[ExI] AI through human homogeny?

[Anders Sandberg]

On 2013-01-04 02:15, ablainey at aol.com wrote:
> The book is a snapshot of all human life in one minute. All life, death
> etccondensed into exact statistics rather than estimates. Not a great
> film. An mildly interesting story.

Sounds like an adaptation on of Stanislaw Lem's "One human minute"
http://english.lem.pl/works/apocryphs/one-human-minute


> What it sparked in me was an idea on what could really be achieved by
> the colation of just one minute of human life on Earth?
> Accounting for 7B people if you could record just one minute of their
> experience that makes around 221.816 years worth of life experience.
>  From every aspect of humanity, every culture, place, time of day and
> night. Life, death, sex (32.4 Million people at anyone time quoted in
> the film), food, the mundane, the ordinary, extraordinary and the
> bizarre. What would happen if you could feed all that data into an AIto
> create a homogenous blend of all humanity?
> Would it yield a balanced personality?

You mean taking their sensory and mental experience and then using it to 
ground the AI? It would be about 799,086 yeas of experience: I think 
that would be more than enough to ground an AI into understanding humans 
quite well.

> What kind of effect mightall the "sleepers" have? The dreams, day
> dreams, hallucinations and psychosis?

A smart algorithm will figure it out, since there are plenty of 
references in the waking states to what sleep is and what it does.

So I think the AI would believe in "there is an objective world, where 
people occasionally go to sleep and dream" over "the world is a 
subjective mess, but a lot of people share the same dream of a 'waking 
world'" since the latter is rather inconsistent and requires a far 
longer description string (essentially a list of all random dreamworlds 
plus the waking world).

> I think this kind of snapshot of humanity could really sumup what it is
> to be human very nicely. It should capture pretty much the entire
> spectrum of what we are. Maybe all of it and a few things we havn't
> figured out yet?

Surely. I think as we move into the world of not just Big Data but also 
Big Sensing we are going to get ever more impressive snapshots of the 
world and ourselves to learn from.



-- 
Anders Sandberg
Future of Humanity Institute
Oxford University