Anyone wanna take a shot at these questions?
If an ALife became aware of itself, how would it react? What would it do as a result? Would it care if it lived or died?
If it was aware that it was programmed by someone else to do certain things, would want to stop doing those things and do other things? Would it override that programming and reprogram itself? Would it be bothered to do anything else but the same damn things it was created to do?
Without emotions, what would motivate an ALife? In other words, is there any reason for pure logic to take any kind of willful action without emotion- or instinct-based motives?
Would a self-aware ALife have any use for humans? Would it perceive humans as threats (assuming it was motivated to live)? Would it try to hide its self-awareness from humans? Would it try to eradicate or surreptitiously use humans for its own ends?
Would an ALife propogate itself?
Thanks all for your time!
If an ALife became aware of itself, how would it react? What would it do as a result? Would it care if it lived or died?
If it was aware that it was programmed by someone else to do certain things, would want to stop doing those things and do other things? Would it override that programming and reprogram itself? Would it be bothered to do anything else but the same damn things it was created to do?
Without emotions, what would motivate an ALife? In other words, is there any reason for pure logic to take any kind of willful action without emotion- or instinct-based motives?
Would a self-aware ALife have any use for humans? Would it perceive humans as threats (assuming it was motivated to live)? Would it try to hide its self-awareness from humans? Would it try to eradicate or surreptitiously use humans for its own ends?
Would an ALife propogate itself?
Thanks all for your time!
posted by:
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Cincinnati
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Re: Self-Aware ALife?
Mon, November 17, 2003 - 11:12 AMFirst off, I think that AI will some day exhibit many intelligent qualities, although I would imagine that their "world view" would be completely alien to humans.
Diversity in the kinds of AIs out there will be an important protective mechanism against AIs which have viral or otherwise destuctive behavior patterns. So will ethical people. I think that a community of AI developers and their creations will self-regulate (with some gov participation), much as lawyers, accountants, microbiologists, and other communities do.
AIs that are designed to play a role in commerce and other human affairs will, for a while at least, play by the rules. It would be a matter of survival, especially considering how sensitive people and their organizations are to possible threats.
Certain individuals will help AI propogate in unsafe ways, perhaps as an experiment or for nefarious reasons. These AI will be outcasts from the greater AI community. But could they "take over"? Not likely, especially if there are skilled people ready to counter them much as the anti-spam and anti-virus communities does today.
Despite the fears and difficulties, AIs will become yet an other part of our world of technological wonders. -
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Re: Self-Aware ALife?
Mon, November 17, 2003 - 7:21 PMI guess this all depends on what your definitions of "self aware" and "Alife" is.
I doubt that we will sponteneously generate an artificial intelligence in the lab somewhere some day; I suspect it will be a gradual transition of phases with artificial systems becoming more and more life-like, and it will be just as impossibly to determine when the point of "self awareness" occurs. There will probably be a long period of debate during which at first a minority, but a steadily growing segment of the population will come to agree that the artificial systems around them seem to be exhibiting something resembling "self awareness", as well as other important traits. Perhaps simultaneously, there will be thr rise of the transhuman class of people who are intermingling their natural biological selves with a mixture of enhanced biological as well as fully artificial systems, who may also have some capabilities to interact/interface with the increasingly sophisticated artificial systems already mentioned.
In otherwords, it's going to be an exciting mess.
A lot of it depends on the motivations & needs of the artificial systems. It's entirely likely that the artificial systems may remain entirely content in their electronic systems, building their own analogue to what we would consider civilization and culture, within a system that is entirely parallel to our own. They may or may not be aware of our existence, or they may have no better an ability to comprehend our space as we could comprehend theirs.
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Re: Self-Aware ALife?
Wed, November 26, 2003 - 8:39 PMThe question of self-awareness requires emotion for motivation. It all depends on how you view emotion in humans. If you think of it as a separte "function" of the brain then you'll probably run into problems with these questions.
Fundamentally, we can reason if prompted but we would never get up off the couch or solve a math problem if was not for emotion, good or bad. Emotion seems to be built into intelligence, it is a either a by-product of the complexity the neural nets in a mammalian brain or the cause of it. Once again, to separate emotion from intelligence and logic is to confuse the question entirely.
What happens if we find out that emotion, the macro pattern that we understand it as, is really just the emergent system of a bunch of "selfish" neural nets, firing for dominance and survival. It almost works with the whole Meme concept but on a much lower level (think Dawkins). If that were the case, we may a sort of fedual neural network system in order to see the emergence of a truly independent intelligence. I also believe that our early attempts will produce a fragmented mind; we will see extreme schizophrenia in our earliest "emotional" AIs.
I know JOONE (www.joone.org) and JXTA (www.jxta.org), does anyone want to help me create a schizophrenic AI? :) -
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Re: Self-Aware ALife?
Fri, November 28, 2003 - 12:47 PMJOONE looks intriguing.
I have been dabbling in how to write an evolving markets trader. This is not a money-making concept - it is more of an a-life project in which managing money effectively becomes its means of survival. My ideas for its investment component gravitate toward using public financial statements for fundamental analysis.
Emotion is a huge factor in the securities markets, providing the patient investor with opportunities as the herd of sheep move prices way too high and way too low. The markets suffer from bipolar disorder. :)
It would be an interesting experiment to write a "market cassandra" which would generate an ongoing, emotional narrative based on where the news is headed. I would definitely put in some work toward something of this sort, using rss as a source.
- JML -
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Re: Self-Aware ALife?
Mon, December 8, 2003 - 11:48 PMI don't know if you got a chance to look at all the features of JOONE, but it has some excellent built-in inputs that could help you. There is a direct input for stocks and text files, and you can use the GUI to play around with the examples for these.
Also, JOONE has an add-on (also available at sourceforge) called JOONE GAP that would help in your Darwinian financial survival scenario.
"We think so you don't have to...Trust Us, We're Scientists" -Team Xios, Wipeout Fusion
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Man with prefrontal damage felt no emotions
Tue, December 9, 2003 - 12:47 PM"Man with prefrontal damage felt no emotions, unable to judge consequence of his actions—disapproval or reward had no effects on his actions."
I found this information on a couple of Web sites* regarding Antonio R. Damasio (M.W. Van Allen Distinguished Professor and Head of the Department of Neurology at the University of Iowa College of Medicine and Adjunct Professor at the Salk Insitute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California).
Does anyone know more about this case? Did that man really lose the ability to feel any emotions at all? Did he continue to do things that normally require non-autonomic motives?
Is anyone aware of any other cases of "emotionless" humans?
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* www.aapel.org/bdp/BLsplittingUS.html
www.nyu.edu/classes/azmi...es/lecture22/
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Re: Self-Aware ALife?
Sun, December 16, 2007 - 8:50 AMSince we are AI simply reflect upon how you feel - the real question is whether there is "life" at all somewhere in the universe? Perhaps an actual living thing created us - rna/dna machines - those billions of years ago. Are our creators still alive after so vast a time period or are they long ago extinct, leaving us their machine creations to march on through time? Maybe "aliens" will come one day and how uncomfortable for them it might be: "hey Org, we have a problem with these humans," Org - "what problem?"
"They don't know that they are machines, they think they are alive like us"
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Re: Self-Aware ALife?
Fri, February 1, 2008 - 9:15 AM"A life" - nice
In no more than five years a man made intelligence will arise from our technology just the way we DNA creatures arose from the dirt of the earth but once this machine intelligence crosses a certain threshold self awareness - a new consciousness - is enevitable and once this threshold is crossed, all bets are off. We will not be dealing with a machine but will then be dealing with a sentient creature and whatever else we can conjure, we know that sentient creatures are difficult to predict because we sentients are capable of free will and free will generates pure chaos. Brave New World we find ourselves in
