Tag: artificial intelligence

Meaningful Relationships…

I enjoyed ths wired article at lot—all the while experiencing an ominous sense of wrongness.

If you have read your Asimov, it feels like parts of humanity are heading towards Solaria.

Eventually, all traces of our base, biological behavior will have been criminalized and proscribed—purged from polite society. The only flirting or f&*king we will be doing then, will be with our robot housemaids.

 

‘Levy takes Alan Turing’s famous claim that the convincing appearance of intelligence (in AI) is proof of intelligence, and he expands that into the emotional realm:

“If a robot behaves as though it has feelings, can we reasonably argue that it does not? If a robot’s artificial emotions prompt it to say things such as ‘I love you,’ surely we should be willing to accept these statements at face value … Why, if a robot that we know to be emotionally intelligent, says, ‘I love you’ or ‘I want to make love to you,’ should we doubt it?” Human emotions, he argues, are no less “programmed” than those of an intelligent machine: “We have hormones, we have neurons, and we are ‘wired’ in a way that creates our emotions.” ‘

Taken to extremes, this is the dark Armageddon of the body snatchers. Humans are swapped out, uploading into shiny, hygienic oids, one by one. Society continues, but it has become a kabuki of raging and laughter—there is nobody home, no Cartesian observers in the cockpit, nothing going on behind cold android eyes…

…I fear we are only starting to scratch the surface of future shock

Is Physics Different Outside the Matrix…

 

My curiosity was piqued by the title of this article:
“We don’t live in a simulation, or computing works differently outside the Matrix.”

https://boingboing.net/2017/10/03/elon-is-wrong.html
http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/3/9/e1701758

But why wouldn’t physics be different outside the simulation?

I suppose one reason is that for a grandfather simulation—where the simulation’s owners try to learn more about their pre-singularity dark ages by letting others (e.g. us) live through them—it would make sense for the rules inside and outside to be the same.

But generally a simulation must consume fewer resources than the universe it is running within, and corners must, therefore, be cut. A program running on a Minecraft Redstone Turing Machine (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1X21HQphy6I) will clearly have fewer resources available than assembler running on the bare metal of a processor. Even ignoring the appalling speed at which it will run, lookup tables and special instructions will make some calculations scale better than others in the simulation…

We already know that the ‘substrate’ our universe runs on, is wildly different from the ‘classical world’ we experience. Some physics like entanglement seems to require access to ‘superuser‘ functions which break our Universe’s laws, e.g. instantaneous communication of state changes between entangled particles. Quantum computation is another example of magic, able to solve ‘classically’ impossible equations in the blink of an eye.

Even if our universe is not a synthetic simulation created for amusement or research, theories like the Holographic Universe suggest reality is far less prosaic than we imagined up until now.

Quantum Computation:

Holographic Universe:

https://phys.org/news/2017-01-reveals-substantial-evidence-holographic-universe.html

Robopocalypse


Wired says “Chill: Robots Won’t Take All Our Jobs”
https://www.wired.com/2017/08/robots-will-not-take-your-job/


I usually like wired, but this piece is either totally misguided or cynically disingenuous…

The argument seems to turn on the fact that productivity (as economists measure it) is not surging, which we should expect if robots were providing most labour, making the handful of human workers left super productive.

There is no mystery; jobs are being degraded: people are being fired from high paying positions and re-hired as burger-flippers and janitors. Hours worked does not change, but the highly trained engineer is now asking “if you want fries with that”.

Also the ‘Deep Learning’ AI revolution is less than a decade old. Sufficiently advanced ‘oids‘ don’t exist yet: self-driving cars are not here; 3D printed houses still a few years away; AI chat bots are only now creeping into the work place. The Robo Advisors of FinTech are destroying the finance sector incumbents, but the big banks can’t fire people fast enough to maintain productivity against their collapsing profits.

Finally, companies are not investing, they are focused on short term cost saving, outsourcing, and downsizing. So even if the ‘oids‘ were available off the shelf, companies wouldn’t be interested yet. They will wait a few years until all the glitches are ironed out–

–even then, as the ‘oids‘ reach parity with humans, productivity may remain low as humans will be performing all the dirty and degrading work too low value for an expensive ‘oid‘.

Perhaps the author simply considers anything more than 5 years away as pointless SciFi speculation, and while the speculation is fun– please read my books!  🙂  –for those of us with kids, these topics are very real.