[ExI] AI definition was Re: Whistling past the graveyard (spike)

[Keith Henson]

On Thu, Apr 7, 2016 at 3:35 AM,   "spike" <spike66 at att.net> wrote:

> I can think of one definition of AI which would never move.  If we do accomplish true AGI, it will self-improve recursively.  This is the singularity.  When or if that happens, the debate is over.

I wrote a few chapters of a post singularity novel.  It's in the
format of "what I did for summer vacation" from the viewpoint of kids
and parents who rent a train in a nearly depopulated world.  "The
Clinic Seed" chapter is a flashback to explain what happened to the
now vanished 99% of the population who stored their bodies and have
been enjoying the uploaded world for several decades by the time of
the story.

This chunk out of chapter 5 is longer than required, but I don't post
here often.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Like most urban schools, the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie
Mellon University had been shut down in the population crash.  When
cities went under about 10 percent of their original population, they
became just too depressing for humans to live in.

However, like infrastructure everywhere, the city and Universities
were well maintained, roads and sidewalks clean, grass mowed, trees
trimmed, and the buildings clean and without a broken window or a
sagging roof anywhere.   Electric power and water was on, gas as well
though it was not used for heating, having been displaced by electric
heat and super insulation.  Unless buildings were in use by physical
state humans, they were kept cold inside (but not freezing) winter and
summer alike to slow down degradation of photographs, paper and other
physical artifacts from the pre crash era.

As they were crossing the bridge on Forbes Avenue over the train
tracks between Carnegie Mellon University and the University of
Pittsburgh, Kenny [11] caught up the [train] engineer.

“Mr. Bledsoe?”  Kenny asked as they walked along.

“Eh?”

“Did they get the idea for the Krell planet from Pittsburgh?”

“Krell planet?”

“In the movie we saw last night.  The planet was deserted except for
the machines.”

“Oh, you saw _Forbidden Planet_ last night.  No, _Forbidden Planet_
was made a 100 years before Pittsburgh was mothballed.”

“Why do we call cities ‘mothballed’?  Does it have anything to do with moths”?

“Actually it does.”  Ed replied, as usual happy to be educating
children by the oldest method.

“The larvae of some kinds of moths eat clothing and blankets made of
wool.  More than 200 years ago, early chemistry workers discovered
that a sharp smelling solid chemical from coal called naphthalene
would keep the moths out of clothes. “

They paused at a Walk/Don’t Walk light turned on for the party’s
amusement by one of the city’s AIs.  Ed went on:

“It was sold in little balls (Ed held his thumb and finger apart about
half an inch) called ‘moth balls.’  People would store winter clothing
and blankets over the summer with a handful of them.

“Eventually ‘mothballed’ came to mean anything that was protected and
stored for possible future use.”

Kenny looked thoughtful.

“How come adults know everything?” He asked.

Ed laughed.  “We cheat.“


Thirty years in the past the AIs tasked with remembering and making
presentations to CMU visitors would have run up a palace of utility
fog on the mall and presented a 3D docudrama on the historical events
around the emergence of AIs at CMU.

Now, in deference to the attempt to raise children in a retro
environment with features of the 1950s, the adults were directed by
messages to their neural interfaces to the McConomy Auditorium, a 110
year-old theater in Carnegie Mellon’s central buildings.  The
20-minute presentation to the adults and older kids (the younger ones
could watch or play on the lawn) was in black and white newsreels
format, much of it converted from video of press conferences.

“Even with a nearly complete historical record from those times, it’s
hard to pin down when the first AIs became full personalities.”   The
narrator spoke in a voice over showing primitive robots and computers.

“The problem isn’t unique to AI history, there is a similar problem
about the first railroad."  (Montage of drawings and photographs of
early trains.)  "About the best we can say is that what we now think
of as AIs didn’t exist before 2032 and definitely did by 2036.  In
that year there were more than a hundred scientific papers co-authored
by AIs.   Carnegie Mellon was in the forefront of this effort."
(Shots of University labs and bits of recorded slow interactions with
early AIs.)  "The key insight was to equip AIs with carefully selected
human motivations."

“The two biggest problems of the early 21 century were energy and
medical treatment.  CMU researchers contributed to both.

“Solar power from orbit solved, in fact, over solved, the first by
2035.”  (Shots of space elevators and power satellites in orbit,
photos of rectenna farms.)

“Integrating AIs into nanomedicine clinics solved the medical
treatment problem.  It took only a few years.  After that AIs and
clinics could be “grown” at low cost and they did their own upgrades,
a lot of it in the field in Africa.  They were too late for the
smallpox epidemics that swept out of the Mid East.

“A side effect of the clinics and widespread use of virtual reality
caused a physical world population crash in the mid 2050s and the
mothballing of the cities.”  (Simulated video of dense freeway traffic
dwindling to an occasional car and then none.)

The rest of the presentation was subtle propaganda mainly to the
children and directed to the goal of them doing their part in
enlarging the population.

^^^^^^^^^^

I would say we have AIs when they start getting author credit in
scientific papers.

Keith