Will,
Yes, humans are manifestly a RADICALLY different machine paradigm- if you
care to stand back and look at the big picture.
Employ a machine of any kind and in general, you know what you're getting -
some glitches (esp. with complex programs) etc sure - but basically, in
general, it will do its job.
Humans are "only human, not a machine." Employ one of those, incl. yourself,
and, by comparison, you have only a v. limited idea of what you're getting -
whether they'll do the job at all, to what extent, how well. Employ a
programmer, a plumber etc etc.. "Can you get a good one these days?..."
VAST difference.
And that's the negative side of our positive side - the fact that we're 1)
supremely adaptable, and 2) can tackle those problems that no machine or
current "AGI" - (actually of course, there is no such thing at the mo, only
pretenders) - can even *begin* to tackle.
Our unreliability
.
That, I suggest, only comes from having no set structure - no computer
program - no program of action in the first place. ("Hey, good idea, who
needs a program?")
Here's a simple, extreme example.
"Will, I want you to take up to an hour, and come up with a dance, called
the "Keyboard Shuffle." (A very "ill-structured" problem.)
Hey, you can do that. You can tackle a seriously ill-structured problem. You
can embark on an activity you've never done before, presumably had no
training for, have no structure for, & yet you will, if cooperative, come up
with something - cobble together a session of that activity, and
end-product, an actual dance. May be shit, but it'll be a dance.
And that's only an extreme example of how you approach EVERY activity. You
similarly don't have a structure for your next hour[s], if you're writing an
essay, or a program, or spending time watching TV, flipping chanels. You may
quickly *adopt* or *form* certain structures/ routines. But they only go
part way, and you do have to adopt and/or create them.
Now, I assert, that's what an AGI is - a machine that has no programs, (no
preset, complete structures for any activities), designed to tackle
ill-structured problems by creating and adopting structures, not
automatically following ones that have been laboured over for ridiculous
amounts of time by human programmers offstage.
And that in parallel, though in an obviously more constrained way, is what
every living organism is - an extraordinary machine that builds itself
adaptively and flexibly, as it goes along - Dawkins' famous plane that
builds itself in mid-air. Just as we construct our activities in mid-air.
Also a very different machine paradigm to any we have at the mo (although
obviously lots of people are currently trying to design/understand such
self-building machines).
P.S. The irony is that scientists and rational philosophers, faced with the
extreme nature of human imperfection - our extreme fallibility (in the sense
described above - i.e. liable to "fail"/give up/procrastinate at any given
activity at any point in a myriad of ways) - have dismissed it as,
essentially, down to bugs in the system. Things that can be fixed.
AGI-ers have the capacity like no one else to see and truly appreciate that
such fallibility = highly desirable adaptability and that humans/animals
really are fundamentally different machines.
P.P.S. BTW that's the proper analogy for constructing an AGI - not
inventing the plane (easy-peasy), but inventing the plane that builds itself
in mid-air, (whole new paradigm of machine- and mind- invention).
Will:>> MT:By contrast, all deterministic/programmed machines and computers
are
guaranteed to complete any task they begin.
Will:If only such could be guaranteed! We would never have system hangs,
dead locks. Even if it could be made so, computer systems would not
always want to do so.
Will,
That's a legalistic, not a valid objection, (although heartfelt!).In the
above case, the computer is guaranteed to hang - and it does, strictly,
complete its task.
Not necessarily, the task could be interrupted at that process stopped
or paused indefinately.
What's happened is that you have had imperfect knowledge of the program's
operations. Had you known more, you would have known that it would hang.
If it hung because of mult-process issues, you would need perfect
knowledge of the environment to know the possible timing issues as
well.
Were your computer like a human mind, it would have been able to say (as
you/we all do) - "well if that part of the problem is going to be
difficult,
I'll ignore it" or.. "I'll just make up an answer..". or "by God I'll
keep
trying other ways until I do solve this.." or... "..zzzzzzzz" or ...
Computers, currently, aren't free thinkers.
Computers aren't free thinkers, but it does not follow from an
inability to switch, cancel, pause and restart or modify tasks. All
of which they can do admirably. They just don't tend to do so, because
they aren't smart enough (and cannot change themselves to be so) to
know when it might be appropriate for what they are trying to do, so
it is left up to the human operator to do so.
I'm very interested in computers that self-maintain, that is reduce
(or eliminate) the need for a human to be in the loop or know much
about the internal workings of the computer. However it doesn't need a
vastly different computing paradigm it just needs a different way of
thinking about the systems. E.g. how can you design a system that does
not need a human around to fix mistakes, upgrade it or maintain it in
general.
As they change their own system I will not know what they are going to
do, because they can get information from the environment about how to
act. This will me it a 'free thinker' of sorts. Whether it will be
enough to get what you want, is an empirical matter, as far as I am
concerned.
Will
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agi
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