13-11-2019, 05:21 PM
(This post was last modified: 13-11-2019, 05:24 PM by Mike Watterson.)
"would you be committing murder if you switched it off?"
1) It's like asking would it be murder to crush an alarm clock. It's simply not possible for such a situation to arise. All popular conceptions about A.I. are based on almost total ignorance of how a Computer works. In ST-TNG, "Data" does stuff impossible for a computer and sometimes physically impossible (like Superman or the Six Million Dollar Man doing stuff that's pure magic, like lifting a car without tipping over ) but Data often can't do stuff easily at least simulated on a computer. A computer is just an electronic implementation of a stored program execution unit that can in theory be made mechanically.
2) We kill rooks. They are certainly smart, sentient, conscious, tool using, problem solving creatures that have a vocabulary. Actually many animals and birds have a vocabulary, but none have been yet shown to have a language.
Would you be committing murder in this fantasy universe where a machine can be consciousness by turning it off?
No, because that is equivalent to anaesthesia or being knocked out. The machine would recover when turned on. Some server computer systems have onboard batteries or a UPS and can save RAM to non-volatile storage (hibernation). Most laptops and many tablets or phones can "hibernate" indefinitely if the battery is low. The power switch is often simply a signal to the Operating System.
So you would need to destroy the storage to "kill" it. It's a concept of Transhumanism (really a religion with no basis in fact, it's a faith) that a snap shot (storage) can be made of a "Consciousness". In the hypothetical case of the conscious machine, wouldn't it make frequent off site backups and thus be rather hard to "kill"?
Would it be murder to destroy the storage and all the backups? A court would have to decide. Killing a person can be an accident, not even your fault at all (engine on car seizes, tyre blow out), negligence or some other manslaughter, self defence, murder but not premeditated, part of state sponsored genocide or a war crime, planned pre-meditated murder etc.
Part of my teenage attraction to programming was reading SF and thinking someday I'd program or help program an A.I. I believe now that A.I. is fantasy, a wishful thinking to create gods in our own image. It's a motif of a certain strand of SF, a modern version being by Iain Banks (as Iain M. Banks). It's certainly possible to fool a casual human with a chat bot, since the 1960s actually. Modern ones are pretty similar, because I've tested both. The newer ones have much bigger rule sets and databases and still have no understanding of language. You can even simulate "emotion", though that's not very useful. I think the Turning Test wasn't exactly ever meant to be a real test of AI, but curiosity about how easy it might be to fool someone. A chat bot can pass the Turning test if the human is NOT an expert and doesn't suspect. Social media is full of bots, doing propaganda and selling. Easy for any expert to spot. Most hardly better than 1960s Eliza or 1990s Alice because people don't particularly interact.
I wrote a book examining the idea. One team builds the best ever chat bot with the aim of it being an interface to a search engine. This is indeed close to what Watson winning "Jeopardy" was. Later IBM Watson implementations actually didn't use much more than the branding and were a failure for the Medical Applications in the USA. The other "team" are Fay and use the forbidden Fetch magic. They erase the memories of a deer and shape change it to seem human and use magic to give it speech. It's an idea in old Celtic myths. One twist is that via DNA it's given the appearance of a real young woman, who has a curious background, so the construct is a bit like a clone*. The later Norse Legends have Ellenfolk, hollow people, they serve Iðunn when she's kidnapped. A Golem is a similar idea as is Mary Shelly's Dr. Frankenstein's "monster". The Fay team find their "Alice Watson" isn't very useful because it only does what you tell it, and even that needs it to be taught the "rules" first. They do indeed have qualms about "killing it" after the experiment. A solution is found. It would be a major spoiler to explain what the solution is. At one point "Alice Watson" attends a programming course. She/It is totally useless at programming and only as good at spotting mistakes as the Compiler.
Likely the book will be out in 2024 or so as there are other titles in the series.
*Clones are another misused SF trope. No clone has the memories or personality of the original DNA donor. Even Identical twins are much less identical than most people realise. They don't share fingerprints. You really don't want to know about USA separation of twins to different foster parents for "research".
1) It's like asking would it be murder to crush an alarm clock. It's simply not possible for such a situation to arise. All popular conceptions about A.I. are based on almost total ignorance of how a Computer works. In ST-TNG, "Data" does stuff impossible for a computer and sometimes physically impossible (like Superman or the Six Million Dollar Man doing stuff that's pure magic, like lifting a car without tipping over ) but Data often can't do stuff easily at least simulated on a computer. A computer is just an electronic implementation of a stored program execution unit that can in theory be made mechanically.
2) We kill rooks. They are certainly smart, sentient, conscious, tool using, problem solving creatures that have a vocabulary. Actually many animals and birds have a vocabulary, but none have been yet shown to have a language.
Would you be committing murder in this fantasy universe where a machine can be consciousness by turning it off?
No, because that is equivalent to anaesthesia or being knocked out. The machine would recover when turned on. Some server computer systems have onboard batteries or a UPS and can save RAM to non-volatile storage (hibernation). Most laptops and many tablets or phones can "hibernate" indefinitely if the battery is low. The power switch is often simply a signal to the Operating System.
So you would need to destroy the storage to "kill" it. It's a concept of Transhumanism (really a religion with no basis in fact, it's a faith) that a snap shot (storage) can be made of a "Consciousness". In the hypothetical case of the conscious machine, wouldn't it make frequent off site backups and thus be rather hard to "kill"?
Would it be murder to destroy the storage and all the backups? A court would have to decide. Killing a person can be an accident, not even your fault at all (engine on car seizes, tyre blow out), negligence or some other manslaughter, self defence, murder but not premeditated, part of state sponsored genocide or a war crime, planned pre-meditated murder etc.
Part of my teenage attraction to programming was reading SF and thinking someday I'd program or help program an A.I. I believe now that A.I. is fantasy, a wishful thinking to create gods in our own image. It's a motif of a certain strand of SF, a modern version being by Iain Banks (as Iain M. Banks). It's certainly possible to fool a casual human with a chat bot, since the 1960s actually. Modern ones are pretty similar, because I've tested both. The newer ones have much bigger rule sets and databases and still have no understanding of language. You can even simulate "emotion", though that's not very useful. I think the Turning Test wasn't exactly ever meant to be a real test of AI, but curiosity about how easy it might be to fool someone. A chat bot can pass the Turning test if the human is NOT an expert and doesn't suspect. Social media is full of bots, doing propaganda and selling. Easy for any expert to spot. Most hardly better than 1960s Eliza or 1990s Alice because people don't particularly interact.
I wrote a book examining the idea. One team builds the best ever chat bot with the aim of it being an interface to a search engine. This is indeed close to what Watson winning "Jeopardy" was. Later IBM Watson implementations actually didn't use much more than the branding and were a failure for the Medical Applications in the USA. The other "team" are Fay and use the forbidden Fetch magic. They erase the memories of a deer and shape change it to seem human and use magic to give it speech. It's an idea in old Celtic myths. One twist is that via DNA it's given the appearance of a real young woman, who has a curious background, so the construct is a bit like a clone*. The later Norse Legends have Ellenfolk, hollow people, they serve Iðunn when she's kidnapped. A Golem is a similar idea as is Mary Shelly's Dr. Frankenstein's "monster". The Fay team find their "Alice Watson" isn't very useful because it only does what you tell it, and even that needs it to be taught the "rules" first. They do indeed have qualms about "killing it" after the experiment. A solution is found. It would be a major spoiler to explain what the solution is. At one point "Alice Watson" attends a programming course. She/It is totally useless at programming and only as good at spotting mistakes as the Compiler.
Likely the book will be out in 2024 or so as there are other titles in the series.
*Clones are another misused SF trope. No clone has the memories or personality of the original DNA donor. Even Identical twins are much less identical than most people realise. They don't share fingerprints. You really don't want to know about USA separation of twins to different foster parents for "research".
