Kurzweil on 2010

[turtles]

For sure, and this is where the 'magic' happens, eh? It's the point at which, for contemporary viewers, the illusion of intelligence is at its most seductive.

And that's the clincher for me - it may be different kind of instruction set; but the machine is still following a set of instructions, issued by the operator.

Of course, you could say that God set the basic conditions of the physical universe, and we just operate within that context. This, to my mind, is a pretty neat half-way house between free will and pre-determination.

A couple of things here, firstly, why so focused on where the instructions come from? I would definitely argue that humans function according to a basic set of rules from which their intelligence arises (in fact, what DOESN'T function according to some set of rules?), and that these rules are a result of the laws of physics plus a billion years of evolution (I'm leaving god out of the picture here, cuz that's how I roll). However, just because one set of rules comes from one source for humans and a different source for artificial constructs, why would that effect whether the resultant system is intelligent or not, when that intelligence is entirely and exclusively dependant upon the set of rules that governs it?

Secondly, just to make it clear, when you say "the machine is still following a set of instructions, issued by the operator" I don't really agree, as the whole point of a self-modifying network is that it can change the rules that it functions by, including the rules by which it decides which rules to change. So after a given period of time, absolutely all remnants of any instructions given by the original creator can be gone. Of course the original seed was still specified by a human (which I imagine will be your sticking point) but the actual instructions the system is following may not be anywhere near those issued by the operator.

Lastly, I think it's worth pointing out that all of your concerns about the difficulty in proving the intelligence or sentience of a system (or consciousness or whatever you want to call it), apply equally well to other humans as it does to machines. After all, it's mostly faith and/or occam's razor that let's me believe I'm actually having this debate with an sentient human being somewhere rather than just an intelligent chat-bot playing devil's advocate

Ah, I love this this shit

Me too!

 

[swears]

A asked a friend that's doing a computer science PHD including a dissertation on autonomous agents about his thoughts on artificial intelligence and he just shrugged and said:
"Meh...It's irrelevent, we just need them to do useful stuff, all that AI business is a long way off, nobody takes it that seriously."

 

[DJ PIMP]

To bastardise bleep's Dawkins quote: the reality is no doubt infinitely more complex than any theologian or scientist has ever proposed.

That wasn't my intent in quoting Dawkins...

Because sure, religion is parochial, unless everyone is talking about the same god (and I don't see that it can be any other way), and that god is a symbol of the mystery - the fundamentally unknowable - that can only talk us through myth, through symbols, through the medium of the unconscious. But is actually there, and is actually trying to help us - the benevolent force behind the veil.

Can there be any greater, more complex, or more beautiful product of the human imagination than the myriad ways of explaining life through myth that have arisen over thousands of years through countless different cultures around the globe?

And the world is being consumed by the simulation of this myth... we would rather be enslaved by the material fantasy of living in heaven than try and find it for ourselves.

 

[blunt]

A couple of things here, firstly, why so focused on where the instructions come from?

Cos otherwise, it's not reason what gave birth to computing, it's magic

However, just because one set of rules comes from one source for humans and a different source for artificial constructs, why would that effect whether the resultant system is intelligent or not, when that intelligence is entirely and exclusively dependant upon the set of rules that governs it?

For sure, I'm not saying mankind will never produce an AI (for want of a better term) - just that we've got a whole world of shit to resolve before we do, and I don't see that happening for a very very long time.

Lastly, I think it's worth pointing out that all of your concerns about the difficulty in proving the intelligence or sentience of a system (or consciousness or whatever you want to call it), apply equally well to other humans as it does to machines.

Absolutely, I totally agree. But I think that's just one of the things we'd need to resolve before getting close to Kurzweil's notion of a "spritual machine".

Of course, maybe we'll get there be accident. Anyone here seen Primer?

 

[blunt]

A asked a friend that's doing a computer science PHD including a dissertation on autonomous agents about his thoughts on artificial intelligence and he just shrugged and said:
"Meh...It's irrelevent, we just need them to do useful stuff, all that AI business is a long way off, nobody takes it that seriously."

Just when I thought I might have been getting out of my depth, you step in to save me