NxGenSentience

No changes that I'd recommend, at all. SPECIAL NOTE: please don't interpret the drop in the number ofcomments, the last couple of weeks, as a drop in interest by forum participants. The issues of these weeks are the heart of the reason for existence of nearly all the rest of the Bostrom book, and many of the auxiliary papers and references we've seen, ultimately also have been context, for confronting and brainstorming about the issue now at hand. I myself just as one example, have a number of actual ideas that I've been working on for two weeks, but I'v... (read more)

Thanks for posting this link, and for the auxiliary comments. I try to follow these issues as viewed from this sector of thinkers, pretty closely (the web site Defense One often has some good articles, and their tech reporter Patrick Tucker touches on some of these issues fairly often.) But I had missed this paper, until now. Grateful, as I say, for your posting of this.

Before we continue, one more warning. If you're not already doing most of your thinking at least half-way along the 3 to 4 transition (which I will hereon refer to as reaching 4/3), you will probably also not fully understand what I've written below because that's unfortunately also about how far along you have to be before constructive development theory makes intuitive sense to most people. I know that sounds like an excuse so I can say whatever I want, but before reaching 4/3 people tend to find constructive development theory confusing and probably no

I didn't exactly say that, or at least, didn't intend to exactly say that. It's correct of you to ask for that clarification.

When I say "vindicated the theory", that was, admittedly, pretty vague.

What I should have said was the recent experiments removed what has been more or less statistically the most common and continuing objection to the theory, by showing that quantum effects in microtubules, under the kind of environmental conditons that are relevant, can indeed be maintained long enough for quantum processes to "run their course"... (read more)

Hi, Yes, for the kickstarter option, that seems to be almost a requirement. People have to see what they are asked to invest in.

The kickstarter option is somewhat my second choice plan, or I'd be furher along on that already. I have several things going on that are pulling me in different directions.

To expand just a bit on the evolution of my You Tube idea: originally – a couple months before I recognized more poignantly the value to the HLAI R & D community of doing well-designed, issue-sophisticated, genuinely useful (to other than a naïve audienc... (read more)

Same question as Luke's. I probably have jumped at it. I have a standing offer to make hi-def (1080) video interviews, documentaries, etc and competent, penetrating Q and A sessions, with people like Bostrom, Google-ites setting up the AI laboratories, and other vibrant, creative, contempory AI-relevant players.

I have knowledge of AI, general comp sci, deep and broad neuroscience, the mind-body problem (philosophically understood in GREAT detail -- college honors thesis at UCB was on that) and deep, detailed knowledge of all the big neurophilosphy play... (read more)

Same question as Luke's. I probably would have jumped at it, if only to make seed money to sponsor other useful projects, like the following.

I have a standing offer to make hi-def (1080) video interviews, documentaries, etc and competent, penetrating Q and A sessions and documentaries with key, relevant players and theoreticians in AI and related work. This includes individual thinkers, labs, Google's AI work, the list is endless.

I have knowledge of AI, general comp sci, consideralble knowledge of neuroscience, the mind-body problem (philosophically und... (read more)

It's nice to hear a quote from Wittgenstein. I hope we can get around to discussing the deeper meaning of this, which applies to all kinds of things... most especially, the process by which each kind of creature (bats, fish, homo sapiens, and potential embodied artifactual (n.1) minds (and also not embodied in the contemporaneously most often used sense of the term -- Watson was not embodied in that sense) *constructs it's own ontology) (or ought to, by virtuue of being embued with the right sort of architecture.)

That latter sense, and the incommensurabil... (read more)

People do not behave as if we have utilities given by a particular numerical function that collapses all of their hopes and goals into one number, and machines need not do it that way, either.

I think this point is well said, and completely correct.

..

Why not also think about making other kinds of systems?

An AGI could have a vast array of hedges, controls, limitations, conflicting tendencies and tropisms which frequently cancel each other out and prevent dangerous action.

The book does scratch the surface on these issues, but it is not all about fail-saf

My general problem with "utilitarianism" is that it's sort of like Douglas Adams' "42." An answer of the wrong type to a difficult question. Of course we should maximize, that is a useful ingredient of the answer, but is not the only (or the most interesting) ingredient.

Taking off from the end of that point, I might add (but I think this was probably part of your total point, here, about "the most interesting" ingredient) that people sometimes forget that utilitarianism is not a theory itself about what is normatively desi... (read more)

One way intelligence and goals might be related is that the ontology an agent uses (e.g. whether it thinks of the world it deals with in terms of atoms or agents or objects) as well as the mental systems it has (e.g. whether it has true/false beliefs, or probabilistic beliefs) might change how capable it is...

This is totally right as well. We live inside our ontologies. I think one of the most distinctive, and important, features of acting, successfully aware minds (I won't call them 'intelligences" because of what I am going to say further down,... (read more)

One way intelligence and goals might be related is that the ontology an agent uses (e.g. whether it thinks of the world it deals with in terms of atoms or agents or objects) as well as the mental systems it has (e.g. whether it has true/false beliefs, or probabilistic beliefs) might change how capable it is, as well as which values it can comprehend.

I think the remarks about goals being ontologically-associated, are absolutely spot on. Goals, and any “values” distinguishing among the possible future goals in the agent's goal space, are built around tha... (read more)

To continue:

If there are untapped human cognitive-emotive-apperceptive potentials (and I believe there are plenty), then all the more openness to undiscovered realms of "value" knowledge, or experience, when designing a new mind architecture, is called for. To me, that is what makes HLAI (and above) worth doing.

But to step back from this wondrous, limitless potential, and suggest some kind of metric based on the values of the "accounting department", those who are famous for knowing the cost of everything but the value of nothing, and ... (read more)

Thanks, I'll have a look. And just to be clear, watching *The Machine" wasn't driven primarily by prurient interest -- I was drawn in by a reviewer who mentioned that the backstory for the film was a near-future world-wide recession, pitting the West with China, and that intelligent battlefield robots and other devices were the "new arms race" in this scenario.

That, and that the film reviewer mentioned that (i) the robot designer used quantum computing to get his creation to pass the Turing Test (a test I have doubts about as do other res... (read more)

Perhaps we should talk about something like productivity instead of intelligence, and quantify according to desirable or economically useful products.

I am not sure I am very sympathetic with a pattern of thinking that keeps cropping up, viz., as soon as our easy and reflexive intuitions about intelligence become strained, we seem to back down the ladder a notch, and propose just using an economic measure of "success".

Aside from (i) somewhat of a poverty of philosophical of imagination (e.g. what about measuring the intrinsic interestingness of... (read more)

If we could easily see how a rich conception of consciousness could supervene on pure information

I have to confess that I might be the one person in this business who never really understood the concept of supervenience -- either "weak supervenience" or "strong supervenience." I've read Chalmers, Dennett, the journals on the concept... never really "snapped-in" for me. So when the term is used, I have to just recuse myself and let those who do understand it, finish their line of thought.

To me, supevenience seems like a fu... (read more)

Thanks for the very nice post.

Three types of information in the brain (and perhaps other platforms), and (coming soon) why we should care

Before I make some remarks, I would recommend Leonard Susskind’s (for those who don’t know him already – though most folks in here probably do -- he is a physicist at the Stanford Institute for Theoretical Physics) very accessible 55 min YouTube presentation called “The World as Hologram.” It is not as corny as it might sound, but is a lecture on the indestructibility of information, black holes (which is a convenient lodestone for him to discuss the ... (read more)

Well, I ran several topics together in the same post, and that was perhaps careless planning. And, in any case I do not expect slavish agreement just because I make the claim.

And, neither should you, just by flatly denying it, with nary a word to clue me in about your reservations about what has, in the last 10 years, transitioned from a convenient metaphor in quantum physics, cosmology, and other disciplines, to a growing consensus about the actual truth of things. (Objections to this growing consensus, when they actually are made, seem to be mostly argu... (read more)

A cell can be in a huge number of internal states. Simulating a single cell in a satisfactory way will be impossible for many years. What portion of this detail matters to cognition, however? If we have to consider every time a gene is expressed or protein gets phosphorylated as an information processing event, an awful lot of data processing is going on within neurons, and very quickly.

I agree not only with this sentence, but with this entire post. Which of the many, many degrees of freedom of a neuron, are "housekeeping" and don't contribut... (read more)