[ExI] Kelly's future

[Kelly Anderson]

2011/5/23 Stefano Vaj <stefano.vaj at gmail.com>:
> On 23 May 2011 09:15, Kelly Anderson <kellycoinguy at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> On Sat, May 21, 2011 at 6:20 AM, Stefano Vaj <stefano.vaj at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>> > *Or* you can simply emulate the effects. No big deal.
>>
>> I believe that it is a very big deal indeed.
>
> What I mean is that by definition any "training" or "evolutionary" process
> can be replaced by an explicit programming of its final outcome. I am not
> implying that this be always easy or practical. And, according to Wolfram,
> sometimes to know the final state of a system you must run through all its
> steps. OTOH, when you know it, you can replicate any number of times you
> like.

Once achieved, an AGI is easily replicated. That much I will grant
you. But mixing explicit programming with a training process is very
difficult. Just look at how hard it is to change people. Changing me
from a religious zealot to an atheist was a very painful process that
took a couple of years of hard work. It was not just "changing the
programming", although that was, in a sense, exactly what it was.

I guess what I'm trying to get at from a computer science point of
view is that it is very difficult to mix what we now call
"programming" with a "training" kind of programming. The Kinect, for
example, uses a "training" set based on nearly 1 million images
processed on thousands of CPUs for months to come up with the decision
tree that it uses to figure out what in the picture is your arm, leg,
head, etc. You can't easily add a few lines of code to that kind of
decision tree that compensates for someone missing a left arm.

> Moreover, what may be difficult to program by hand, may be much easier to
> program, well, automatically. :-)

That's exactly what I'm saying, if I am understanding you correctly.

>> This may merit it's own thread... but I suspect that some day an AGI
>> will begin to exhibit a kind of super consciousness.
>
> I suspect "consciousness" to be just an evolutionary artifact that albeit
> being fully emulatable like anything else has little to do with
> intelligence. As for qualia, they are a dubious linguistic and philosophical
> artifact of little use at all..

I dunno... "redness" seems useful for communicating between sentient
beings. So I'm not sure how useless it is. Please elaborate.

>> I think we know more than that about other human beings.
>
> Sure, as far as signalling is concerned. For the rest, the truth is simply
> that we are hallucinating (in a PNL sense) much more.

I agree that much of what we think we observe is a kind of
hallucination. Our eyes simply aren't good enough optically to produce
the model that is in my mind of the world.

>> Since there are people who have a fetish where they want their limbs
>> to be removed (which is fully, completely crazy in my book), there are
>> in all likelihood women who really truly enjoy rape, even the danger
>> and pain of it.
>
> There is nothing necessarily unconsensual in the removal of limbs, while
> "rape" is defined by the lack of consent by the victim. So, welcome sudden
> and violent sex by a stranger is by no means a rape either legally or
> linguistically, even though the victim may fake resistance or fear bodily
> damage from the process...

All right, I guess I see your point. It isn't rape unless it has the
psychological component of doing damage to the other being. So we are
going to be stuck with assholes who won't be happy with their sexbot,
no matter what. Perhaps they will rape my sexbot... and I'll probably
be none to happy about it. ;-)

>> True enough. With humans, there are some things that appear to be
>> cross cultural. Smiling, for example, as well as most of the other
>> facial expressions seem to be mostly independent of culture.
>
> Mmhhh. Of course, there are species-related (as there are genos-related,
> family-related, order-related) ethological traits, but I am not sure smiling
> is one of them. There are cultures where showing teeth is insignificant (as
> in Thailand) or unbecoming (Japan in the classical age) or denoting mostly
> embarassment (Japan today).

I'll try to find the reference. I think it was one of the set of Wired
authors. Seth Godin I think. He was talking about FACS, a coding
system for facial expressions, and how doing those expressions led to
emotions being produced. The universality of it was a kind of aside.
It was in a story about some research that was done on predicting
divorce from watching a couple argue for just a few minutes.

Here is the coding system.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facial_Action_Coding_System

It was really fascinating how much they could tell from
micro-expressions that lasted only a few milliseconds.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Ekman
Ekman's work on facial expressions had its starting point in the work
of psychologist Silvan Tomkins.[4] Ekman showed that contrary to the
belief of some anthropologists including Margaret Mead, facial
expressions of emotion are not culturally determined, but universal
across human cultures and thus biological in origin. Expressions he
found to be universal included those indicating anger, disgust, fear,
joy, sadness, and surprise. Findings on contempt are less clear,
though there is at least some preliminary evidence that this emotion
and its expression are universally recognized.[5]

How mainstream this Paul Ekman is, I don't know... but the US
government is apparently using his work in surveillance at airports.
Hollywood computer animators use it as well. It's a fascinating corner
of human behavior.

-Kelly