AI

[AqD]

No, this is not about jobs of billions losers to come.

It's something more serious: trust.


According to Confucuis, trust is the single most important thing that holds our society together, without which nothing works.


Think about the scenarios: you wake up one day, the photos with you and your dog are made up, the music you hear is generated, the news on morning TV is fabricated. You don't even know if the politician talking on youtube is real. She probably has instgram, facebook, numerous search results and debate history from google, all generated, all made up, and indistinguishable from reality.

Read a book? Probably generated too, adepted from a real book with all the ideas carefully twisted. How would you know? You ask 1000 guys, they all tell you your version is real, because everyone they asked told them it's real.


Terrifying ist it?

[Flinn]

it doesn't need the AI for this to happen

in fact, it happened for decades now .. the politicians might not be completely fake, but most of them are certainly built up to suit the agenda of a specific power group.

and about using media, of whatever form, to influence people with fake news, carefully built lies etc etc is as old as history, ever read the Bible for example?

The problem you are referring to is connected with human nature, rather than with AI. AI will make it worse probably, but certainly will not be the cause of it.. it's part of what we are, of how intelligence it has been developed by evolution: if you ever had a dog, you know you can trick them into doing what you want, pretending it's not that; the same happens with kids..

the key concept is trust, as you noted: if you trust someone/something, they can trick you into believing anything. So something we should always be doing is doubting what we are told/taught, no matter what, but even this can be used against you, because if they know that you are one of those who "doubts" they will present the things in a way that what you believe is the hidden truth is in fact what they wanted you to believe (it's the base of any conspiracy theory).

in the end there's only one thing one can do: isolate themselves and live by their rules. which of course is the opposite of a society

ps. forgot to say: I still fear the AI for the possibility of it one day to become a competitor to our own intelligence, which means we'll end up inevitably to be "at war" with it. I'm not so apocalyptic like with Terminator or Matrix, I'm confident we can win that war, but if we lose, that's the kind of fate it will reserve us: exterminate us if we are seen as a menace; farm us if we can be farmed for useful stuff for it; ignore us if we are neither useful nor harmful. This is precisely what we do now.

[paleologos]

Psychoanalysts speculate that self awareness is not feasible unless the AI is embedded in a physical (artificial) body whose boundaries it can perceive/sense.
That is the AI needs to be able to perceive the body it is embedded in, as integral to it and distinguish between the body/itself and the outside world.
That's the essence of self awareness, is it not?

Even the proverbial "brain-in-a-jar" is tricked to perceive the existence of a body in which the brain resides.

So, if the psychoanalysts are correct, we will need to built "robots" with all-extensive tactile sensor abilities and enough computational power to become self aware.
I remember reading somewhere that 40% of human brainpower is retained for visual processing.

Also it seems to me it is unreasonable to fear ill intent without independent will.
Do we think that self awareness can be possible without free will?
Do we think that independent will is possible without desire -or aversions, that is instincts?

A coded routine that coerces a robot to recharge it's batteries hardly qualifies as instinct.
In us and other biological entities instincts are emergent properties.

The ones we all share seem to have come to existence as the quirks that worked:

A) Well enough to enable the individual organism to survive predation...
B) ...for long enough to find enough food, quickly enough so...
C) ...as to have time to attempt attracting a mate and...
D) ...be successful enough a seducer to be chosen for copulation and...
E) ...once more survive long enough to protect and care for the offspring until...
F) ...the offspring can take care of itself, provided it has inherited the successful quirks and not the other ones.

I do not think it is possible to program this process to a machine.
However, if enough robots are built, they can be let to fend for themselves.
Then copy the learned behaviors of the survivors to the revived units and let the process re-iterate itself until the right instincts emerge.

Then we could have self aware robots.
But why would we intentionally farm the proverbial "ghosts in the machine" in numbers so massive as to cause ourselves a problem?
The experiment could be run with a decreasing number of units as their "quirks" become increasingly acute.

[Ludicus]

P
That is the AI needs to be able to perceive the body it is embedded in, as integral to it and distinguish between the body/itself and the outside world.
That's the essence of self awareness, is it not?

António Damásio argues that the way to get AI to the next level is to add in feelings.
Minute 13.15

[Mithradates]

New video from Kurzgesagt, explains what Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is. (I highly recommend the channel)

[Flavius Ibrahimius Augustus]

I watched it. Pretty good to get a starting picture of what AI could possible influence. Thanks for sharing.

[Flavius Ibrahimius Augustus]

My opinion on AI Singularity: I think that knowledge itself is insufficient to make a consciousness which itself is something we still aren't able to completely understand. But I think that knowledge without emotions, psyche and a self is utterly unstable. Too unstable to even think for itself. Which is worrying but also something we could take advantage of if things got messy. I see a conscious Ai as a unstable being to able to coordinate it's options, as it's not shaped by something as the psyche.