I think AI is fascinating, in its mathematical complexity and also its social potential.

But I was watching a documentary, and it showed that an amusingly large amount of people had worries about AI on the grounds that they might "take over the world" or somesuch. I'm sure that most of them have their ideas from films like The Terminator or The Matrix, because such a concept is illogical.
There is no reason at all to think that robots would ever 'want' to kill human beings. Robots are, just as the derived word suggests, serfs or labourers. They do what they are programmed to do. The only way that robots are going to hurt humans is if they are specifically told to, and this is already happening with smart bombs and the like.
My kettle is not going to suddenly desire to take over the world and attack me.

I think this illogical fear of computers and robots is going to be a problem, as I think robots are the way society is going to progress.
Many manual labour jobs such as assembely lines have replaced humans with robots, and I think this trend needs to continue. Going to the supermarket is so terribly slow and inefficient with people sitting there simply passing goods through a scanner. This job could easily be done by a robot with only a basic degree of artificial intelligence. Bus drivers or taxi drivers could be replaced similarly, but with a higher degree to intelligence to calculate data from various sensors.

But this would cause people to lose their jobs, I hear you cry. When a hundred people are made redundant, it is their concern and their problem. But what if a million people were made redundant?
They wouldn't have jobs, no. But they wouldn't need them either. Robots would do work so humans wouldn't have to. Robots would harvest crops, make clothes, build houses. Robots would build and repair robots.
Humans could spend their lives persuing whatever they wanted. Humanity would exist for science and art and sport and entertainment.

Of course this wouldn't happen overnight. Many jobs, such as medicine, surgery and the like, cannot yet be done by AI.
But it is certainly not impossible. Work needs to be done, instead of teaching medical students, doctors could be programming robots in how to perform medical operations. I do think that an awful lot of jobs could currently be done by robots, but it will be some time before robots can do all jobs.
In the meantime, social policies would have be placed to look after the robotically replaced humans, while programmers work on making robots to replace the rest.

It might sound far-fetched, but if you follow it one step at a time, it certainly isn't impossible.

You do make a good point. AI can't do anything that it is not programmed to do. What people are thinking is that some day robots will be able to think for themselves and act without any human input, which is almost impossible. So ya, your right people are worried for nothing.

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[url="mailto:redknightanimation@hotmail.com"]mailto:redknightanimation@hotmail.com[/url]redknightanimation@hotmail.com</A>

Do you realize how boring the world would be if all tasks were done by robots?

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Roach - Gyring and gimbling in the wabe...
0 of 14.

Then it's not AI.

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Do you have stairs in your house?

No, I don't.

How exciting is it to have some incompetent worker messing up?

Robots will do things perfectly, efficiently and quickly. They will do tasks much faster and better than humans can ever do.

When robots do all the jobs that humans need done to survive, humans spend their entire lives just having fun.

You won't waste time going to work, you can just do whatever you enjoy doing. Whether it be studying science, reading literature, going fishing or getting very drunk, you would never be tied down by a depressing job.


And AI is still a computer program.

It will not do anything outside the boundries of its programming.

[This message has been edited by Mort-Hog (edited August 11, 2004).]

bleh, ai sucks.

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deviantART gallery.

elaborate.

Read Prey By Michael Crichton

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mir·ow ( V ) Pronunciation Key (meer-oh)
Someone or something that possesses unfathomable awesomeness

Exactly. Someone screwing up is exciting. It adds stress to your life. It's variety. If everything were perfect, it'd be dull, nothing would stand out. How much can you do with your free time? Ever wonder why the children of the world's richest people do nothing but **** around, get smashed, and try to do something destructive? Because that's all they have to do. Nothing's new to them. They have no obligations to a job. They have no responsibility. They don't have to deal with the normal challenges to obtain free time and pleasure, like working hard, saving money, and planning. They just have it. And they don't know what to do with it. It would be a very very boring world if no one had to do anything. We need stress, we need variety.

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Roach - Gyring and gimbling in the wabe...
0 of 14.

Blessed are the welded, their joints be perfection without crack or flaw.

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MadQuack has a signature.

If robots did all the work, we would play computer games all day and turn into slugs. Of course, some of us do that already. But still, there wouldn't be much to do would there? If the robots did all the work, we wouldn't have to pay for anything because there would be no need. Once the robots really got their groove on, anyway.

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Map-Review | My Portfolio | The Matrix: Unplugged

Banks and banks of humming machinery! I've never seen so many knobs. We're going to have to do something, Charlie! Try pushing that button there. No? How about that one? No, not that one either. I know! I'll try pushing this one. Hold my hat will you? Good fellow.

Which is why at this point AI is impossible.

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Do you have stairs in your house?

Wait. Wouldn't complete AI not have any programing attached to it?

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Snail racing: (500 posts per line)

---------@%

The Massassi JO/JA Single Player contest info (or something of this matter. Just smile.)

Even Natural Intelligence has programming attached, as i understand it at least.

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[Blue Mink Bifocals !] [fsck -Rf /world/usr/] [<!-- kalimonster -->] [Capite Terram]
"That's why we had to beat you with tennis rackets".
NPC.Interact::PressButton($'Submit');

Right Echoman. So it just won't work. Mort-Hog, if we have robots doing all the work people would be largely over weight so having robots do all the work isn't a good idea.

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[url="mailto:redknightanimation@hotmail.com"]mailto:redknightanimation@hotmail.com[/url]redknightanimation@hotmail.com</A>

If robots ever took over I think it would have to be in a situation like in I, Robot where the robots are programmed to protect humans, but we are doing so much to harm ourselves that they take over. It's not a problem with the programming, it's with how we might perceve things differently from the machines.

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"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing." - Edmund Burke

"Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right." -Isaac Asimov

I sit around all day, everyday, and I'm not in overweight at all.

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America, home of the free gift with purchase.

*hums "In the Year 2525"*

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Snail racing: (500 posts per line)

---------@%

The Massassi JO/JA Single Player contest info (or something of this matter. Just smile.)

And the manfools piled rock on rock and raised a treesie roof
Hammer saws tears at flesh of the goodsie wood
And laughs at the crafty lord
When he learns of this the crafty lord sends
his beastesses to the manfools
They hammer and tear at their useless fleshes
And build walls of their rotting skins

Builds your roofs of dead wood
Builds your walls of dead stones
Build your dreams of dead thoughts
Comes singing laughing crying back to life takes what you steal
And pulls your skins from your dead bones shrieking

Danced we in joys and triumphs
With as the Crafty Lord danced the stringsie foolsie man.
Rose the storms in shouty glee,
The darkness in faery glooms,
The fires in happy greed.
Danced we away and fed the sad stringsie manfool to
their devouring for our thanks.

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[Blue Mink Bifocals !] [fsck -Rf /world/usr/] [<!-- kalimonster -->] [Capite Terram]
"That's why we had to beat you with tennis rackets".
NPC.Interact::PressButton($'Submit');

What.

AI always has and always will be a computer program. It's never going to turn into something 'magical'.

A robot fundementally recieves input from sensors and then does stuff with it. All 'AI' allows it to do is be able to do more stuff. Like, say, a Quake 3 bot.
The robot will never have to be able to do anything more than it has to. Giving it the ability to do more than it is supposed to is inefficient.

Now, as for all of you saying "if we didn't have jobs, we'd all be lazy".

Well. Perhaps you would.
Scientists do not get paid very much, and so they have certainly not chosen that career in order to get rich quick (and that would be a very poor motivation to study science in the first place). Students of science often have to take up other jobs to pay for their studies, often in business or banking. If they didn't have those jobs, they could spend all their time devoted to science.
Scientists often have to somehow prove that their field of research is "useful" or in that it will end up making some company a big profit in the end, but that is not science. No, scientists could study science just for the sake of science.

Similarly with the artists and the poets and the writers. Yes, some may have the "when I finish this book, I'll be rich!!" motivation, but they're probably not very good writers to start with. They could spend their time devoted to furthering their creativity.

Yes, you could do absolutely nothing with your life. You no longer have to do anything. Doing stuff is a choice.
But what exactly is the point in doing nothing? That is terribly boring. You lot could spend the rest of your life making maps and things!


And anyway, you tell that to those holding up several jobs just to survive, do you think they would be 'bored' if they didn't have to work all the time just to live? Or those working in sweatshops or factories?

Ha! After playig Quake 3 based games, I'd like to see AI try to take over the world. You could kill them all one at a time and the others robots wouldn't notise, and they probably just stand in a corners tryng to shoot throguh walls with rocket launchers! But, besides, a machine can't think for it self. That's is impossible. weather an inclined plain, or a computer, they are still just tools.

Oh and before you start thinking along the lines of the film I, Robot, I'll quickly post how that film was terribly illogical.

Firstly, it relied on some notion of "ghosts" in the code.
"Why is it that robots move into the light when it is dark?"

what. My kettle doesn't run away when I turn off the light.
The only reason a robot might move into the light would be if it is solar powered (in which case it'd be obeying Law 3. question anwered!)

The film somehow relied on robots developing a "soul". ugh.
It's not the first film to make this horrible mistake.

Secondly, the film claims that robots following the three laws "evolve" and are bound to "revolution".

what.

They seem to have misunderstood the whole concept of 'evolution'. It is about survival, those not able to survive die out and those that are better adapted survive.
This process is meaningless for robots. Robots do not die, they do not survive, they do not compete. When robots make robots, they do not change from one generation to another. They are like bacteria dividing into perfect clones.
Robots would follow the laws to the dot, they would not start to "reinterpret" them.
I'm not quite sure, but I do think the film actually got the laws wrong when they quoted them at the start of the film. I'm sure I read that they had "A robot will not harm a human being, through inaction" when they should read "through action or inaction". The robots would not all of a sudden ignore the "action" part of that law, or replace "human being" with "human race".
The point of the book is to examine the behavior of the robots in different circumstances and how the laws play a part. This does result in robots lying, or robots walking around in circles. It does not result in robots trying to take over the world. Asimov studies the robots using mathematical logic, the film studies robots using guns and "raw emotion".
bleh.

Basically, you're wrong.

Programmers have already experimented with evolving code, and programs that constantly modify themselves to fit new situations and they've ended up being able to do things that weren't specifically programmed by anyone.

^^^ Exactly.

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mir·ow ( V ) Pronunciation Key (meer-oh)
Someone or something that possesses unfathomable awesomeness

This "evolving code" is still within set parameters. It might do things the programmer wouldn't expect, but it won't do things the programmer specifically doesn't want.

Well, after playing Deus Ex again, I've been up for some totally world-controlling AI's again.

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<landfish> FastGamerr > Satan

If robots became commonplace, I would rather have it be like futurama instead of I robot.



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I have found that you can transform your character solely by the power of belief: as you believe yourself to be, so you shall become over time.

Mort, /anyone/ who programs knows that code /frequently/ does things that they didn't want it to

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[Blue Mink Bifocals !] [fsck -Rf /world/usr/] [<!-- kalimonster -->] [Capite Terram]
"That's why we had to beat you with tennis rackets".
NPC.Interact::PressButton($'Submit');

Game based AI is a horrible, let me say that again, a horrible example of what the more advanced concepts of AI can do. With the science of neural nets we are able to simulate the human brain. One application of neural nets is the hopfield network.

It was designed to be a network consisting of nodes to simulate the neurons in the brain, while also simulating the firing patterns also found in the human brain. They are able to teach, for example, the network what a triangle looks like, or what square looks like. They were even able to teach the hopfield network how to add numbers together.

They can teach the hopfield network a multitude of things they did not originally have in mind, because it simulates the human brain. Unlike a lot of game AI, it is not merely a list of conditional statements saying what to do when what happens, but it can actually learn what to do.

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"It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity."

-Albert Einstein

[This message has been edited by SG1_129 (edited August 12, 2004).]

[This message has been edited by SG1_129 (edited August 12, 2004).]

I think that the term AI is often misused, which is what is causing the intense amount of ignorance in this thread.

Artificial Intellegence.

We are implying sentience. Your concept of applying AI to your kettle and even Robots (ie. the kind that work on an assembly line making your car) can not be applied to what AI is by definition (and not by what it has been used to label the simulation of thinking).

If you've ever read the book I, Robot by Issac Asimov you'd realize that the purpose of his writing was to question WHAT makes us human. A concept touched upon in the matrix our brains are merely controlled electrical impulses shot between synapses and nodes. Our brain is a giant, complicated, bio motherboard. And with the neural nets briefly described by SG, we are coming closer to a computer that is no longer a computer, but a human mind trapped in a metal body.

The future described by Asimov, or Phillip K Dick (Blade Runner), or even Frank Herbert aren't as fantastic as you believe. If we could build a perfect replica of the human brain in electronic form, what would the difference be?

And then you come to the question of the human spirit, our soul, and god and all that, which is a different question entirely.

AI in games is NOT AI. It's merely a misnomer. And your experiance playing Q3 does not give you anywhere near the ability to gauge the capabilities of a thinking machine. We are talking about sentient, thinking, conscious machines. Not just a series of IF statements or conditionals. It's hard to explain to somebody who doesn't know programming...

Before you start rattling off what a program can and can't do, I suggest you learn a little about programming, and do a little more research on AI. No offense, but you're coming off pretty ignorant.

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[url = "http://www.DelphiDragon.cjb.net"]The Dragon's Lair[/url]. Game Programming in Borland Delphi.

[This message has been edited by DragonPhinn (edited August 12, 2004).]

[This message has been edited by DragonPhinn (edited August 12, 2004).]

For that matter there are expirements working with using actual brainmeats as the computational/storage components of systems. I was reading something on wireheading.com about using sections of rat brains as an array of some sort. When i have more time i may try to find the article again.

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[Blue Mink Bifocals !] [fsck -Rf /world/usr/] [<!-- kalimonster -->] [Capite Terram]
"That's why we had to beat you with tennis rackets".
NPC.Interact::PressButton($'Submit');

In the year 2525, if Man is still alive, if Woman can survive, they may find...



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free mp3 ~Jump - Young America

new album Between the Dim and the Dark available now

I machine can't do anything that it's not told, in some way to do. A program is no diffrent than spikes on a wheel that make music. Immagine a dead person. What if you could restore everything physical about him exactly how he was before he died. Even if you start his heart back up he's still nothing but a lump of tishue. He no longer exists as a seintent life form.

[This message has been edited by Obi_Kwiet (edited August 12, 2004).]

You seem to be hinting at the fact that a program is really no more than a list of insructions. This is, of course, true. However, neural nets allows a program to act analog, though it is, in reality, digital.

You say that a machine won't do anything that we don't tell it to do. To me, this is a bit flawed if you are trying to prove that a machine can't act like a human. For example, what if we told it to act like a human?

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"It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity."

-Albert Einstein

[edit]Argh, double post[/edit]

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"It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity."

-Albert Einstein

[This message has been edited by SG1_129 (edited August 12, 2004).]

Mort, why do you keep compairing highly advanced robots to your kettle? I'd say there are just a few differences.

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Roach - Gyring and gimbling in the wabe...
0 of 14.

While I agree with your anger against Luddites, and the obviously stupid choice of casting the main character in I, Robot as a technophobe, I do not agree with some of your other points. First off, your computation that we could all do what we want is flawed. You are not taking into account the many other variables and forces that would influence this kind of outcome. We (americans) currently live in capitalism. The ability to do what we want comes from the ability to procure the resources necessary for what it is we want to do. Since there is already an inequality present, those people who currently lack the resources, will not gain the resources necessary to live such a lifestyle, and will lose the means of procuring the resources once the robots come online...

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Daddy, why doesn't this magnet pick up this floppy disk?

WRONG. If you set everything back up to the way a body was before it died, it wouldn't be DEAD. All we are now is a lump of tissue, we're just a very complex lump of tissue.

This kind of brings up a really interesting question...about at what point do we consider something a "being"? At a certain point I think that a neural net "artificial" intelligence isn't really artificial, and really is of as much value as a simple animal or maybe at soem point a human. What if the AI in our games got so advanced that they used a sort of neural net....wouldn't we then be killing REAL intelligences? Something to think about.

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WOOSH|-----@%

I wouldn't think so, since it's a game, with the press of a button you could revive the dead and it would be as if nothing ever happened. And if you were really concerned about killing conciousnesses in games (lets use a holodeck as a more real example) you could have its "death" routine simply be something that shuts it down temporarily.

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Bassoon, n. A brazen instrument into which a fool blows out his brains.

Good point...why REALLY "kill" it when you can simulate killing it...but it's still interesting to think about...if you don't save the pathways it's created or what it has learned, isn't that almsot the same as killing it? What if you suddenly forgot everything you ever knew? You wouldn't really be you anymore. Also, if you allowed it to continue to learn, it'd be like raising a child in your computer...and think about how terrible that would end up. Smart people would need to think of these things, and hopefully are already.

But as you've pointed out, it'd be kinda cool to have little robot friends that you could turn on whenever you wanted to and play a game with, heh.

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WOOSH|-----@%