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Donathan.Hutchings wrote:
Spock would disagree

As would ~~Albert Finney~~ any disembodied head.

modified 1-Aug-18 10:11am.

raddevus wrote:
but it is possible we do not want AI to get past this point.

tell that to the amount of people trying to achieve exactly that... luckily, I think they still are quite far from getting it.

M.D.V.

If something has a solution... Why do we have to worry about?. If it has no solution... For what reason do we have to worry about?
Help me to understand what I'm saying, and I'll explain it better to you
Rating helpful answers is nice, but saying thanks can be even nicer.

Quote:
This also relates to the fact that we call random numbers on a computer pseudo-random.

True, in software. False, in hardware. There, its possible to have true random number generators (TRNG), which can (of course) be made available to software.

Good point -- with possibility of outside values to randomize I assume?

Yeah, basically, on the hardware device they use truly random physical processes to expose a set of random bits. Many of these devices are a bit slow, so sometimes they're only used to seed a pseudo-random number generator. If you Google TRNG, you'll find more detail and some product references.

I think you have given him an idea for his next Arduino article Wink | ;)

M.D.V.

If something has a solution... Why do we have to worry about?. If it has no solution... For what reason do we have to worry about?
Help me to understand what I'm saying, and I'll explain it better to you
Rating helpful answers is nice, but saying thanks can be even nicer.

Ah, this peaked my interest. Thank you!
I'd like to challenge your initial statements.

As of yet, I haven't seen any proof that humans posses the capacity to be random.
When people get confronted with this assessment, some do challenge it by emulating random behavior to the best of their capacity.
(often overthinking it in the process, and taking a considerably amount of time to come up with something they feel is "truly" random. I am guilty of this behavior myself.)
Thing is, when people aren't put on the spot, they always seem to take the most logical next step, from their personal perspective.

I'm currently inside an office building housing about 5000 people.
Out of the 500 or so in my direct vicinity, none of them are showing any out-of-place behavior.
I just checked by walking around, looking like a complete idiot in the process.
If even one of them ever does something insane, I'll immediately revise my position.

On the topic of creativity:
People can only create copies of the things they know, in structured ways that don't always make sense to the rest of us.
This is part of creativity. It's how we get stories, movies, music, paintings.. it's all an attempt at copying one thing or another, in a very specific way.
Another big part of it, is the fact that we're constantly forgetting details about everything we know.
And when we don't recall what we're recalling, we might end up convincing ourselves a stolen idea is our own.

I don't see any reason why we can't implement abstract copies and memory loss in a software system.
Currently, most of our AI systems are based around mathematically obtuse attempts at making abstract copies.
And instead of selective memory loss, we usually do arbitrarily optimization on the result.

It's like we're still stumbling in the dark right now, but eventually we'll build it.
We always end up building, don't we? Every damn time..

I question your assertion,

Quote:
People can only create copies of the things they know

There has to be creativity somewhere, or we'd still be living in caves with a complete absence of tools. Often our creativity manifests in small improvements to existing structures, but recognizing the need for improvement and designing it, I would assert, are inherently creative tasks.

Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend; inside of a dog, it's too dark to read. -- Groucho Marx

I think people make small improvements by combining 2 known concepts at a time.

Perhaps our ancestors once tried stabbing the fire with a pointy stick, and ended up with a torch.

Well, the thing with humans being able to generate "random" stuff and being creative, that's not 100% true. Our brain generates "random" stuff based on "seeds" just like a random number generator, but the seed can be almost anything. Don't believe me? Watch any "mentalism" act, there, the basic idea is the "mentalist" using certain actions, words, images, influences the person to chose a "random" thing of the mentalist's desire, be it picking a certain card, picking a certain glass of something. More so, advertising works the same way. There's a video on youtube where they brought in a number of people with the task to create a new image for a new product. Everyone of the people invited for this task was driven to the location under some pretext. The surprising thing? Each and every one came up with similar/identical ideas. At the end it's revealed that the course the cab took was staged to influence those people in subtle ways. If i manage to find the clip i'l post it.

here's the clip: Derren Brown - Subliminal Advertising - YouTube[^]

Why the comparison with humans? If anything is intelligent and conscious, it is intelligent and conscious completely independent from us.

Blame Alan Turing.

When he was hype in ye olden times, he proposed that a theoretical thinking machine should be compared to a human, because intelligence meant being eloquent and witty.
This is known as the Turing Test, an obsolete idea by a guy who died 74 years ago.
People kinda rolled with it, for no reason in particular.

But hey, thanks to that guy, we got the original Blade Runner, which gaves us the Bladerunner 2049 reboot, which paved the way for Cyperpunk 2077.
In the end, he did good.

To Be Fair... Have you defined Intelligence?
I studied AI at the University...

If something is or appears Intelligent... Does it matter?
And what is Intelligence without Empathy? (Dangerous, choose: Dalek, or psychopaths)

What makes use HUMAN is the BioChemistry + Intelligence + Emotions/Empathy.

The BioChemistry is why we get bored and STOP working on things. We have to eat, sleep.
Our abilities change dynamically based on this. So, we have to have an operating system on top of an operating system.

For the record, I was considering doing my Masters on defining Intelligence as "self-organizing hierarchical pattern recognition" And if you think of Mensa and IQ tests... The toughest questions are the most complex patterns to identify, and those are the answers that increase your scores.

I fear machine intelligence because if it does not understand Empathy/pain/suffering...
Many things are easy. (Kill the homeless, feed them to the poor as free food. Test every child early, those not capable of expanding the race are terminated). Those are OBVIOUS solutions... And HORRIBLY WRONG for a HUMAN. The seem almost like the Communist decisions!

I am not biochemical. I am a spirit inhabiting a biochemical machine.

Prove the spirit exists!

Prove that consciousness exists!

Well we have 2 choices here.

Either it does, or it does not exist.

If we see a person completely knocked out, we refer to them as unconscious.
Therefore, we accept unconsciousness as a state of being.
And the opposite of that, being consciousness.
QED.

Now, we can argue degrees of consciousness. But that REQUIRES the acceptance of consciousness.

BTW, it exists because it is a "state" of being. It can be proven.

Spirit, on the other hand, is something we "Possess". But it takes up no space, cannot be weighed or measured in the physical world. Therefore, it is simply a LABEL on part of us that we FEEL connects to other people, and not in ways we can completely explain, and many don't understand, and yet some say they don't have and it is a hallucination.

Finally, as a word, it can have Positive or Negative meaning.

Positive: He really brings a lot of Spirit to the game.

Negative: I had to Fly Spirit!

Smile | :)

I define intelligence as:
- an emergent behavior that occurs when a group of self-sustaining pattern engines successfully exchange ideas over an extended period of time.

Feelings are tools; they short-circuit our thought process with previously established follow-up actions.
It saves time and stops our neurons from getting overly exerted, mostly, but as a side effect it also makes our thought process more rigid.

Fun side note:
I really hate Mensa. They kept stalking me for years, trying to sucker me into joining their retarded little club.
They tell me I'm smart and yet they treat me like an idiot. I'm not paying anyone who wastes my time.

From your definition...
There is no intelligence without behavior?

The wise old monk isn't intelligent unless he behaves?

And is it behavior that we MEASURE to score Intelligence?

Your definition is close to what I imagine, but behavior throws me as well as no indication of the depth involved to indicate a level of intelligence. The more complicated a pattern you can easily recognize, the higher your intelligence, as is the higher your ability to predict the outcome of a set of events. (Just watch FAIL videos to prove the inverse!)

You can only recognize patterns if you have been exposed to them.

This means you always need a precursor before intelligence can be established. I believe the exchange of ideas is the necessary initial precursor
If the wise old monk has never moved, he can't be wise. He needs to exchange ideas before he can become wise.
Once he has intelligence, inaction will diminish it.

We currently score intelligence by testing the adoption and retention rate of measurable patterns.
Someone who enjoys looking for patterns is considered smart. Someone who does not enjoy looking for patterns is considered dumb.

So wait, does that mean I can become super smart, just reading / researching patterns?
Yes. Exactly that. By any conventional measurement standard we possess, that's the thing that makes you smart.

The first problem with that is that most of our patterns are assumed to be self-evident so they're never really written down in one place.
Second problem is that people jealously guard the patterns they know because it gives them a measurement of power.
You could call them trade secrets, but to me that seems to imply the information is somehow complex, which it often isn't.

I completely disagree with you that you can only recognize patterns you have been exposed to.

The magic of pattern recognition is that Numerology is a perfect example. We can actually make up INSANE patterns and fit things to them...

Also, you can study patterns in general, but below a certain IQ point, I don't think you can see them. In fact, in children, one of the key markers for IQ is not pattern recognition, but the desire to keep trying. My daughter was given an incredibly long word to try to pronounce (some chemical name, she was 7, she started reading 4), and the doctor said she outlasted everyone her age that he had tested. He had to STOP her from trying to get it right.

That "Search" for the correct answer is a search for a discernible pattern you have not seen before.

While I agree if you are the puzzle maker, solving the puzzle is easy... But there is a certain amount of magic to creating problems/puzzles. Take a LOW IQ individual and have them create a pattern problem for someone else to solve. You will quickly find a "Child-like" knock-knock joke formulation. (Those jokes, BTW, are a standard setup and pattern).

We are drawn to such patterns. Exchanging them does NOT create intelligence, and NOT exchanging them does not DIMINISH intelligence. While I would argue that communicating complex intellectual ideas to others can CLEARLY helped develop the reasoning behind the ideas... Writing them down in a book is a future potential exchange. If the book is burned first, the OPPORTUNITY is lost, but the IQ of the person who wrote the book is NOT diminished. For the same reason. The Old Wise guy who sees the truth and beauty of the universe, and all of its inherent patterns is just as intelligent with or without ever talking to another human being.

The point about this wise old person is "Who Cares?" Because their lack of interaction impacts nobody but "others", not themselves. they were fine with their life.

The protection of knowledge... unfortunately as we advance as a civilization, knowledge becomes the truest medium of power and value. I, for example, just learned a TON about eating right and fasting that flies in the face of EVERYTHING we were told since the 1970s. yet in 8 weeks, I have lost 35lbs, and EVERY Blood Marker has improved. My risk of cancer, heart attack, and atherosclerosis are all markedly improved. Yep, we guard knowledge. And yep, we are often misled to the profit of others! But even those become patterns, and when you see them enough, you learn (When EVERYONE is telling you the same thing... Look elsewhere! LOL)

It's kinda cool that your daughter got scored on her desire to "keep at it". That's an interesting metric, tbh.

As an anecdote, I can share you my experience with low-IQ people coming up with puzzles:
They are derivative in form and they're often incomplete, with multiple fitting solutions, and no indication of which solution will be considered "correct".
A good riddle is therefor a complex pattern: it follows a structured set-up, has a clue to identify the correct answer, and has an elimination factor to exclude wrong results.

By simply reading those properties, you have inevitably gained intelligence, because you automatically mesh your notion of a riddle with the properties I present.
You might accept them or reject them, but you're bound by the conclusions you draw, recalling them partially the next time you have to come up with a riddle.

This is the acquisition of intelligence. You digest, analyze, consolidate, repeat, forget the details.
The higher your intelligence, the more patterns you can combine and reproduce with a measure of success, potentially opening up the way to more interactions and more patterns.
In contrast, the more you revert to immediate self-gratification, the less complex everything becomes, which generally reduces the variance of the interactions you'll have, and the more dumb you become.

Smart people who suddenly decide to watch TV all day and never go out again, don't stay smart.
We're not machines that suddenly stop working, but we do deteriorate gradually over time.

Having been out of my body several times, and having spent time studying accommodating philosophies and meditating, thinking, and feeling, I've come to the conclusion that my brain is a tool of my consciousness, but it is not me. Having said that, everything has at least a rudimentary consciousness, since everything is a product of consciousness that cannot be separated from its maker, so it might be possible for an AI to exhibit some consciousness, and our brains themselves to have some consciousness. But we are each more than that.

Have you noticed that during meditation, you're mostly suppressing your though loop and enforcing minor sensory deprivation, until the residual brain activity becomes the primary thought loop?
I honestly don't recommend it. I recommend segmentation: use a completely different set of skills, thoughts and feelings for a part of the day.

That way, the other neurons can get some R&R, and you're emotions have more trigger moments, which helps to keep the chemical balance.

Thought cycles have an intrinsic value.
If I did nothing with them, it would feel like a waste.

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