On 5/29/07, Samantha Atkins <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
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".
Yep. So had I. Then I discovered considerable work is nowhere near enough, alas. A "will to survive" is probably essentially to any autonomous being if it is
to survive.
Indeed, which is why we observe animals, evolved for autonomous survival, reliably possess such a thing (or behave as though they did, which amounts to the same thing here). Autonomous machines, however, are conspicuous by their nonexistence, and only partly because of technical difficulty. The truth is, the market doesn't want them in the first place. That's why it's not just that machines don't have a will to survive, or even that they don't have the rudimentary beginning of one - it's that they aren't even moving in that direction. 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?
Yes, because the engineered artificial development cycle not only doesn't have four billion years to spare, it also doesn't have pressures in the right direction. The market doesn't reward intermediate steps, and doing the whole thing in one go is utterly impossible. Maybe given $1 billion/year for a century, it might be possible to create an artificial sentient mind, but the market won't support that. Now, by "is impossible" I don't mean "will forever be impossible". Maybe in 10 million AD some kid will hack one up on his Jupiter brain in between coming up with 65536 nontrivially distinct axiom sets in which a proof of the continuum hypothesis exists for maths homework and carrying out abiogenesis in a nonpolar solvent for chemistry homework, before going out with his family for dinner on savory beta particles at the Betelgeuse Pulsar Restaurant. I don't know, none of us can forecast that far into the future. But impossible for us to accomplish now, this century? Yes. 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.
I think it'll stay the cutting edge. Embedded stuff trails a long way, partly because the reliability requirements are such as to flush productivity down the drain and partly because hard real time means our best tools and techniques are limited or completely unusable. Still, cake would be nice but we can live on potatoes, so we shouldn't complain too much if life offers a hope of the latter but not the former. The stuff we really need - smart CAD, design rules checking, smart search and data integration, process design and monitoring etc, to stem the loss of fifty million lives a year, to get us off this planet - can be done on beige boxes. And it is cool stuff compared to what most of the IT industry works on, let alone most of the global workforce. Think of it this way: I bet the alchemists were pretty depressed when they figured out they weren't going to transmute lead into gold. But looking back, we know they _shouldn't_ have been - the products of real chemistry ended up being much, much cooler even if they did take awhile coming. Maybe someone in 3007 will read these archives and think the same way about us. ----- This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=4007604&user_secret=7d7fb4d8
