albert medina wrote:
Dear Sirs,
I have a question to ask and I am not sure that I am sending it to the
right email address. Please correct me if I have made a mistake. From
the outset, please forgive my ignorance of this fascinating topic.
All sentient creatures have a sense of self, about which all else
revolves. Call it "egocentric singularity" or "selfhood" or
"identity". The most evolved "ego" that we can perceive is in the human
species. As far as I know, we are the only beings in the universe who
"know that we do not know." This fundamental "deficiency" is the basis
for every desire to acquire things, as well as knowledge.
One of the Terminator movies described the movie's computer system as
becoming "self-aware". It became territorial and malevolent, similar to
a reaction which many human ego's have when faced with fear, threat or
when possessed by greed.
My question is: AGI, as I perceive your explanation of it, is when a
computer gains/develops an ego and begins to consciously plot its own
existence and make its own decisions.
Do you really believe that such a thing can happen? If so, is this the
phenomenon you are calling "singularity"?
Thanks for your reply,
Al
Al,
You should understand that no one has yet come anywhere near to building
an AGI, so when you hear people (on this list and elsewhere) try to
answer your question, bear in mind that a lot of what they say is
guesswork, or is specific to their own point of view and not necessarily
representative of other people working in this area. For example, I
already disagree strongly with some of the things that have been said in
answer to your question.
Having said that, I would offer the following.
The "self" or "ego" of a future AGI is not something that you should
think of as just appearing out of nowhere after a computer is made
intelligent. In a very important sense, this is something that will be
deliberately designed and shaped before the machine is built.
My own opinion is that the first AGI systems to be built will have
extremely passive, quiet, peaceful "egos" that feel great empathy for
the needs and aspirations of the human species. They will understand
themselves, and know that we have designed them to be extremely
peaceful, but will not feel any desire to change their state to make
themselves less benign. After the first ones are built this way, all
other AGIs that follow will be the same way. If we are careful when we
design the first few, the chances of any machine ever becoming like the
standard malelvolent science fiction robots (e.g. the one in Terminator)
can be made vanishingly small, and essentially zero.
The question of whether these systems will be "conscious" is still open,
but I and a number of others believe that consciousness is something
that automatically comes as part of a certain type of intelligent system
design, and that these AGI systems will have it just as much as we do.
The term "singularity" refers to what would happen if such machines were
built: they would produce a flood of new discoveries on such an immense
scale that we would be jumped from our present technology to the
technology of the far future in a matter of a few years.
Hope that clarifies the situation.
Richard Loosemore
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