> > What if the copy is not exact, but close enough to fool others who know > you? > Maybe you won't have a choice. Suppose you die before we have developed > the > technology to scan neurons, so family members customize an AGI in your > likeness based on all of your writing, photos, and interviews with people > that > knew you. All it takes is 10^9 bits of information about you to pass a > Turing > test. As we move into the age of surveillance, this will get easier to > do. I > bet Yahoo knows an awful lot about me from the thousands of emails I have > sent > through their servers.
I can't tell if you're playing devil's advocate for monadic consciousness here, but in any case, I disagree with you that you can observe a given quantity of data of the sort accessible without a brain scan, and then reconstruct the brain from that. The thinking seems to be that, as the brain is an analogue device in which every part is connected via some chain to every other, everything in your brain slowly leaks out into the environment through your behaviour. This theory reminds me of one I had as a young child; that you shouldn't wet your toothbrush under a tap running into dirty water, because the bacteria could diffuse up the water column and adhere to the bristles. This doesn't actually happen, although the reason why it doesn't is probabilistic and not nearly as satisfying as the naive assumption that it must. The analogy is a bit strained, but holds pretty well, I think. The tap is the outside world. The dirty water is the mind, and the putative bacteria are like Minsky's agents, interacting and trying to manipulate the water column, i.e. communication channel. Now even though the agent's may well be perfectly describable things, the chance of even one of them diffusing out of a noisy channel - while great wads of data are coming in the opposite direction and altering the mind's state - is nil. And so it will go for extracting a great deal of the brain's content by observation. I make no claims for what a super AI will be able to do if it can actually talk to you. It's the concept of reconstructing a computer by passive observation that disagrees with my mathematical intuition. -- Nathan Cook ----- This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=4007604&id_secret=39912678-83d09e
