[ExI] malevolent machines

[John Clark]

On Tue, Apr 8, 2014 at 7:14 PM, William Flynn Wallace <foozler83 at gmail.com>
wrote:


> >  It does what it is programmed to do and cannot do anything else.
>

Then how can a computer behave in ways that the programer did not and could
not expect? It would only take a few minutes to write a program to look for
the first even number greater than 2 that is not the sum of two prime
numbers and then stop. But will the machine ever stop? I don't know, you
don't know, even the computer doesn't know. Maybe it will stop in the next
5 seconds, maybe it will stop in 50 billion years, and maybe it will never
stop. If you want to know what the machine will actually do you just have
to watch it and see. And just like us the machine doesn't know what it will
do until it actually does it.

> Any other function is just some sort of mystical belief
>

The only way you could be right is if 3 pounds of grey goo in a bone vat
sitting on your shoulders contains some sort of mystical fuzzball thing
that computers don't have and can never have. But I don't believe in
mystical fuzzball things.

  John K Clark
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