapping Engine or Cyc;
it would fall short of Copycat or EURISKO.
The reflexes are undoubtedly quite complex, but while the present
ambient "mode" of reflexes might be linked to both senses and speech
command acceptance, the complexity of the reflexes themselves would not
be integrated with the personality front. The reflexes might involve a
complex, active model of the user, but would it really be necessary to
integrate this with the conversational model? Maybe a set of simple
heuristics would cross-link the two; it still wouldn't be intelligence.
In short, the AC really would be operated by emotions, meaning that it
would have a set of "modes" that could trigger complex behaviors and be
triggered by complex rules, but all the communication between modules
would be through the modes. A really sophisticated AC might even have a
modular emotional system with several tones (*) that can operate
independently and simultaneously impose different behaviors that would
be automatically integrated. But this is really over-complicating
things up to the "lizard" level; the "spider" level of discrete,
non-reduceable modes should be quite sufficient.
(*) = See the definition under:
http://tezcat.com/~eliezer/alger_non.html#counter
--
sentience@pobox.com Eliezer S. Yudkowsky
http://pobox.com/~sentience/AI_design.temp.html
http://pobox.com/~sentience/singul_arity.html
Disclaimer: Unless otherwise specified, I'm not telling you
everything I think I know.
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