pjeby comments on Could Robots Take All Our Jobs?: A Philosophical Perspective - Less Wrong

2 Post author: ChrisHallquist 24 May 2013 10:06PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (14)

You are viewing a single comment's thread.

Comment author: pjeby 29 May 2013 03:47:26AM 3 points [-]

This is known as the halting problem, and we don’t know how to build any machine that could solve it.

Humans can't "solve" it either, in that sense. We can pattern-recognize that some programs will halt or not halt, but there exist huge spaces of programs in between where we would be just as helpless to give a yes or no answer as any computer program.

I'm not sure what this should be considered evidence of, but somehow it seems relevant. ;-)

Comment author: Nornagest 29 May 2013 04:37:56AM *  1 point [-]

For that matter, it's perfectly possible to build algorithms that can accurately tell you whether or not some systems will halt -- certain types of infinite loop are easily machine-detectable, to give one simple example. It's doing it in the general case that's impossible.