From: Eugen Leitl (eugen@leitl.org)
Date: Mon Nov 04 2002 - 15:01:04 MST
On Mon, 4 Nov 2002, gts wrote:
> Okay, thanks, so then it appears to me that SHRDLU is essentially a
> descendent of its primitive ancestor ELIZA, (though much more advanced
> than ELIZA).
No, it is a lot more than that. It has a world renderer, a world
manipulator, a manipulation planner, and a natural language interface
allowing both to issue commands and to dump introspection state. In
contrast, Weizenbaum's Eliza (1966) is just a stupid pattern matcher.
I've taken the freedom of adding a machine vision package, and a robotic
arm with a camera and a physical blocks world. It's an insignificant
extension in relation to what is currently possible. (Especially, since no
grad students have to slave overtime to implement it).
> Would you say that ELIZA or SHRDLU have human-like non-nominal
> identities? Aren't they merely non-living computer programs, except in
> name only?
I don't understand 'living'. It sounds a lot like phlogiston, or vis
vitalis to me. If you have objections to instances of man-made cognition,
how about a nematode upload? It has about 1 k cells, one third of them
neurons. It has been mapped down to exquisite detail, and numerical models
of it have been made, though not individually accurate ones which would
deserve the term upload. It could be done today, though it would require
quite a bit more effort than a Ph.D. thesis.
> I agree to the setup but I am reluctant to start with uploads first. I
> think that would be putting the cart before the horse.
Not really. Once we figure out the upload identity situation, we can
progress to handling actual physical persons.
> As extropians, isn't our monumental problem that of finding a way to
> upload the awareness of a living person?
>
> I think we are not interested merely in creating uploads that blindly
> simulate their dead human predecessors. As I wrote in another message,
> such programs would be nothing more that very hi-tech tombstones.
I think we have a problem here. You seem to deny that uploads are persons.
Forget about uploads, can machine intelligences be persons? Imagine a
virtual world, going through xillenia of virtual evolution, eventually
resulting in a bit ecology. Some of the critters are even sentient. Would
you deny these beings reality, just because they're bit patterns
interpreted by a machine? We definitely have to resolve this situation
before we can continue.
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