Re: Let's Talk About Artificial Intelligence And Virtual Reality
@Camlorn, good and evil don't exist without a religious framework? hmmm, perhaps you should study more ethics sinse defining the nature of good without respect to god is what people have been doing for the last two thousand years ever sinse socrates and the euthephro dilemma, and all the religious right yellings about "We need god to say what's good because the devil is evil" doesn't change that.
After all what are ethical systems like utilitarianism for?
Getting back to Ai, personally my problem with the idea of ai is whether we can create consciousness. That we could create a system which is able to learn to an extent I don't doubt, but whether we could have a system with real qualea, ie, real experience of a mental world I am not sure sinse I personally do not believe that the properties of mental objects reduce to the properties of physical objects.
this isn't actually a belief in souls or whatever, it's just th
e belief that saying "I am happy" Doesn't reduce down to a "my neurones are in state x"
With Ai there is a very famous thought experiment called the chinese room that illustrates the problem.
Imagine you have someone locked in a room with many draws labeled with chinese characters, each containing some peaces of paper written in chinese.
You post a paper into the room with chinese characters on it, and the person inside the room matches those characters to one of the draws, takes a peace of paper out of that draw and posts it back to you.
In this way you could theoretically have an intelligent conversation in Chinese. You post a paper saying "hello" into the room, and the person matches it with the right draw and posts a paper back saying "Hello, how are you?"
The problem however is that the person in the room is just pattern matching. They themselves have no knolidge of the Chinese language, no ide a what the papers they send out of the room actually refer to, they just match and send a response.
this is my issue with Ai, sinse while I am quite convinced when I search for a file my computer is able to find it quite coherently by putting together sets of positively and negatively charged logic gates on it's circuit boards that adhere to my request, I am not convinced that my computer has any extra sensation or consciousness involved with that system.
So, even if (and it is a pretty gigantic if), a system were developed that was able to assimilate different sorts of information outside it's initially prescribed intake I'm not sure if that system would be actually sentient, especially considering that in biological terms we're not even sure on the sentience of other none animal species, and even our knolidge of the sentience of animals is generally ganed by assumption and empathy rather than something impyrical.
Note that this idea has not hing to do either with souls or with God, it's just the recognition that our current language of biological determinism isn't adequate to explain our mental landscape and so any system developed only with the knolidge of that language will not in any sense approximate who and what we are.
Otherland is an awsome series, and I love the portrayals of The Other and the clones of human brains involved, but it is at rock bottom fiction, albeit extremely good fiction, that is based on some pretty major assumptions, same goes for Data in Tng (indeed rather more so).
As to virtual reality, I am not sure whether or not we will have accurate enough knolidge of the brain to actually interface brains and computers for the reasons just mentioned. We may well get to the point that computers can monitor certain nurvous activity and that a person can think control a device, although odds are you probably won't be able to just think and have it happen like magic, you' ;ll need to think something specific, eg, think of moving your right hand up to access the top part of a screen. But actual virtual reality of a real environment projected into the brain that someone can manipulate? I'm not sure.
I do see us getting to a point where devices! will be able to completely mimic reality in sensations, at least as far as sight sound and movement go, although touch is something that hasn't even been considered yet, let alone taste and smell, (and sinse those two actually would require relese of particles into the body they have rather worrying implications).
However, to me the ethics of virtual reality are far less worrying than the ethics of the companies selling the devices involved with producing it. After all, companies are already using every casino trick the gam bling industry ever produced to flease people out of money as we discussed in This topic and the bette r the vr devices the more that will continue, not to mention the amount of power people like Apple have through social media etc.
I don't necessarily think Virtual reality, at least if we could ever get something close to real virtual reality would necessarily be a bad thing, after all everything has two sides, but I'm more concerned with the world's economic situation and the way that technological progress is always calculated only on prophetability with little regards for ethics or freedom.
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