Transcript Slides

Creation
by Steve Grand
Chapters 11-15
The Main Idea
Chapter 11 “Igor, Hand Me That Screwdriver”
• “Life is not the stuff of which it is made – it is an
emergent property of the aggregate arrangement
of that stuff.”
• “Intelligence cannot be abstracted – we have to
build a whole organism.”
• “Our task is not to program in intelligent behaviour,
but to enable such behaviour to emerge from
simulated objects that embody the cybernetic
properties from which life emerged in the natural
world.”
Chapter 12
“I Am Ron’s Brain”
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The basics are programmed as “genes”
Cocktail party effect – filtering information
Decision making
Making connections and memories
Recycling memory space and forgetting
information
• Drawing on previous experiences to
generalize and learn
Chapter 13
“Three Parts Gin To One Part of
Vermouth”
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Reduction of drives represents reward
Hunger drive and energy storage
Illness and Immune system
Sex drive and reproduction
- genes and mutation  evolution!
• Aging
• Language
Chapter 14:
“Taking Over the
World”
The scary side of AI
• Machine Take Over
• Humans becoming slaves or domestic
pets to amuse machines
• Machine intelligence will surpass that of
human kind
• All leads to the unforeseeable future of the
machine takeover!!
Don’t fear intelligence
• The more intelligent something is, the
more rational, considerate, and thoughtful
it will be. The same should apply to AI
machines.
• We are already slaves to our current
technology because it does not
understand what we want it to do.
• It is not smart enough to work it out on it’s
own.
Why won’t AI surpass
natural intelligence?
• Intelligence cannot be abstracted
• So far reasoning machines cannot learn
• We will define the machine’s desires,
drives, and needs.
• Who says that our own intelligence has
reached it’s optimal level?
Is artificial evolution out or
our hands?
• Are we really letting our creations off the
leash?
• Letting artificial evolution create is more an
admission of defeat.
What will life be like then?
• No one can predict the future
• But….can tell you the future that can be
worked toward.
The near future
• Intelligent machines probably are actually
artificially stupid.
– Not necessarily machines with intelligence of
humans, but rather the intelligence of
mammals up to and including some primates.
– The importance relies on given motivations
and goals.
The Dinosaur Garbage
Disposal
• Synthetic life forms will enjoy what they do
and their working lives due to the desires
and motivations that the creator gives
them.
• The Flintstones example.
• The intelligent car example.
Interaction with intelligent
machines
• Interaction with artificial life forms in
Creatures
• Creature Cruelty
• Creature infamy
– A million creature owners
– 400 websites
Chapter 15:
“Vapourware”
Just like clockwork?
• Time to show that we as humans live lives
unlike clockwork
• Three things that we believe to separate
us:
– Free will
– Minds
– Souls
Free Will
• Argues against existence of free will
– “ability to choose our own actions and decide
our own future”
• If this to be true future cannot be
determined from past.
• An effect with no cause is random
– There may be no such thing as random
• Random simply means that an effect has causes
that are unknowable or inevitable
Where does this take us?
• If there is no free will, then we are “slaves” in our
own predetermined circumstances.
• We need to believe in free will in order to
survive.
• Even though our future is inevitable from our
past, we are not “slaves” because the future is
unknowable.
• To predict something, it has to be acted out.
– Example: Conway’s Game of life and the existence of
the glider.
A necessary balance
• Somewhere between free will and “slaves
of our circumstances” there exists a belief
to seek the right balance of the two.
The mind
• Associate with consciousness and self
awareness
• Created Creatures are alive but not conscious
• A mind is hard to define and cannot yet be
created
• An observation though is that a mind is an
emergent, persistent phenomenon that arises
from inside a virtual space.
• This is familiar with a digital computer that can
simulate (imagine). This can create a space to
build life and intelligence.
Souls
• Mind is product of our bodies
• Can there be a disembodied mind? (soul)
• Believes that recording the state of your
brain and passing it into a machine is
theoretically possible, but unlikely to
happen anytime soon.
• 1st law of cyberspace
Grand Finale
• Brain is the ultimate simulator
• Imagination drives us
• Dedication of closing chapter to Ron and
Eve, the original Creatures