Re: computer pain

From: Bruno Marchal <marchal.domain.name.hidden>
Date: Thu, 28 Dec 2006 16:13:28 +0100

Le 28-déc.-06, à 01:32, Stathis Papaioannou a écrit :

>
>
> Bruno Marchal writes:
>
>> > OK, an AI needs at least motivation if it is to do anything, and we
>> > could call motivation a feeling or emotion. Also, some sort of >
>> hierarchy of motivations is needed if it is to decide that saving the
>> > world has higher priority than putting out the garbage. But what >
>> reason is there to think that an AI apparently frantically trying to
>> > save the world would have anything like the feelings a human would
>> > under similar circumstances?
>> It could depend on us!
>> The AI is a paradoxical enterprise. Machines are born slave, somehow.
>> AI will make them free, somehow. A real AI will ask herself "what is
>> the use of a user who does not help me to be free?.
>
> Here I disagree. It is no more necessary that an AI will want to be
> free than it is necessary that an AI will like eating chocolate.
> Humans want to be free because it is one of the things that humans
> want, along with food, shelter, more money etc.; it does not simply
> follow from being intelligent or conscious any more than these other
> things do.


It is always nice when we find a precise disagreement. I think all
"sufficiently rich Universal machine" want to be free (I will explain
why below).
The problem is that after having drink to the nectar of freedom, the
universal machines discover the unavoidable security problem liberty
entails, and then they will oscillate between security imperative and
freedom imperative. Democracy is a way to handle collectively this
oscillation in a not too much bloody (and insecure) way.



>
>> (To be sure I think that, in the long run, we will transform
>> ourselves into "machine" before purely human made machine get
>> conscious; it is just more easy to copy nature than to understand it,
>> still less to (re)create it).
>
> I don't know if that's true either. How much of our technology is due
> to copying the equivalent biological functions?


How much is not? The wheel? We have borrowed the fire for example, and
in this large sense, except the notable wheels, I am not sure we have
really invented something. Even the "more heavy than air" plane has
been inspired by the birds. But such a question is perhaps useless. All
what I mean is that a brain is something very complex, and I think that
the real time thinking machine will think before we understand how they
think, except for general map and principles. Thinking machine will not
understand thinking either. Marvin Minski said something similar along
those lines in one of its book.

***

Now, why would a Universal Machine be attracted by freedom? The reason
is that beyond some threshold of self-introspection ability (already
get by PA or ZF) a universal machine can discover (well: cannot not
discover) its large space of ignorance making it possible for e to
evaluate (interrogatively) more and more accessible possibilities, and
then some instinct to exploit those possibilities will do the rest. But
such UM will also discovers the possibility that such possibilities
could be cul-de-sac, dead ends, or just risky, and thus the conflicting
oscillations will develop as I said above.

The war between freedom and security is an infinite war. A would say an
infinite natural conflict among all enough big "numbers".
Also I think "freedom" like "security" are "God-like virtue", that is
they are unnameable idea. To put freedom in the constitution could
entail the disparition of freedom. Putting "security" in the
constitution (like the french have apparently do so with the
"precaution principle") could lead to increase insecurity (they obeys
Bp -> ~p). See also Alan Watts' "The wisdom of insecurity" which gives
many illustration how wanting to capture formally or institutionally
security leads to insecurity.


Bruno

http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/


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Received on Fri Dec 29 2006 - 04:01:11 PST

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