On May 28, 2007, at 6:52 PM, Russell Wallace wrote:
On 5/29/07, Samantha Atkins <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
So your are happily provincial in this respect.
Addendum: I think it is my view that is unprovincial. We're
programmed to think intelligence = humanlike, because for the last
million years the only forms of general intelligence in existence
have been human. So every generation that tries to imagine what the
next generation's super-advanced machines will be like, comes up
with - metal men.
I think you know well enough that most of us who have considered such
things for significant time have done considerable work to get beyond
"metal men".
Oh, as time goes by the imagination gets more sophisticated, the
whirrs and beeps get muted, the language is cloaked in jargon like
"really powerful optimization process", but it's still metal men
with the animal will to survival and power.
A "will to survive" is probably essentially to any autonomous being
if it is to survive. "Power" is a bit too ambiguous a term to get a
handle on.
Every generation does the same thing, no matter how often real
progress fails to even start veering in that direction, because
it's programmed into our psychology to think like that - yes, mine
too, I spent years on those lines and I still look wistfully back
at how much fun it was to seriously imagine creating a sentient
mind from scratch; what cooler hack could there ever be?
Do you believe it is impossible to create an artificial sentient mind
given that an existence proof of sentient minds from a non-engineered
natural development cycle is all around us?
Meanwhile, real life progress continues to consist of ever more
sophisticated boxes that process data according to keyboard input
and mouse clicks.
Do you think that is the only progress being made or possible to make
in the entire universe of software? Admittedly on a bad day that can
seem like the only stuff being decently funded.
- samantha
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