John Marlow wrote:
<snip>
Also, it seems the greater the gap in intelligence, the less value the thing
on the high end ascribes the things on the low end. for example, rank in
order of value/respect: bacterium, cockroach, toad, mouse, dog, monkey,
human. Many humans place the value cutoff at the human line.
Where will an AI draw that line, hmm..?
<snip>
Ayn Rand seemed to have a reasonable segmenting of the different levels of
thought that may apply to this. She broke it down to 3 levels.
Sensation: The experience of receiving input directly on a nerve cell, and
when the stimulus is gone, so is the perception. Bacteria and very simple
critters rely on the direct stimulus and react method.
Perception: The experience of taking multiple sensations and being able to
integrate them into the understanding that there is a particular "thing"
that one is observing (the cumulative input into your eye, from all those
rod and cone cells turns out to be "rock", "tree", "car"). Dogs and Cats
generally live at this layer.
Conception: The experience of taking perceptions and understanding that
there are similarities between certain entities that can be categorized and
classified. This is where we go from "rock" to "a family of objects I call
'rock', of which this is simply just one particular instance", or concepts
like love, bravery, etc.... Here's where us humans and AIs live.
I don't think many people would argue that baser animals exist on the
conception level (although a few tests have show that some chimps make a
good play for it at times). Unless someone could prove that there is another
level of consciousness above the conceptual, then the AI will ALWAYS be on
the same level as us, and only differ in scale and speed. Sure you can say
they MIGHT develop something new, but that's speculation and not based on
fact.
If its this easy to draw lines about consciousness (except for the chimps),
I'm sure an AI would have NO problem developing a system of classification
as such. It would be hard pressed to draw lines based on processing speed
and memory though. Is the AI going to say to the less intelligent AI,
sorry... you don't classify as intelligent just cause your running Pentium
3s and I'm using Pentium 4s? And I'm not going to try and sidestep dealing
with the issues by saying 'Well, I'm not an AI so I cant make any
intelligent predictions on what an AI might do', sure ya can. Remember,
conception is the top of the food chain, unless someone has PROOF otherwise.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Mon May 28 2001 - 10:00:01 MDT