Artificial intelligence-why?

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renegade7

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Feb 9, 2011
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By the way, in response to some of the more...opinionated?...quotes I've received, I'm not saying AI is in itself a bad thing (I actually think it's a good thing), I'm just pointing out that from some points of view it may not be entirely realistic.
 

renegade7

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Feb 9, 2011
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And a few other points:

Higher level jobs (creative work, legal work, analysis, etc.) may be lost to AIs, potentially leaving a lot of people without work. This could create a whole new unemployment problem, this time among even well trained and experienced professionals.

Do you really have the right to just shut down (ie KILL) an AI that isn't doing what you want?

If it's an AI that is only built to do one thing and not ask questions, why not just have a non-sentient computer? I suppose the programmer wouldn't put a will to live in such a machine.

But if it's an AI created to be like a human being, and have a range of emotions similar to that of a human, it will probably want to continue living.
 

tautologico

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Apr 5, 2010
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It's a very interesting topic, one I don't have time to contribute to much at this moment. Most people here seem to have very limited ideas about what a sentient program or robot would be, however. The whole "we program it so it will only do as programmed" is patently false even for "simple" artificial intelligence programs we do today. For example, a neural network learns how to classify objects, but we don't exactly know how it classifies, and the network itself can't express how it does it. This is similar to our brains, actually; we can do lots of stuff (semi-)automatically (like read this text), but we can't articulate how our brains do it. Can you explain exactly what your brain is doing to decode these words and sentences?

Anyway, I recommend some reading for people really interested in the subject. There are tons of good books about conscience, the philosophy of "strong AI", sentience, free will, artificial intelligence techniques, machine learning, etc. One mind-blowing example for starters is "Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid" by Douglas Hofstadter, which seems to be about a lot of things in the beginning but it's really about consciousness and the possibility of a "strong AI".
 

tautologico

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Apr 5, 2010
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renegade7 said:
Would cost a whole lot of money.
They would cost a lot of research money to achieve, but once achieve it could (possibly) be far cheaper to reproduce. This is speculation, but your claim that true AI machines would cost a lot has no basis in reality either.

renegade7 said:
So even though AIs COULD exist, do you think they actually will?
Even if the benefit of a truly intelligent, sentient machine is not enough to justify its costs, at least some will be built on the way to understand our own brain and our own consciousness. Learning how to create a truly intelligent being would make us learn a lot about our own intelligence, even if it wouldn't mean we would know everything about intelligence and consciousness. This has already happened to some degree, there is an interplay between neuroscience, cognitive science and artificial intelligence research that goes way back.

I think most people would agree that understanding more about our intelligence and brains has huge potential benefits. Some risks too, of course, but it's the same with every technology. In the long run, the research costs would be offset by the possibility of curing Alzheimer, other degenerative diseases, and even developing drugs that would make us smarter, healthier, and live longer.