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from the i-for-one-welcome-our-new-computer-overlords dept.
kef writes:
"By 2029, computers will be able to understand our language, learn from experience and outsmart even the most intelligent humans, according to Google's director of engineering Ray Kurzweil.
Kurzweil says:
Computers are on the threshold of reading and understanding the semantic content of a language, but not quite at human levels. But since they can read a million times more material than humans they can make up for that with quantity. So IBM's Watson is a pretty weak reader on each page, but it read the 200m pages of Wikipedia. And basically what I'm doing at Google is to try to go beyond what Watson could do. To do it at Google scale. Which is to say to have the computer read tens of billions of pages. Watson doesn't understand the implications of what it's reading. It's doing a sort of pattern matching. It doesn't understand that if John sold his red Volvo to Mary that involves a transaction or possession and ownership being transferred. It doesn't understand that kind of information and so we are going to actually encode that, really try to teach it to understand the meaning of what these documents are saying.
Skynet anyone?"
(Score: 3, Interesting) by mhajicek on Monday February 24 2014, @03:32PM
I think any program that uses a world model that contains a representation of itself (such as a bot that maps the room and knows where it is within said room) has a rudimentary degree of consciousness. It is technically self aware. Like intelligence, consciousness has degrees.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 2) by drgibbon on Tuesday February 25 2014, @02:25AM
More full answer to this idea in reply to the poster below, but I think this position is pretty much untenable. Why is the program self-aware? Based on what is it experiencing itself in reality? If we try to imagine what it's like to be the bot, all we do is insert the substance of our own consciousness inside our bot representation (e.g. imagining what it's like to be the bot). And presumably, the substance of our own consciousness is dependent on having a human body, so they should not transfer so easily. I grant that it is at least conceivable that the bot is subjectively experiencing something, but it seems far, far less likely that the bot is experiencing itself as compared with DNA-containing lifeforms, such as people, animals, plants and so on.
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(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Tuesday February 25 2014, @04:41AM
Substitute "bot" with any other intelligence and reread your post and it is equally valid. If we try to imagine what it's like to be the dog, all we do is insert the substance of our own consciousness inside our dog representation, for example. But with a bot, a dog, or any number of other things, we know it's thinking about itself; it's location, orientation, velocity, energy level, etc. Is not thinking about ones self the definition of self awareness?
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 1) by drgibbon on Tuesday February 25 2014, @06:32AM
Of course, and this is what makes the problem so difficult. One can never know, with absolute certainty, that anyone but oneself is experiencing consciousness; but that doesn't mean we can't make working judgements. We infer consciousness in others (usually based on behaviour). But a conscious entity never infers its own consciousness; it must be self-evident.
I am suggesting that the inference that a bot is consciously experiencing reality is not evidenced by the simple fact that it responds to the environment (or has models of the environment specified in code). True, neither of us have definitive proof, but I see no compelling reason to believe that it is so (other than a theoretical possibility, which IMO, is exceedingly small).
For instance, a mobile phone has what you might call "awareness" of its energy levels and location in space; it responds to light, orientation, touch and so on. By your definition, the phone is conscious. It is "thinking" about its location in space, etc. I cannot prove that the phone is not conscious (just as you cannot prove that it is), but I make a working judgement that it is not. At present, everything that has a semblance of consciousness (which we must infer) is alive and contains DNA. Computer programs/bots/AI seem to be more akin to models of conscious life, rather than conscious life itself.
Someone else posted something about David Chalmers, and I found some interesting discussion here [consc.net] about the easy vs. hard problems of consciousness (although I only skimmed the intro). What he talks about there is what I mean by consciousness, the phenomena of experience.
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(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Tuesday February 25 2014, @04:43PM
I agree that the cell phone is self aware. The thing is that "self awareness" has degrees just like intelligence. A calculator has some intelligence, just not very much. An average computer has significantly more, and an average person much more than that. Same with self awareness. An ant and a cell phone both have some self awareness; there is nothing special about being DNA based that gives a magical attribute of "consciousness".
Am I right in inferring that when you say "consciousness" you're referring to the higher level of self awareness by which one is aware of one's own mind and thoughts? If so, even a significant portion of the human population may not be conscious. It seems many of them operate on instinct.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 1) by drgibbon on Tuesday February 25 2014, @11:20PM
In terms of consciousness in the experiential sense (which I would associate with self-awareness), I would say the phone is not self-aware (of course we both have no direct proof either way; I could say a plastic bag is imbued with a universal consciousness and neither of us could prove or disprove it definitively). Consciousness may have qualitative degrees (I'm sure it does in fact), but that does not mean that we must attribute it to telephones.
Regarding DNA, I do not claim that it is magical, or that DNA alone gives consciousness (although it is at least conceivable); I was merely pointing out that everything so far that we would attribute with consciousness (in the experiential sense) is alive and contains DNA.
As I have said many times, by consciousness I am referring to a subjective experience of being in the world (check out the Chalmers paper [consc.net] for a more thorough description of this). I cannot find any sympathy for your view that "a significant portion of the human population may not be conscious". Operating on instinct in no way rules out an experiential sense of being. I strongly doubt that mobile phones are imbued with a subjective experiential sense of being in reality. If you believe they are, we might have to agree to disagree!
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(Score: 1) by TheLink on Tuesday February 25 2014, @06:32AM
Of course one could go the other way and say that everything in this universe is actually self-aware. Just that different things have different abilities and powers- e.g. what rocks can do and feel is different from what we can do.
Either way it's still rather interesting.