Re: AI Dooms Us
meekerdb
But maybe he's forgotten the Dark Ages. I think ISIS is working hard to produce a pause.
Brent
On 8/25/2014 10:27 AM
Artificial Intelligence May Doom The Human Race Within A Century, Oxford Professor
Chris de Morsella
From: meekerdb <meek...@verizon.net>
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Subject: Re: AI Dooms Us
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LizR
Platonist Guitar Cowboy
I prefer "keep it simple approaches to novelty":
From G. Kreisel's "Obituary of K. Gödel":
Kreisel, 1980.
Chris de Morsella
We can engage and do so without overarching understanding of what we are doing and stuff will emerge out of our activities. AI will be (and is!) in my opinion emergent phenomena. We don’t really understand it, but we are accelerating its emergence never the less.
Modern software systems with millions of lines of code are not fully understood by anybody anymore, people know about small specific regions of a system and some architects have a fuzzy and rather vague understanding of system dynamics as a whole, but mysterious stuff is already happening (ex. Google (or some researchers from Google) has recently reported that its photo recognition smart systems are acting in ways that the programmers don’t fully comprehend and that are not deterministic – i.e. explicable based on working through the code)
If you look at where the money is in AI research and development, it is largely focused on military, security state, and other allied sectors, with perhaps an anomaly in the financial sector where big money is being thrown at smart arbitrage systems.
We will get the kind of AI we pay for.
-Chris
From: everyth...@googlegroups.com [mailto:everyth...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Platonist Guitar Cowboy
Sent: Tuesday, August 26, 2014 7:57 AM
To: everyth...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: AI Dooms Us
If we engage a class of problems on which we can't reason, and throw tech at that, we'll catch the occasional fish, but we won't really know how or why. Some marine life is poisonous however, which might not be obvious in the catch.
Terren Suydam
LizR
For what it's worth, the kind of autonomous human-level (or greater) type of AI, or AGI, will *most likely* require an architecture, yet to be well understood, that is of an entirely different nature relative to the kind of architectures being engineered by those interests who desire highly complicated slaves. In other words, I'm not losing any sleep about the military accidentally unleashing a terminator. If I'm going to lose sleep over a predictable sudden loss of well being, I will focus instead on the much less technical and much more realistic threats arising from economic/societal collapse.
Telmo Menezes
For what it's worth, the kind of autonomous human-level (or greater) type of AI, or AGI, will *most likely* require an architecture, yet to be well understood, that is of an entirely different nature relative to the kind of architectures being engineered by those interests who desire highly complicated slaves.
spudb...@aol.com
Terren Suydam
meekerdb
Hi Telmo,
I think if it were as simple as you make it seem, relative to what we have today, we'd have engineered systems like that already. You're talking about an AI that arrives at novel solutions, which requires the ability to invent/simulate/act on new models in new domains (AGI). I'm not saying this is impossible, in fact I see this as inevitable on a longer timescale. I'm saying that I doubt that the military is committing any significant resources into that kind of research when easier approaches are much more likely to bear fruit... but I really have no idea what the military is researching, so it's just a hunch.
What I would wager on is that the military is developing drones along the same lines as what Google has achieved with its self-driving cars. Highly competent, autonomous drones that excel in very specific environments. The utility functions involved would be specified explicitly in terms of "hard-coded" representations of stimuli. For AGI they would need to be equipped to invent new models of the world, articulate those models with respect to self and with respect to existing goal structures, simulate them, and act on them. I think we are a long way from those kinds of AIs. The only researcher I see making inroads towards that kind of AI is Steve Grand.
Brent
Telmo Menezes
Hi Telmo,I think if it were as simple as you make it seem, relative to what we have today, we'd have engineered systems like that already.
You're talking about an AI that arrives at novel solutions, which requires the ability to invent/simulate/act on new models in new domains (AGI).
I'm not saying this is impossible, in fact I see this as inevitable on a longer timescale. I'm saying that I doubt that the military is committing any significant resources into that kind of research when easier approaches are much more likely to bear fruit... but I really have no idea what the military is researching, so it's just a hunch.
What I would wager on is that the military is developing drones along the same lines as what Google has achieved with its self-driving cars. Highly competent, autonomous drones that excel in very specific environments. The utility functions involved would be specified explicitly in terms of "hard-coded" representations of stimuli. For AGI they would need to be equipped to invent new models of the world, articulate those models with respect to self and with respect to existing goal structures, simulate them, and act on them. I think we are a long way from those kinds of AIs. The only researcher I see making inroads towards that kind of AI is Steve Grand.
Terren Suydam
On Wed, Aug 27, 2014 at 1:14 AM, Terren Suydam <terren...@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi Telmo,I think if it were as simple as you make it seem, relative to what we have today, we'd have engineered systems like that already.It wasn't my intention to make it look simple. What I claim is that we already have a treasure trove of very interesting algorithms. None of them is AGI, but what they can do becomes more impressive with more computing power and access to data.
Take google translator. It's far from perfect, but way ahead anything we had a decade ago. As far as I can tell, this was achieved with algorithms that had been known for a long time, but that now can operate on the gigantic dataset and computer farm available to google.Imagine what a simple minimax search tree could do with immense computing power and data access.
You're talking about an AI that arrives at novel solutions, which requires the ability to invent/simulate/act on new models in new domains (AGI).Evolutionary computation already achieves novelty and invention, to a degree. I concur that it is still not AGI. But it could already be a threat, given enough computational resources.
I'm not saying this is impossible, in fact I see this as inevitable on a longer timescale. I'm saying that I doubt that the military is committing any significant resources into that kind of research when easier approaches are much more likely to bear fruit... but I really have no idea what the military is researching, so it's just a hunch.Why does it matter if it's the military that does this? To a sufficiently advanced AI, we are just monkeys throwing rocks at each other. It will surely figure out a way to take control of our resources, including weaponry.
What I would wager on is that the military is developing drones along the same lines as what Google has achieved with its self-driving cars. Highly competent, autonomous drones that excel in very specific environments. The utility functions involved would be specified explicitly in terms of "hard-coded" representations of stimuli. For AGI they would need to be equipped to invent new models of the world, articulate those models with respect to self and with respect to existing goal structures, simulate them, and act on them. I think we are a long way from those kinds of AIs. The only researcher I see making inroads towards that kind of AI is Steve Grand.But again, a reasonable fear is that a sufficiently powerful conventional AI is already a threat (due to increasing autonomy and data access + our possible inability to cover all the loopholes in utility functions).
CheersTelmo.
Telmo Menezes
On Wed, Aug 27, 2014 at 6:31 AM, Telmo Menezes <te...@telmomenezes.com> wrote:
On Wed, Aug 27, 2014 at 1:14 AM, Terren Suydam <terren...@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi Telmo,I think if it were as simple as you make it seem, relative to what we have today, we'd have engineered systems like that already.It wasn't my intention to make it look simple. What I claim is that we already have a treasure trove of very interesting algorithms. None of them is AGI, but what they can do becomes more impressive with more computing power and access to data.I agree that can be made to do impressive things. Watson definitely impressed me.Take google translator. It's far from perfect, but way ahead anything we had a decade ago. As far as I can tell, this was achieved with algorithms that had been known for a long time, but that now can operate on the gigantic dataset and computer farm available to google.Imagine what a simple minimax search tree could do with immense computing power and data access.The space of possibilities quickly scales beyond the wildest imaginings of computing power. Chess AIs are already better than humans, because they more or less implement this approach, and it turns out you "only" need to computer a few hundred million positions per second to do that. Obviously that's a toy environment... the possibilities inherent in the real world are even be enumerable according to some predefined ontology (i.e. that would be required to specify in a minimax type AI).
You're talking about an AI that arrives at novel solutions, which requires the ability to invent/simulate/act on new models in new domains (AGI).Evolutionary computation already achieves novelty and invention, to a degree. I concur that it is still not AGI. But it could already be a threat, given enough computational resources.AGI is a threat because it's utility function would necessarily be sufficiently "meta" that it could create novel sub-goals. We would not necessarily be able to control whether it chose a goal that was compatible with ours.It comes down to how the utility function is defined. For Google Car, the utility function probably tests actions along the lines of "get from A to B safely, as quickly as possible". If a Google Car is engineered with evolutionary methods to generate novel solutions (would be overkill but bear with me), the novelty generated is contained within the utility function. It might generate a novel route that conventional map algorithms wouldn't find, but it would be impossible for it to find a solution like "helicopter the car past this traffic jam".
I'm not saying this is impossible, in fact I see this as inevitable on a longer timescale. I'm saying that I doubt that the military is committing any significant resources into that kind of research when easier approaches are much more likely to bear fruit... but I really have no idea what the military is researching, so it's just a hunch.Why does it matter if it's the military that does this? To a sufficiently advanced AI, we are just monkeys throwing rocks at each other. It will surely figure out a way to take control of our resources, including weaponry.I think the thread started with a focus on killing machines. But your point is taken.What I would wager on is that the military is developing drones along the same lines as what Google has achieved with its self-driving cars. Highly competent, autonomous drones that excel in very specific environments. The utility functions involved would be specified explicitly in terms of "hard-coded" representations of stimuli. For AGI they would need to be equipped to invent new models of the world, articulate those models with respect to self and with respect to existing goal structures, simulate them, and act on them. I think we are a long way from those kinds of AIs. The only researcher I see making inroads towards that kind of AI is Steve Grand.But again, a reasonable fear is that a sufficiently powerful conventional AI is already a threat (due to increasing autonomy and data access + our possible inability to cover all the loopholes in utility functions).The threats involved with AIs are contained within the scope of their utility functions. As it turns out, the moment you widen the utility function beyond a very narrow (and specifiable) domain, AI gets much, much harder.
TerrenCheersTelmo.
Terren Suydam
On Wed, Aug 27, 2014 at 1:53 PM, Terren Suydam <terren...@gmail.com> wrote:
The space of possibilities quickly scales beyond the wildest imaginings of computing power. Chess AIs are already better than humans, because they more or less implement this approach, and it turns out you "only" need to computer a few hundred million positions per second to do that. Obviously that's a toy environment... the possibilities inherent in the real world are even be enumerable according to some predefined ontology (i.e. that would be required to specify in a minimax type AI).
Ok, but of course minimax was also a toy example. Several algorithms that already exist could be combined: deep learning, bayesian belief networks, genetic programming and so on. A clever combination of algorithms plus the still ongoing exponential growth in available computational power could soon unleash something impressive. Of course I am just challenging your intuition, mostly because it's a fun topic :) Who knows who's right...
Another interesting/scary scenario to think about is the possibility of a self-mutating computer program proliferating under our noses until it's too late (and exploiting the Internet to create a very powerful meta-computer by stealing a few cpu cycles from everyone).
You're talking about an AI that arrives at novel solutions, which requires the ability to invent/simulate/act on new models in new domains (AGI).Evolutionary computation already achieves novelty and invention, to a degree. I concur that it is still not AGI. But it could already be a threat, given enough computational resources.AGI is a threat because it's utility function would necessarily be sufficiently "meta" that it could create novel sub-goals. We would not necessarily be able to control whether it chose a goal that was compatible with ours.It comes down to how the utility function is defined. For Google Car, the utility function probably tests actions along the lines of "get from A to B safely, as quickly as possible". If a Google Car is engineered with evolutionary methods to generate novel solutions (would be overkill but bear with me), the novelty generated is contained within the utility function. It might generate a novel route that conventional map algorithms wouldn't find, but it would be impossible for it to find a solution like "helicopter the car past this traffic jam".What prevents the car from transforming into an helicopter and flying is not the utility function but the set of available actions. I have been playing with evolutionary computation for some time now, and one thing I learned is to not trust my intuition on the real constraints implied by such set of actions.
meekerdb
You're talking about an AI that arrives at novel solutions, which requires the ability to invent/simulate/act on new models in new domains (AGI).
Evolutionary computation already achieves novelty and invention, to a degree. I concur that it is still not AGI. But it could already be a threat, given enough computational resources.
AGI is a threat because it's utility function would necessarily be sufficiently "meta" that it could create novel sub-goals. We would not necessarily be able to control whether it chose a goal that was compatible with ours.
Brent
Terren Suydam
Platonist Guitar Cowboy
ISTM Gödel's work has more to say about AI and monkey rock throwing theologies than we might be inclined to assume.
Telmo Menezes
On Wed, Aug 27, 2014 at 12:21 PM, Telmo Menezes <te...@telmomenezes.com> wrote:
On Wed, Aug 27, 2014 at 1:53 PM, Terren Suydam <terren...@gmail.com> wrote:
The space of possibilities quickly scales beyond the wildest imaginings of computing power. Chess AIs are already better than humans, because they more or less implement this approach, and it turns out you "only" need to computer a few hundred million positions per second to do that. Obviously that's a toy environment... the possibilities inherent in the real world are even be enumerable according to some predefined ontology (i.e. that would be required to specify in a minimax type AI).
Ok, but of course minimax was also a toy example. Several algorithms that already exist could be combined: deep learning, bayesian belief networks, genetic programming and so on. A clever combination of algorithms plus the still ongoing exponential growth in available computational power could soon unleash something impressive. Of course I am just challenging your intuition, mostly because it's a fun topic :) Who knows who's right...I think these are overlapping intuitions. On one hand, there is the idea that given enough computing/data resources, something can be created that - regardless of how limited its domain of operation - is still a threat in unexpected ways. On the other hand is the idea that AIs which pose real threats - threats we are not capable of stopping - require a quantum leap forward in cognitive flexibility, if you will.
Although my POV is aligned with the latter intuition, I actually agree with the former, but consider the kinds of threats involved to be bounded in ways we can in principle control. Although in practice it is possible for them to do damage so quickly we can't prevent it.Perhaps my idea of intelligence is too limited. I am assuming that something capable of being a real threat will be able to generate its own ontologies, creatively model them in ways that build on and relate to existing ontologies, simulate and test those new models, etc., generate value judgments using these new models with respect to overarching utility function(s). It is suspiciously similar to human intelligence.
The difference is that as an *artificial* intelligence with a different embodiement and different algorithms, the modeling they would arrive at could well be strikingly different from how we see the world, with all the attendant problems that could pose for us given the eventually superior computing power.
Another interesting/scary scenario to think about is the possibility of a self-mutating computer program proliferating under our noses until it's too late (and exploiting the Internet to create a very powerful meta-computer by stealing a few cpu cycles from everyone).I think something like this could do a lot of damage very quickly, but by accident... in a similar way perhaps to the occasional meltdowns caused by the collective behaviors of micro-second market-making algorithms.
I find it exceedingly unlikely that an AGI will spontaneously emerge from a self-mutating process like you describe. Again, if this kind of thing were likely, or at least not extremely unlikely, I think it suggests that AGI is a lot simpler than it really is.
You're talking about an AI that arrives at novel solutions, which requires the ability to invent/simulate/act on new models in new domains (AGI).Evolutionary computation already achieves novelty and invention, to a degree. I concur that it is still not AGI. But it could already be a threat, given enough computational resources.AGI is a threat because it's utility function would necessarily be sufficiently "meta" that it could create novel sub-goals. We would not necessarily be able to control whether it chose a goal that was compatible with ours.It comes down to how the utility function is defined. For Google Car, the utility function probably tests actions along the lines of "get from A to B safely, as quickly as possible". If a Google Car is engineered with evolutionary methods to generate novel solutions (would be overkill but bear with me), the novelty generated is contained within the utility function. It might generate a novel route that conventional map algorithms wouldn't find, but it would be impossible for it to find a solution like "helicopter the car past this traffic jam".What prevents the car from transforming into an helicopter and flying is not the utility function but the set of available actions. I have been playing with evolutionary computation for some time now, and one thing I learned is to not trust my intuition on the real constraints implied by such set of actions.I was actually talking about contracting a helicopter ride which seems easier :-) The set of actions available to an AI is limited to the way it models the world. Without a capacity for intelligently expanding its world model, no AI is going to do anything outside of the domain it is defined in. Google Car won't ever think to contract a helicopter ride until either A) Google engineers program it to consider that as an option or B) Google engineers give the Car the ability to start modelling the world on its own terms.
If B then it could be a long time before the Car discovers what a helicopter is, what it's capable of, how it could procure one, etc. The helicopter example is a bad one actually because it's a solution you or me can easily conceive of, so it seems mundane or easy.Terren
--
Telmo Menezes
Telmo Menezes
Brent
Terren Suydam
Although my POV is aligned with the latter intuition, I actually agree with the former, but consider the kinds of threats involved to be bounded in ways we can in principle control. Although in practice it is possible for them to do damage so quickly we can't prevent it.Perhaps my idea of intelligence is too limited. I am assuming that something capable of being a real threat will be able to generate its own ontologies, creatively model them in ways that build on and relate to existing ontologies, simulate and test those new models, etc., generate value judgments using these new models with respect to overarching utility function(s). It is suspiciously similar to human intelligence.I wonder. What you describe seems like the way of thinking of a person trained in the scientific method (a very recent discovery in human history). Is this raw human intelligence? I suspect raw human intelligence is more like a kludge. It is possible to create rickety structures of order on top of that kludge, by a process we call "education".
I think something like this could do a lot of damage very quickly, but by accident... in a similar way perhaps to the occasional meltdowns caused by the collective behaviors of micro-second market-making algorithms.
Another example is big societies designed by humans.
I find it exceedingly unlikely that an AGI will spontaneously emerge from a self-mutating process like you describe. Again, if this kind of thing were likely, or at least not extremely unlikely, I think it suggests that AGI is a lot simpler than it really is.This is tricky. The Kolmogorov complexity of AGI could be relatively low -- maybe it can be expressed in 1000 lines of lisp. But the set of programs expressible in 1000 lines of lisp includes some really crazy, counter-intuitive stuff (e.g. the universal dovetailer). Genetic programming has been shown to be able to discover relatively short solutions that are better than anything a human could come up with, due to counter-intuitiveness.
LizR
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LizR
Platonist Guitar Cowboy
PS "Arnold" is hilarious. I recognised quite a few quotes ... but where was this one?ENDLESS LOOP - To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of their women.
Stephen Paul King
Stephen Paul King
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Chris de Morsella
From: everyth...@googlegroups.com [mailto:everyth...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Stephen Paul King
Are our fears of AI running amuck and killing random persons based on unfounded assumptions?
Perhaps, and I see your point.
However, am going to try to make the following case:
If we take AI as some emergent networked meta-system, arising in a non-linear, fuzzy, non-demarcated manner from pre-existing (increasingly networked) proto-AI smart systems (+vast repositories), such as already exist… and then drill down through the code layers – through the logic (DNA) – embedded within and characterizing all those sub systems, and factor in all the many conscious and unconscious human assumptions and biases that exist throughout these deeply layered systems… I would argue that what could emerge (& given the trajectory will emerge fairly soon I think) will very much have our human fingerprints sown all the way through its source code, its repositories, its injected values. At least initially.
I am concerned by the kinds of “values” that are becoming encoded in sub-system after sub-system, when the driving motivation for these layered complex self-navigating, increasingly autonomous systems is to create untended killer robots as well as social data mining smart agents to penetrate social networks and identify targets. If this becomes the major part of the code base from which AI emerges then isn’t it a fairly good reason to be concerned about the software DNA of what could emerge? If the code base is driven by the desire to establish and maintain a system characterized by having a highly centralized and vertical social control, deep data mining defended by an army increasingly comprised of autonomous mobile warbots… isn’t this a cause for concern?
But then -- admittedly -- who really knows how an emergent machine based (probably highly networked) self-aware intelligence might evolve; my concern is the initial conditions (algorithms etc.) we are embedding into the source code from which an AI would emerge.
Telmo Menezes
Telmo Menezes
" "If humanity had been sane and had our act together globally, the sensible course of action would be to postpone development of superintelligence until we figured out how to do so safely. "Sanity is not a common property of crowds, we are not considering "wisdom" but actual observer behaviors of humans in large groups. If we define "wise" behavior that which does not generate higher entropy in its environment, crows, more often than not, tend to not be wise.If an AI where to emerge from the interactions of many computers, would it be expected to be "sane"? What is sanity anyway?
Another question is: Would AI have a view of the universe that can be matched up with ours? If not, how would we expect it to "see the world" that it interacts with? Our worlds and that of AI may be disjoint!
Terren Suydam
On Thu, Aug 28, 2014 at 10:05 PM, Terren Suydam <terren...@gmail.com> wrote:
On Thu, Aug 28, 2014 at 7:30 AM, Telmo Menezes <te...@telmomenezes.com> wrote:
Although my POV is aligned with the latter intuition, I actually agree with the former, but consider the kinds of threats involved to be bounded in ways we can in principle control. Although in practice it is possible for them to do damage so quickly we can't prevent it.Perhaps my idea of intelligence is too limited. I am assuming that something capable of being a real threat will be able to generate its own ontologies, creatively model them in ways that build on and relate to existing ontologies, simulate and test those new models, etc., generate value judgments using these new models with respect to overarching utility function(s). It is suspiciously similar to human intelligence.I wonder. What you describe seems like the way of thinking of a person trained in the scientific method (a very recent discovery in human history). Is this raw human intelligence? I suspect raw human intelligence is more like a kludge. It is possible to create rickety structures of order on top of that kludge, by a process we call "education".I don't mean to imply formal learning at all. I think this even applies to any animal that dreams during sleep (say). Modeling the world is a very basic function of the brain, even if the process and result is a kludge. With language and the ability to articulate models, humans can get very good indeed at making them precise and building structures, rickity or otherwise, upon the basic kludginess you're talking about.I think something like this could do a lot of damage very quickly, but by accident... in a similar way perhaps to the occasional meltdowns caused by the collective behaviors of micro-second market-making algorithms.
Another example is big societies designed by humans.Big societies act much more slowly. But they are their own organisms, we don't design them anymore than our cells design us. We are not really that good at seeing how they operate, for the same reason we find it hard to perceive how a cloud changes through time.I find it exceedingly unlikely that an AGI will spontaneously emerge from a self-mutating process like you describe. Again, if this kind of thing were likely, or at least not extremely unlikely, I think it suggests that AGI is a lot simpler than it really is.This is tricky. The Kolmogorov complexity of AGI could be relatively low -- maybe it can be expressed in 1000 lines of lisp. But the set of programs expressible in 1000 lines of lisp includes some really crazy, counter-intuitive stuff (e.g. the universal dovetailer). Genetic programming has been shown to be able to discover relatively short solutions that are better than anything a human could come up with, due to counter-intuitiveness.I suppose it is possible and maybe my estimate of how likely it is is too low. All the same I would be rather shocked if AGI could be implemented in 1000 lines of code. And no cheating - each line has to be less than 80 chars ;-) Bonus points if you can do it in Arnold.Arnold is excellent! :)I raise you Piet:
Stephen Paul King
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LizR
Chris de Morsella
From: everyth...@googlegroups.com [mailto:everyth...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Stephen Paul King
Sent: Saturday, August 30, 2014 8:35 PM
To: everyth...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: AI Dooms Us
Hi Chris,
Here is the thing. Does not the difficulty in creating a computational simulation of the brain in action give you pause?
Difficult yes, impossible I don’t think so. A simulation of the human brain need not have the same scale as an actual human brain (after all it is a model). For example statistical well bounded statements can be made about many social behavioral outcomes based on relatively small sampling sets. This also applies to the brain. A model could have a small fraction of the real brain’s complexity and scale and yet produce pretty accurate results.
Of course it is complex for us to imagine today… the human brain is after all vastly parallel with an immense number of connections 100s of trillions. Even within a single synapse (one of a large number of synapses) there is a world of exquisite molecular scale complexity and it seems multi-channeled to me.
However, it is also true that the global networked meta-cloud (the dynamic process driven interconnected cloud of clouds operating over the underlying global scale physical and technological infrastructure) is also scaling up to immense numbers of disparate computational elements with thousands of trillions of network vertices.
Perhaps I don’t understand the thrust of this statement? Why should it give me pause?
The brain is a magnificent but of biology an admirable compact hyper energy efficient computational engine of unequaled parallelism. Yes, we agree.
On the other hand the geometric growth rates of informatics capacity – in all dimensions: storage, speed, network size, traffic, cross talk, numbers of cores, memory, capacity of the various pipes.. you name it is also literally exploding out in scale. And on the level of fundamental understanding we are establishing a finer and finer grained understanding about the brain and how it works – dynamically in real time – and doing so from many various angles and scales of observation (from macro down to the electro-chemical molecular machinery of a single synapse). There are major initiatives in figuring out (at least at the macro scale) the human brain connectome. The micro architecture of the brain (at the scale of a single arrayed column -- usually around six neurons deep) is also being better understood, as are the various sensorial processing, memory, temporal, decisional and other brain algorithms.
A huge exciting challenge certainly… but for my way of thinking about this, not a cause for pause, rather a call to delve deeper into it and try to put it all together.
Why are we assuming that the AI will have a "mind" (program) that can be parsed by humans?
Who is assuming that? I was arguing that the code we create today will be the DNA of what emerges, by virtue of being the template in which subsequent development emerges from. Are you saying that our human prejudices, assumptions, biases, needs, desires, objectives, habits, ways of thinking… that all this assortment of hidden variables is not influencing the kind of code that is written. The hundreds of millions of lines of code written by programmers – mostly living and working in just a small number of technological centers operating on planet earth -- that all of this vast output of code is somehow unaffected by our humanness, by our nature?
Personally I would find that astounding and think it would seem rather obvious that in fact it is very much influenced by our nature and our objectives and needs.
I am not assuming anything by making the statement that whatever does emerge (assuming a self-aware intelligence does emerge) will have emerged out from a primordial soup that we cooked up and will have had its roots and beginnings from a code base of human creation, created for human ends and objectives with human prejudices and modes of thinking literally hard coded into the mind boggling numbers of services, objects, systems, frameworks and what have you that exist and are now all connecting up into non-locational dynamic cloud architectures.
AFAIK, AGI (following Ben Goertzel's convention) will be completely incomprehensible to us. If we are trying to figure out its "values", what could we do better than to run the thing in a sandbox and let it interact in with "test AI". Can we "prove" that is intelligent?
We don’t know what it will turn out to become, but we can say with certainty that it will emerge from the code, from the algorithms from the physical chip architectures, network architectures, etc. that we have created. This is clearly an a priori assumption if we are speaking about human spawned AI – it has to emerge from human creation (unless we are speaking of alien AI of course).
We cannot even prove that we are intelligent or that we even exist. We do not even know what we are. We think we think, but measurements of brain activity indicate the thinking has already happened before we have had the though we though we thunk!
Mere narrators of our minds we are. We do not even understand how we think…. Or why we get our values. For example I tis becoming clear that our gut flora and fauna have more influence over our moods and desires than was previously realized… how much of “our” thoughts, decisions are really just our human host executing on the microbial desires and decisions of the five pounds or so of biological complexity in our guts?
I don't think so! Unless we could somehow "mindmeld" with it and the mindmeld results in a mutual "understanding", how could we have a proof. But melding minds together is a hard thing to do....
In thirty to forty years we may begin to converge as humans become increasingly cyborgs…. And I am being very conservative. Apple is about to unleash smart watches and google has its glasses… already people are thinking of having their biometrics wired up to a networked monitoring service… people born blind are being given rudimentary artificial vision. Nano-scale molecular machinery techniques and self-assembling systems approaches are pushing the scale down to levels where informatics may soon become incorporated throughout the body and the brain itself.
My question for you is how much longer do you think we will remain recognizably human? Twenty years, fifty years.. a hundred perhaps. I just don’t see us stopping at some arbitrary wall unless our technology itself is collapsed by our collapsing resource base.. or unless (it has been argued) there is a point at which increasingly complex systems begin to fail. And this has merit as an argument too. But then taking computer architecture for example instead of scaling in complexity it scales out… multi-core architectures for example (each single core’s complexity within manageable bounds)
I assume nothing (or at least make an attempt)… we very much do live in interesting times… on this I think we can agree.
Chris de Morsella
From: everyth...@googlegroups.com [mailto:everyth...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of LizR
Sent: Saturday, August 30, 2014 8:55 PM
To: everyth...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: AI Dooms Us
I think the only test we have available for consciousness etc (for computers or people) is the good old Turing test. Once our AI starts killing of astronauts because they may interfere with its main mission (I was always with HAL on this one, what exactly was the point of those humans, again?) that looks like a good point to stop arguing the finer details and start pulling out the memory cubes.
AI might also accelerate its development at such breakneck speed that it very rapidly loses all interest in us, our planet, this galaxy, this particular underlying “physical reality” (whatever that may turn out to be) and exit our perceived universe into some other dimension beyond our reach or comprehension.
LizR
From: everyth...@googlegroups.com [mailto:everyth...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of LizR
Sent: Saturday, August 30, 2014 8:55 PM
To: everyth...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: AI Dooms Us
I think the only test we have available for consciousness etc (for computers or people) is the good old Turing test. Once our AI starts killing of astronauts because they may interfere with its main mission (I was always with HAL on this one, what exactly was the point of those humans, again?) that looks like a good point to stop arguing the finer details and start pulling out the memory cubes.
AI might also accelerate its development at such breakneck speed that it very rapidly loses all interest in us, our planet, this galaxy, this particular underlying “physical reality” (whatever that may turn out to be) and exit our perceived universe into some other dimension beyond our reach or comprehension.
However it's possible they might at least feel enough gratitude to upload us, perhaps into a zoo...
DALEK: Why?
LESTERSON: (like a Dalek) I am your servant.
DALEK: We do not need humans now.
LESTERSON: Ah, but you wouldn't kill me. I gave you life.
DALEK: Yes, you gave us life
Chris de Morsella
(It exteminates him.)
Classic J
John Clark
> The Kolmogorov complexity of AGI could be relatively low -- maybe it can be expressed in 1000 lines of lisp.
That is not a crazy idea because we know for a fact that in the entire human genome there are only 3 billion base pairs. There are 4 bases so each base can represent 2 bits, there are 8 bits per byte so that comes out to just 750 meg, and that's enough assembly instructions to make not just a brain and all its wiring but a entire human baby. So the instructions MUST contain wiring instructions such as "wire a neuron up this way and then and then repeat that procedure exactly the same way 917 billion times". And there is a huge amount of redundancy in the human genome, if you used a file compression program like ZIP on that 750 meg you could easily put the entire thing on half a CD, not a DVD not a Blu ray just a old fashioned steam powered vanilla CD.
meekerdb
Brent
Chris de Morsella
From: everyth...@googlegroups.com [mailto:everyth...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of John Clark
Sent: Sunday, August 31, 2014 9:27 AM
To: everyth...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: AI Dooms Us
On Thu, Aug 28, 2014 at 7:30 AM, Telmo Menezes <te...@telmomenezes.com> wrote:
John K Clark
Just want to point out that the process of DNA expression is highly dynamic and is multi-factored (including environmental driven epigenetic feedback). This is especially so during the process of embryogenesis, an unfolding developmental choreographed switching process that is controlled by epigenetic programming (methylation/demethylation and other mechanisms). The mammalian genomes undergo very extensive genomic reprogramming during embryogenesis.
DNA is not a direct single layered – single meaning -- instruction set encoded and fixed. The expression of hereditary information is a multi-layered, dynamic and epigenetically influenced (driven) process, and this is especially true during embryogenesis. The same strand of DNA, depending on the dynamic action of the large number of transcription factors (there are 2600 identified proteins in the human genome that contain DNA-binding domains and it is thought that 10% of our genome is involved in encoding this large family of transcription factors) can encode very different mRNA and result in different outcomes and be used for different purposes.
It is – IMO – necessary to understand DNA as an encoded bundle of potential instructions that through a highly dynamic transcription process becomes actualized.
The actual expression of the underlying DNA blueprint is best understood in terms of it being a dynamic, environmentally and developmentally influenced process. DNA is arranged… and re-arranged – read forwards or backwards with coding sections turned on or off – in a large number of different ways.
-Chris
meekerdb
From: everyth...@googlegroups.com [mailto:everyth...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of John Clark
Sent: Sunday, August 31, 2014 9:27 AM
To: everyth...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: AI Dooms Us
On Thu, Aug 28, 2014 at 7:30 AM, Telmo Menezes <te...@telmomenezes.com> wrote:
> The Kolmogorov complexity of AGI could be relatively low -- maybe it can be expressed in 1000 lines of lisp.
That is not a crazy idea because we know for a fact that in the entire human genome there are only 3 billion base pairs. There are 4 bases so each base can represent 2 bits, there are 8 bits per byte so that comes out to just 750 meg, and that's enough assembly instructions to make not just a brain and all its wiring but a entire human baby. So the instructions MUST contain wiring instructions such as "wire a neuron up this way and then and then repeat that procedure exactly the same way 917 billion times". And there is a huge amount of redundancy in the human genome, if you used a file compression program like ZIP on that 750 meg you could easily put the entire thing on half a CD, not a DVD not a Blu ray just a old fashioned steam powered vanilla CD.John K Clark
Just want to point out that the process of DNA expression is highly dynamic and is multi-factored (including environmental driven epigenetic feedback). This is especially so during the process of embryogenesis, an unfolding developmental choreographed switching process that is controlled by epigenetic programming (methylation/demethylation and other mechanisms). The mammalian genomes undergo very extensive genomic reprogramming during embryogenesis.
DNA is not a direct single layered – single meaning -- instruction set encoded and fixed. The expression of hereditary information is a multi-layered, dynamic and epigenetically influenced (driven) process, and this is especially true during embryogenesis. The same strand of DNA, depending on the dynamic action of the large number of transcription factors (there are 2600 identified proteins in the human genome that contain DNA-binding domains and it is thought that 10% of our genome is involved in encoding this large family of transcription factors) can encode very different mRNA and result in different outcomes and be used for different purposes.
It is – IMO – necessary to understand DNA as an encoded bundle of potential instructions that through a highly dynamic transcription process becomes actualized.
The actual expression of the underlying DNA blueprint is best understood in terms of it being a dynamic, environmentally and developmentally influenced process. DNA is arranged… and re-arranged – read forwards or backwards with coding sections turned on or off – in a large number of different ways.
-Chris
Brent
Chris de Morsella
From: meekerdb <meek...@verizon.net>
To: everyth...@googlegroups.com
Sent: Sunday, August 31, 2014 2:06 PM
LizR
Russell Standish
>
> As per what I was saying about Watson (or whatever it's called), the baby
> needs to be immersed in an environment in order to develop any form of
> consciousness beyond the rudimentary raw feels provided by nature - that
> is, it needs to be educated by interaction with the environment, and with
> other people (i.e. assimilate culture).
>
in a regular, lawlike universe. We can get by with a smaller genome,
and learn the rest of the stuff that makes up our mental life, which
is a more likely scenario (even evolutionary speaking) than having a
large genome directly encoding our knowledge.
Of course, that is only possible if in fact the environment is regular
enough to be learnable.
Cheers
--
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile)
Principal, High Performance Coders
Visiting Professor of Mathematics hpc...@hpcoders.com.au
University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au
Latest project: The Amoeba's Secret
(http://www.hpcoders.com.au/AmoebasSecret.html)
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
LizR
On Mon, Sep 01, 2014 at 12:24:37PM +1200, LizR wrote:This actually supplies a good reason for why we should find ourselves
>
> As per what I was saying about Watson (or whatever it's called), the baby
> needs to be immersed in an environment in order to develop any form of
> consciousness beyond the rudimentary raw feels provided by nature - that
> is, it needs to be educated by interaction with the environment, and with
> other people (i.e. assimilate culture).
>
in a regular, lawlike universe. We can get by with a smaller genome,
and learn the rest of the stuff that makes up our mental life, which
is a more likely scenario (even evolutionary speaking) than having a
large genome directly encoding our knowledge.
Of course, that is only possible if in fact the environment is regular
enough to be learnable.
meekerdb
> On Mon, Sep 01, 2014 at 12:24:37PM +1200, LizR wrote:
>> As per what I was saying about Watson (or whatever it's called), the baby
>> needs to be immersed in an environment in order to develop any form of
>> consciousness beyond the rudimentary raw feels provided by nature - that
>> is, it needs to be educated by interaction with the environment, and with
>> other people (i.e. assimilate culture).
>>
> This actually supplies a good reason for why we should find ourselves
> in a regular, lawlike universe. We can get by with a smaller genome,
> and learn the rest of the stuff that makes up our mental life, which
> is a more likely scenario (even evolutionary speaking) than having a
> large genome directly encoding our knowledge.
>
> Of course, that is only possible if in fact the environment is regular
> enough to be learnable.
irregular environment.
Brent
Telmo Menezes
Brent
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Telmo Menezes
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John Clark
> But the baby learns a lot as it grows,>>> The Kolmogorov complexity of AGI could be relatively low -- maybe it can be expressed in 1000 lines of lisp.
>> That is not a crazy idea because we know for a fact that in the entire human genome there are only 3 billion base pairs. There are 4 bases so each base can represent 2 bits, there are 8 bits per byte so that comes out to just 750 meg, and that's enough assembly instructions to make not just a brain and all its wiring but a entire human baby. So the instructions MUST contain wiring instructions such as "wire a neuron up this way and then and then repeat that procedure exactly the same way 917 billion times". And there is a huge amount of redundancy in the human genome, if you used a file compression program like ZIP on that 750 meg you could easily put the entire thing on half a CD, not a DVD not a Blu ray just a old fashioned steam powered vanilla CD.
Stephen Paul King
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John Clark
> Just want to point out that the process of DNA expression is highly dynamic and is multi-factored
> The mammalian genomes undergo very extensive genomic reprogramming during embryogenesis.
> This is especially so during the process of embryogenesis, an unfolding developmental choreographed switching process that is controlled by epigenetic programming (methylation /demethylation and other mechanisms).
Methylation means that occasionally a Methyl group might be added to one of the DNA bases, a base would have a Methyl group or it would not so it's still digital. There are 4 bases so AT MOST each of the 3 billion bases would represent 3 bits instead of 2, so the information content would increase from 750 Meg to 1.12 Gig and with a file compression program like ZIP you could still fit all of it on a CD.
> DNA is not a direct single layered – single meaning -- instruction set encoded and fixed.
> The same strand of DNA, depending on the dynamic action of the large number of transcription factors
> It is – IMO – necessary to understand DNA as [...]
Stephen Paul King
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John Clark
> Hold it! Where is the information about the physical system required to run that 750 Meg of information contained?
meekerdb
Brent
Chris de Morsella
From: everyth...@googlegroups.com [mailto:everyth...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of John Clark
Sent: Monday, September 01, 2014 9:43 AM
To: everyth...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: AI Dooms Us
On Sun, Aug 31, 2014 at 3:18 PM, 'Chris de Morsella' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:
> Just want to point out that the process of DNA expression is highly dynamic and is multi-factored
Yes it certainly is, but however dynamic the DNA information is it's still just 750 meg (actually it's much less than that considering the massive amount of redundancy in our genome). And Telmo's 1000 lines of lisp would also have to be highly dynamic.
Amazing isn’t it. The elegance of self-assembling processes that can do so much with so little input. I doubt 1000 lines of computer code is a large enough initial instruction set even for a highly self-generating system. Maybe a few million lines of code might do it though, if it was code that generated other code and so forth in a cascading process similar to embryogenesis in eukaryotes.
> The mammalian genomes undergo very extensive genomic reprogramming during embryogenesis.
And where did the information about how to do that reprogramming come from? From the original 750 meg.
Much of it did certainly. But it also comes from the environment… e.g. from an external source. The outcome of embryogenesis is affected by epigenetic influences that alter what genetic information is expressed and also crucially when (at what point in sequences of expression) it occurs. This external epigenetic programming instructions are completely outside of that original bundle of genetic information.
> This is especially so during the process of embryogenesis, an unfolding developmental choreographed switching process that is controlled by epigenetic programming (methylation /demethylation and other mechanisms).
Methylation means that occasionally a Methyl group might be added to one of the DNA bases, a base would have a Methyl group or it would not so it's still digital. There are 4 bases so AT MOST each of the 3 billion bases would represent 3 bits instead of 2, so the information content would increase from 750 Meg to 1.12 Gig and with a file compression program like ZIP you could still fit all of it on a CD.
But the fact is that the epigenetic external information is not available until run-time. It exists outside the organism in its environment.
But in reality Epigenetic information is pretty clearly of minor importance compared with the DNA sequence information, so I doubt it would even cause it to increase to 751 Meg. And the evidence that Epigenetic heredity exists for more than one generation is very meager.
I do not agree that the understanding and quantification of epigenetic influences on human development (especially during embryogenesis) is as settled or of minor consequence as you state. There is evidence for example that it persists for three generations in studies of cigarette smokers progeny, and I have read studies that point to high stress in one generation resulting in epigenetic hereditary outcomes in subsequent generations. Even identical twins as they grow and live through their different lives – even their originally identical DNA diverges in its expressed outcome due to epigenetic affects.
> DNA is not a direct single layered – single meaning -- instruction set encoded and fixed.
You can assign as many layers of meaning on it as you like but nothing can change the fact that you could put all the information in the entire human DNA genome on a old fashioned CD and still have enough room on it for a Beatles album from 1965.
And 32 or so fundamental values define (fix, quantify) all the laws of our universe. Amazing complexity can emerge from simple initial conditions.
> The same strand of DNA, depending on the dynamic action of the large number of transcription factors
A transcription factors is just a protein that binds to specific DNA sequences. And where did the information come from to know what sequence of amino acids will build that very important protein? From the original 750 Meg of course.
From that original bundle of genetic code + environmental influences. 90% of the living things in a human body DO NOT have human DNA (not by weight of course but by census)… our behavior, our desires, our decisions, our thoughts, dreams, cravings, fears… our volition… is at least in part being driven by these other non-human organisms (especially the huge diverse community of microorganisms living in our guts).
The kind of flora and fauna we have in our guts in many ways determines who we are, what we think and what we desire. It affects out well-being (or lack of it), our emotions and our goals. This genetic information is not part of the human DNA, but humans have coevolved with these communities of microorganisms and many of them play important (perhaps vital) roles in our Darwinian fitness.
The information that triggers a whole slew of affects resulting in a changed outcome for the organism could very well have originated in some microorganism inhabiting that individuals gut. Our immune system especially seems to have co-evolved to work symbiotically with many different species of microorganisms.
We require a vast library of CDs to live healthy lives…. Not just our DNA CD, but all the DNA CDs of the thousands of organisms that a healthy human animal requires (or greatly benefits from having within them). We are not isolated organisms apart from the many other cohabitating organisms that journey through life living inside our bodies.
> It is – IMO – necessary to understand DNA as [...]
I'm not saying that understanding how 750 Meg of DNA information manages to produce a human being will be easy, figuring out how Telmo's 1000 lines of lisp works will not be easy either, but I am saying that's all the information there is.
John K Clark
I agree that it is amazingly compact. We may differ on where we draw the line. I do not see a single human (or other eukaryote) only in terms of its own DNA + epigenetic meta-programming over the DNA base, but also in terms of the ecosystem that exists within. Both the beneficial and the parasitic species within us hugely affect our lives – as they do with every multi-cellular species we know about.
We are walking talking ecosystems with biotic auras as unique as fingerprints (in fact forensic science is beginning to study this as a potential investigative tool)
-Chris
Stephen Paul King
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Chris de Morsella
From: everyth...@googlegroups.com [mailto:everyth...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of John Clark
Sent: Monday, September 01, 2014 10:55 AM
To: everyth...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: AI Dooms Us
On Mon, Sep 1, 2014 at 1:03 PM, Stephen Paul King <Step...@provensecure.com> wrote:
> Hold it! Where is the information about the physical system required to run that 750 Meg of information contained?
DNA contains information on how to make stuff but it doesn't actually do anything, only proteins and RNA do things. DNA by itself just sits there and a 1000 line lisp program printed out onto 100 pages of paper would just sit there, both need hardware to run on. To run the 750 meg DNA program a cell needs Mitochondrial RNA, Transfer RNA, Messenger RNA, and several thousand protein enzymes.
Don’t forget to mention the ribosomes.
And to answer your question, every single bit of information needed to make all those different types of RNA and all those different types of proteins is contained in that original 750 Meg, it's equivalent to not only containing the program but also all the information you need to make the computer to run the program on. And if that reminds you a little of the chicken or the egg problem welcome to the club, it has caused origin of like theorists no end of problems. Did DNA, which knows what to do but can't do it, come first or did proteins, which can do things but doesn't know what to do, come first?
John K Clark
Can a single complex multi-cellular organism be understood or defined completely without also viewing it in its larger multi-species context?
Within our own selves; we are not alone! And we do not function in life on our own either. Our living bodies are thriving diverse communities of microorganisms as well. Without all of that externally stored DNA and all that dynamic interactions with these other co-evolved organisms would we even be able to survive for long? We certainly cannot live without them and remain in good health.
Without also accounting for all the services the beneficial micro flora and fauna provide us and then adding this externally reposited DNA into the tally of the set of information needed to produce a healthy human individual… well without doing this we are just looking at the tip of the genetic and biological iceberg.
-Chris
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Chris de Morsella
From: everyth...@googlegroups.com [mailto:everyth...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Stephen Paul King
Sent: Monday, September 01, 2014 4:03 PM
To: everyth...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: AI Dooms Us
Excellent point, Chris. Entities do not exist in isolation from each other... We have to include the "world" or "environment" of an entity when we consider it in our models and reasonings.
I wonder how an AGI will develop a model of its world and what kind of world would it be.
Read a study that is in the science news lately that within a period even as brief as just 24 hours a person or familiar grouping of peoples biotic auras will completely take over and colonize the environment of a hotel room. We are dragging a microscopic jungle with us wherever we go and in the spots we habituate – in those same exact spots our fingerprint specific micro-biota also sets up shop.
There are more than fifty different known species of microorganisms that have evolved to live on human tooth enamel (and similar numbers for dogs, cats, rabbits, crocodiles.. ) that is just the enamel surface… have not even hit the gum line where there is a veritable population explosion and many more microorganisms.
We live & breathe, are bathed in… a living biotic earth planet soup. Our bodies are like sieves and we are filled by a still poorly understood micro-biotic ecosystem that interacts with our own body’s cells in so many ways both beneficial and parasitic.
The reductionist view of seeing an organism in isolation of its environment (including its inner environment) misses the mark and fails to capture the dynamic living reality that we are walking talking ecosystems… each single one of us…. Veritable jungles living deep inside us. Our lives are shared lives.
Life or perhaps living systems, involve multiple actors.
-Chris
Chris de Morsella
From: everyth...@googlegroups.com [mailto:everyth...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Stephen Paul King
Sent: Monday, September 01, 2014 2:53 PM
To: everyth...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: AI Dooms Us
Hi Chris,
A colleague of mine has found a few possible examples of "self-assembling code" but they are not strings of bits, they are better described as a form of topological object. They are based on a different model of computation:
http://chorasimilarity.wordpress.com/2014/09/01/quines-in-chemlambda/
software systems increasingly are becoming comprised of services (making use of other services (that call into other services (etc.))) In the ecosystem of cloud facing services those that are performant etc. will tend to rise and become incorporated – often, increasingly in a late binding manner, through a process called dependency injection – into other assemblies of multiple different services and internal logic that increasingly are themselves becoming exposed as yet other services.
Meta systems, comprised of loosely coupled archipelagos of distinct areas of responsibility and roles linked together in the cloud through dynamic queues are taking off. Large systems such as say Netflix heavily rely on this architecture.
IMO – this is an architecture in which a form of digital Darwinian evolution can more easily occur – as compared with traditionally application models -- with the services being the organisms and the cloud being the ecosystem. As the adoption of dependency injection models increases and systems become more late bound with the better exemplars of specific services (say logging, monitoring and alarming for example) becoming injected into live systems (often without even needing to bring them down) best of breed pressures will begin to drive the service organisms to evolve into becoming more effective and better options.
Stephen Paul King
Stephen Paul King
Chris de Morsella
From: everyth...@googlegroups.com [mailto:everyth...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Stephen Paul King
Sent: Monday, September 01, 2014 5:38 PM
To: everyth...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: AI Dooms Us
Hi Chris,
I agree. What we see in the current development is, literally, evolution - I would not say that it is "Darwinian" per se as it is not smooth or continuous. It looks more like a punctuated equilibrium over many interacting asynchronous systems. What I don't see is an analogue of a genome, such that the Dawkins model is supported.
I just recently found talks on "dependency injection". Please tell me more!
Also known as inversion of control. Essentially it involves the implementation of interfaces. The interface being the contract. How the service implementing the contract goes about doing so is an internal matter, what matters to the client is that the contract is honored and the given service is performed. Complex systems are assemblages of simpler systems… file systems, data repositories, messaging systems, and so on. These systems can be composited together using interfaces and abstract containers – instead of returning a concrete container of something the thing can return something (could be anything) that fulfills a shared contract.
Late binding dependency injection is a means of supplying at the late deployed run time phase of a configured set of libraries… perhaps behind other endpoints and so forth that will implement the required interface and provide the needed service. The consuming program need not worry about how a given dependency will be fulfilled – that is the injected libraries responsibility.
Using a combination of programming behind the abstraction of interfaces and IOC containers – frameworks that perform late binding dependency injection to fulfill the service needs a program can free itself from any particular implementation and smoothly evolve to other better implementations as long as its contracts i.e. defined implemented interfaces can be fulfilled.
Stephen Paul King
Chris de Morsella
Sure
Pierz
On Tuesday, August 26, 2014 5:05:04 AM UTC+10, Brent wrote:
Bostrom says, "If humanity had been sane and had our act together globally, the sensible course of action would be to postpone development of superintelligence until we figured out how to do so safely. And then maybe wait another generation or two just to make sure that we hadn't overlooked some flaw in our reasoning. And then do it -- and reap immense benefit. Unfortunately, we do not have the ability to pause."
But maybe he's forgotten the Dark Ages. I think ISIS is working hard to produce a pause.
Brent
On 8/25/2014 10:27 AMArtificial Intelligence May Doom The Human Race Within A Century, Oxford Professor
Terren Suydam
One day, a printout of this email will be found among the post apocalyptic wreckage by one of the few remaining humans and they will enjoy the first laugh they've had in a year.
Just kidding. I have no idea how to calibrate this threat. I'm pretty skeptical, but some awfully smart people are seriously concerned about it.
Terren
spudb...@aol.com
From: Pierz <pie...@gmail.com>
To: everything-list <everyth...@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Tue, Sep 2, 2014 7:22 am
Subject: Re: AI Dooms Us
On Tuesday, August 26, 2014 5:05:04 AM UTC+10, Brent wrote:
Bostrom says, "If humanity had been sane and had our act together globally, the sensible course of action would be to postpone development of superintelligence until we figured out how to do so safely. And then maybe wait another generation or two just to make sure that we hadn't overlooked some flaw in our reasoning. And then do it -- and reap immense benefit. Unfortunately, we do not have the ability to pause."
But maybe he's forgotten the Dark Ages. I think ISIS is working hard to produce a pause. Repeating, the fault lies not in AI, but in ourselves, Horatio.
Brent
On 8/25/2014 10:27 AM
Artificial Intelligence May Doom The Human Race Within A Century, Oxford Professor
John Clark
>> Amazing isn’t it. The elegance of self-assembling processes that can do so much with so little input.
> I doubt 1000 lines of computer code is a large enough initial instruction set even for a highly self-generating system.
>>> The same strand of DNA, depending on the dynamic action of the large number of transcription factors
>> A transcription factors is just a protein that binds to specific DNA sequences. And where did the information come from to know what sequence of amino acids will build that very important protein? From the original 750 Meg of course.
> From that original bundle of genetic code + environmental influences.
> 90% of the living things in a human body DO NOT have human DNA not by weight of course but by census
> The kind of flora and fauna we have in our guts in many ways determines who we are, what we think and what we desire.
> It affects out well-being
> I do not see a single human (or other eukaryote) only in terms of its own DNA + epigenetic meta-programming over the DNA base, but also in terms of the ecosystem that exists within.
John Clark
> The chicken or the egg problem is not hard to solve; just figure out how to get something that is a little bit like both and has an evolution path into one or the other.
> But your missing my point here. There is an already existing environment of physical stuff and interactions that is required for the expression of the information associated with a genome.
John Clark
> Can a single complex multi-cellular organism be understood or defined completely without also viewing it in its larger multi-species context?
Telmo Menezes
Hi Telmo,Access to resources seems to only allow for reproduction and continuation. For an AGI to "act on the world" it has to be able to use those resources in a manner that implies that it can "sense the world" that it exist within. This seems to be a catch-22 situation. ISTM, that if a computation has no means to model itself as existing in a world or the equivalent, how would it ever operate as if it did in the first place?Blind clock-work....?
Telmo Menezes
I have to say I find the whole thing amusing. Tegmark even suggested we should be spending one percent of GDP trying to research this terrible threat to humanity and wondered why we weren't doing it. Why not? Because, unlike global warming and nuclear weapons, there is absolutely no sign of the threat materializing. It's an absolutely theoretical risk based on a wild extrapolation. To me the whole idea of researching defences against a future robot attack is like building weapons to defend ourselves against aliens. So far, the major threat from computers is their stupidity, not their super-intelligence. It's the risk that they will blindly carry out some mechanical instruction (think of semi-autonomous military drones) without any human judgement. Some of you may know the story of the Russian commander who prevented World War III by overriding protocol when his systems told him the USSR was under missile attack. The computer systems f%^*ed up, he used his judgement and saved the world. The risk of computers will always be their mindless rigidity, not their turning into HAL 9000. Someone on the thread said something about Google face recognition software exhibiting behaviour its programmers didn't understand and they hadn't told it to do. Yeah. My programs do that all the time. It's called a bug. When software reaches a certain level of complexity, you simply lose track of what it's doing. Singularity, shmigularity.
On Tuesday, August 26, 2014 5:05:04 AM UTC+10, Brent wrote:Bostrom says, "If humanity had been sane and had our act together globally, the sensible course of action would be to postpone development of superintelligence until we figured out how to do so safely. And then maybe wait another generation or two just to make sure that we hadn't overlooked some flaw in our reasoning. And then do it -- and reap immense benefit. Unfortunately, we do not have the ability to pause."
But maybe he's forgotten the Dark Ages. I think ISIS is working hard to produce a pause.
Brent
On 8/25/2014 10:27 AMArtificial Intelligence May Doom The Human Race Within A Century, Oxford Professor
Bruno Marchal
Bostrom says, "If humanity had been sane and had our act together globally, the sensible course of action would be to postpone development of superintelligence until we figured out how to do so safely. And then maybe wait another generation or two just to make sure that we hadn't overlooked some flaw in our reasoning. And then do it -- and reap immense benefit. Unfortunately, we do not have the ability to pause."
But maybe he's forgotten the Dark Ages. I think ISIS is working hard to produce a pause.
On 8/25/2014 10:27 AMArtificial Intelligence May Doom The Human Race Within A Century, Oxford Professor
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Richard Ruquist
On 25 Aug 2014, at 21:04, meekerdb wrote:Bostrom says, "If humanity had been sane and had our act together globally, the sensible course of action would be to postpone development of superintelligence until we figured out how to do so safely. And then maybe wait another generation or two just to make sure that we hadn't overlooked some flaw in our reasoning. And then do it -- and reap immense benefit. Unfortunately, we do not have the ability to pause."
But maybe he's forgotten the Dark Ages. I think ISIS is working hard to produce a pause.I agree. ISIS, Hamas, Muslim Brotherhood, etc.It is not Islam, in my current opinion, but I read the Hamas chart, and, well, I have only read one half of the Quran for now, and it is hard to interpret (I do think the hamas is inconsistent with the surrah of the poets and the surrah of the table), but I read entirely "mein kampf", and the chart of the hamas extends mein kampf, and indeed those guys works hard and patiently to produce a pause, may be one more millenium of obscurity.Religion are like drug, the more you repress them, the more they get solid. The christian era is already a consequence of the attempt by the Romans to eradicate christianity from the empire, we know the result.
meekerdb
On 25 Aug 2014, at 21:04, meekerdb wrote:
Bostrom says, "If humanity had been sane and had our act together globally, the sensible course of action would be to postpone development of superintelligence until we figured out how to do so safely. And then maybe wait another generation or two just to make sure that we hadn't overlooked some flaw in our reasoning. And then do it -- and reap immense benefit. Unfortunately, we do not have the ability to pause."
But maybe he's forgotten the Dark Ages. I think ISIS is working hard to produce a pause.
I agree. ISIS, Hamas, Muslim Brotherhood, etc.
It is not Islam, in my current opinion, but I read the Hamas chart, and, well, I have only read one half of the Quran for now, and it is hard to interpret (I do think the hamas is inconsistent with the surrah of the poets and the surrah of the table), but I read entirely "mein kampf", and the chart of the hamas extends mein kampf, and indeed those guys works hard and patiently to produce a pause, may be one more millenium of obscurity.
Religion are like drug, the more you repress them, the more they get solid. The christian era is already a consequence of the attempt by the Romans to eradicate christianity from the empire, we know the result.
We can't win a war against Islam, but we still can win a war against nazism (program of eliminating categories of people).
We should better not confuse the pseudo-muslim nazis from the muslims.
Brent
LizR
Stephen Paul King
On the subject of AI dooming us, at least we have John Mikes' benevolent aliens looking out for us. Unless their aim was to get the AIs ... but why not build one themselves? (Come to think of it why not build US themselves?)
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LizR
What if the aliens are AI?
Stephen Paul King
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LizR
Hi LizR,My point about Aliens being AGI is simple. A sufficiently advanced alien civilization may very likely have had a Singularity of its own in the past and what survived are the machines!
We forget that the Turing test is merely a test for an ability to deceive humans....
"In that case they were built by someone else. "I don't think that AI works like that, now that I am thinking about it. One could take the ID argument seriously and reach that conclusion. I don't think that an AGI can be "designed" any more than you and I are not designed.
OTOH, -Following the ID concept for a bit longer - intelligent entities can create conditions and environments within which AGI can evolve. I submit that we will be just as unable to fathom the operations of the "mind" of an AGI as we are of each other's minds. This "unfathomability" is an inherent property of a mind. It is the inability to predict exactly its behavior.
My "proof" - if I should call it that - is a bit technical. It involves an argument based on the ability of pair of computers to simulate each others behavior and to have the simulations predicted by another computer. If one computer X could exactly simulate another computer Y, then it is easy to show that X could include Y as a sub-algorithm of some kind and thus X would be able to "inspect" arbitrary content of the mind of B.Is this correct so far?
Stephen Paul King
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LizR
Hi LizR,
But here is the thing: the hardware to run AGI already exists! From what I have gathered so far in my research it is a sufficiently complex and dynamic network. The AGI, AFAIK, is a "software" machine. It does not need particular hardware, it just needs the functions that are required to exist and to be sequentiable properly.
Stephen Paul King
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Stephen Paul King
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LizR
Right, the connections have to be correct, but there is a weird trick here. Recall how an encrypted message can appear to be random noise? There is a form of computation that would look like noise if one where only looking at some subset of the network that is running a distributed computation. If that distributed computation is an AGI, we would never know it is there and neither would it know we are here.
LizR
Hi LizR,
Sequentiable means that the correct sequence of operations occurs. Information is sensitive to orderings after all. 101001010010 is not the same number as 00100110001....
Stephen Paul King
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LizR
Hi LizR,Yes, I am saying that there may be AIs around already unaware of our existence and vice versa! Cultures, languages, religions, etc. all have the behaviors that we would associate with entities that are to some degree "self-aware" in that there are "self-replication" behaviors associated - See Dawkin's The extended Phenotype - Humans are quite capable of becoming members of a sufficiently expressive language as silicon hardware...
LizR
Chris de Morsella
From: everyth...@googlegroups.com [mailto:everyth...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of John Clark
Sent: Tuesday, September 02, 2014 6:58 AM
To: everyth...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: AI Dooms Us
On Mon, Sep 1, 2014 at 2:45 PM, 'Chris de Morsella' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:
>> Amazing isn’t it. The elegance of self-assembling processes that can do so much with so little input.
Yes, very amazing!
> I doubt 1000 lines of computer code is a large enough initial instruction set even for a highly self-generating system.
My intuition would say that you're right but my intuition would also say that 750 Meg is not enough information to make a human baby, and yet we know for a fact that it is. So I must conclude that our intuition is not very good in matters of this sort.
Point taken, but then a human baby is a plastic template for the individual to emerge in; a fully formed adult human only develops after decades of experience and learning. All of that living experience and cultural learning is not contained inside that DNA bundle.
I disagree with your conclusion that epigenetic effects are of minor consequence. For example a fetus developing in a low stress nourishing environment will during embryogenesis – or so I am arguing – develop into a different human being than that same child in an alternate universe where it is exposed to high stress and low nourishment. The very rapid unfolding sequence of DNA choreographed events that occurs during embryogenesis will unfold in a different manner in each instance.
Time will tell… eventually (and perhaps soon) I believe we will crack this code operating over the code. That I believe provides life with a key ability to respond – in a genetic manner to rapidly mutating environments. It is an extra mechanism that works hand I hand with DNA switching expression on and off… selecting from alternate exressions.
>>> The same strand of DNA, depending on the dynamic action of the large number of transcription factors
>> A transcription factors is just a protein that binds to specific DNA sequences. And where did the information come from to know what sequence of amino acids will build that very important protein? From the original 750 Meg of course.
> From that original bundle of genetic code + environmental influences.
>>I don't know what you're talking about.
I am talking about epigenetic environmentally driven processes both acting to control – to a degree -- which regions of DNA get expressed, and how these regions finally get transcribed into mRNA, in what is a highly dynamic process occurring within the cell’s nucleus -- with much snipping and splicing taking place on the underlying original copy of the DNA being transcribed. Out of this process occurring within the nucleus emerges the resulting mRNA that ultimately is sent out to the ribosomes (where further front line editing may be taking place,)
What a protein can do is a function of it's shape, and the shape of a transcription factor, just like any other protein, is entirely determined by its amino acid sequence, and that is entirely determined by the Messenger RNA sequence, and that is entirely determined by the DNA sequence in the genome. Proteins with the same amino acid sequence always fold up in exactly the same way, at least under all environmental conditions found inside living cells. Yes if environmental conditions are very extreme, if things are very hot or the pH is super high or super low the protein can become denatured and fold up into weird useless shapes, but such conditions are always fatal to life so it's irrelevant. Under all lifelike conditions proteins always fold up in the exact same way.
> 90% of the living things in a human body DO NOT have human DNA not by weight of course but by census
Our primary interest around here is the brain and what the brain does, mind; and I don't see the relevance bacteria have to that. But if you want to include the genome of E coli that's fine, there's plenty of unused space on that CD for it.
There are a heck of lot more species inhabiting our guts than just one or two species of E coli. They perform many services, including it is being discovered working very closely with our own immune systems to warn their human host of the presence of pathogens.
> The kind of flora and fauna we have in our guts in many ways determines who we are, what we think and what we desire.
So the key to consciousness and the factor that determines our personal identity lies in our poo?
If you want to characterize your digestive process by what is defecated out as waste I think you must not have a good grasp of what the digestive process is all about. It is our primary interface with the external world. It is the interface where we absorb the external world into our bodies internal world. It even has its own tiny frontline brain – the enteric nervous system.
You think that the cravings for sugary foods, that the depression that often occurs in sugar addicted people when they do not feed their habit is purely human in origin and that the candida yeast that such persons are often infested with has absolutely no role in this? There are numerous amazing animal studies that prove that parasite species can control the behavior of their hosts – even to the extent of making their hosts engage in behavior that is designed to get them eaten as certain parasitic species do to insects they have infected (in the Amazon I believe) making the host insects climb to the exposed tops of the leaves where they become easy prey for birds of the species that is the next host species in that parasites life cycle.
Just because a thought pops up in the brain does not mean that the mind is the executive actor at the root of the desire or emotion. Parasites have evolved very sophisticated chemical signaling that they use to influence their hosts.
> It affects out well-being
So would an inflamed toenail, but I don't think a investigation of that affliction will bring much enlightenment on the nature of intelligence or consciousness.
Apples and oranges. The internal chemical signaling that parasites engage in to harness a hosts immune system or affect its mental state is the evolved mechanism by which these parasitic species have learned to control their hosts. An inflamed toenail is a wound and the pain is the organisms own nervous system response.
As I said apples and oranges.
> I do not see a single human (or other eukaryote) only in terms of its own DNA + epigenetic meta-programming over the DNA base, but also in terms of the ecosystem that exists within.
That is where we differ and I think that is your fundamental error, you believe you must understand everything before you can understand anything, in other words you do what is becoming increasingly fashionable these days, you reject reductionism in spite of it having worked so spectacularly well during the last 400 years. I don't.
John K Clark
If you need to saw a piece of lumber don’t use a hammer. Just because one tool – reductionism has had spectacular success in increasing our understanding (and I am not denying that it has) does not mean that it is always the appropriate tool to use for the job.
In understanding the workings of complex multi-actor systems reductionist approach has not produced spectacular results. A systems approach is required as well – to complement the understanding of the parts with a different kind of understanding of the dynamic working of the whole.
Surely this is important for something like understanding consciousness and self-aware intelligence.
-Chris
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meekerdb
From: everyth...@googlegroups.com [mailto:everyth...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of John Clark
Sent: Tuesday, September 02, 2014 6:58 AM
To: everyth...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: AI Dooms Us
On Mon, Sep 1, 2014 at 2:45 PM, 'Chris de Morsella' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:
>> Amazing isn’t it. The elegance of self-assembling processes that can do so much with so little input.
Yes, very amazing!
> I doubt 1000 lines of computer code is a large enough initial instruction set even for a highly self-generating system.
My intuition would say that you're right but my intuition would also say that 750 Meg is not enough information to make a human baby, and yet we know for a fact that it is. So I must conclude that our intuition is not very good in matters of this sort.
Point taken, but then a human baby is a plastic template for the individual to emerge in; a fully formed adult human only develops after decades of experience and learning. All of that living experience and cultural learning is not contained inside that DNA bundle.
I disagree with your conclusion that epigenetic effects are of minor consequence. For example a fetus developing in a low stress nourishing environment will during embryogenesis – or so I am arguing – develop into a different human being than that same child in an alternate universe where it is exposed to high stress and low nourishment. The very rapid unfolding sequence of DNA choreographed events that occurs during embryogenesis will unfold in a different manner in each instance.
Time will tell… eventually (and perhaps soon) I believe we will crack this code operating over the code. That I believe provides life with a key ability to respond – in a genetic manner to rapidly mutating environments. It is an extra mechanism that works hand I hand with DNA switching expression on and off… selecting from alternate exressions.
>>> The same strand of DNA, depending on the dynamic action of the large number of transcription factors
>> A transcription factors is just a protein that binds to specific DNA sequences. And where did the information come from to know what sequence of amino acids will build that very important protein? From the original 750 Meg of course.
> From that original bundle of genetic code + environmental influences.
>>I don't know what you're talking about.
I am talking about epigenetic environmentally driven processes both acting to control – to a degree -- which regions of DNA get expressed, and how these regions finally get transcribed into mRNA, in what is a highly dynamic process occurring within the cell’s nucleus -- with much snipping and splicing taking place on the underlying original copy of the DNA being transcribed. Out of this process occurring within the nucleus emerges the resulting mRNA that ultimately is sent out to the ribosomes (where further front line editing may be taking place,)
What a protein can do is a function of it's shape, and the shape of a transcription factor, just like any other protein, is entirely determined by its amino acid sequence, and that is entirely determined by the Messenger RNA sequence, and that is entirely determined by the DNA sequence in the genome. Proteins with the same amino acid sequence always fold up in exactly the same way, at least under all environmental conditions found inside living cells. Yes if environmental conditions are very extreme, if things are very hot or the pH is super high or super low the protein can become denatured and fold up into weird useless shapes, but such conditions are always fatal to life so it's irrelevant. Under all lifelike conditions proteins always fold up in the exact same way.
> 90% of the living things in a human body DO NOT have human DNA not by weight of course but by census
Our primary interest around here is the brain and what the brain does, mind; and I don't see the relevance bacteria have to that. But if you want to include the genome of E coli that's fine, there's plenty of unused space on that CD for it.
There are a heck of lot more species inhabiting our guts than just one or two species of E coli. They perform many services, including it is being discovered working very closely with our own immune systems to warn their human host of the presence of pathogens.
> The kind of flora and fauna we have in our guts in many ways determines who we are, what we think and what we desire.
So the key to consciousness and the factor that determines our personal identity lies in our poo?
If you want to characterize your digestive process by what is defecated out as waste I think you must not have a good grasp of what the digestive process is all about. It is our primary interface with the external world. It is the interface where we absorb the external world into our bodies internal world. It even has its own tiny frontline brain – the enteric nervous system.
You think that the cravings for sugary foods, that the depression that often occurs in sugar addicted people when they do not feed their habit is purely human in origin and that the candida yeast that such persons are often infested with has absolutely no role in this? There are numerous amazing animal studies that prove that parasite species can control the behavior of their hosts – even to the extent of making their hosts engage in behavior that is designed to get them eaten as certain parasitic species do to insects they have infected (in the Amazon I believe) making the host insects climb to the exposed tops of the leaves where they become easy prey for birds of the species that is the next host species in that parasites life cycle.
Just because a thought pops up in the brain does not mean that the mind is the executive actor at the root of the desire or emotion. Parasites have evolved very sophisticated chemical signaling that they use to influence their hosts.
> It affects out well-being
So would an inflamed toenail, but I don't think a investigation of that affliction will bring much enlightenment on the nature of intelligence or consciousness.
Apples and oranges. The internal chemical signaling that parasites engage in to harness a hosts immune system or affect its mental state is the evolved mechanism by which these parasitic species have learned to control their hosts. An inflamed toenail is a wound and the pain is the organisms own nervous system response.
As I said apples and oranges.
> I do not see a single human (or other eukaryote) only in terms of its own DNA + epigenetic meta-programming over the DNA base, but also in terms of the ecosystem that exists within.
That is where we differ and I think that is your fundamental error, you believe you must understand everything before you can understand anything, in other words you do what is becoming increasingly fashionable these days, you reject reductionism in spite of it having worked so spectacularly well during the last 400 years. I don't.
John K Clark
If you need to saw a piece of lumber don’t use a hammer. Just because one tool – reductionism has had spectacular success in increasing our understanding (and I am not denying that it has) does not mean that it is always the appropriate tool to use for the job.
In understanding the workings of complex multi-actor systems reductionist approach has not produced spectacular results. A systems approach is required as well – to complement the understanding of the parts with a different kind of understanding of the dynamic working of the whole.
Surely this is important for something like understanding consciousness and self-aware intelligence.
Brent
Chris de Morsella
From: everyth...@googlegroups.com [mailto:everyth...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of meekerdb
Sent: Wednesday, September 03, 2014 4:54 AM
To: everyth...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: AI Dooms Us
On 9/2/2014 10:35 PM, 'Chris de Morsella' via Everything List wrote:
From: everyth...@googlegroups.com [mailto:everyth...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of John Clark
Sent: Tuesday, September 02, 2014 6:58 AM
To: everyth...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: AI Dooms Us
On Mon, Sep 1, 2014 at 2:45 PM, 'Chris de Morsella' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:
>> Amazing isn’t it. The elegance of self-assembling processes that can do so much with so little input.
Yes, very amazing!
> I doubt 1000 lines of computer code is a large enough initial instruction set even for a highly self-generating system.
My intuition would say that you're right but my intuition would also say that 750 Meg is not enough information to make a human baby, and yet we know for a fact that it is. So I must conclude that our intuition is not very good in matters of this sort.
Point taken, but then a human baby is a plastic template for the individual to emerge in; a fully formed adult human only develops after decades of experience and learning. All of that living experience and cultural learning is not contained inside that DNA bundle.
I disagree with your conclusion that epigenetic effects are of minor consequence. For example a fetus developing in a low stress nourishing environment will during embryogenesis – or so I am arguing – develop into a different human being than that same child in an alternate universe where it is exposed to high stress and low nourishment. The very rapid unfolding sequence of DNA choreographed events that occurs during embryogenesis will unfold in a different manner in each instance.
The rapidity of unfolding isn't really relevant to the information required.
It is not the rapidity – though embryogenesis is certainly rapid. What I am pointing out is that epigenetic mechanisms alter which DNA actually gets expressed. Instead of sequence A, sequence B becomes expressed.
Just think what you're saying from an information standpoint. At the most simplistic level, stress (whatever that is for a fetus?) and nourishment are two bits. Realistically it's maybe a half dozen bits. For those few bits to make a significant difference in the baby can only happen if those significant differences are already encoded in the DNA and the epigenetic bits are just "picking out" one from another.
Exactly – but if one looks at the underlying original information in the DNA as also being a dictionary of coding stretches – amongst other things. Epigenetics (and the OS of the DNA itself for that matter that until recently was dismissively called junk DNA) would function in a similar manner selecting already existing words from a dictionary of words in order to assemble them into meaningful sentences and paragraphs. Is the information content of the resulting final output reducible to the word definitions contained in the dictionary.
It is all in the sequencing. No doubt – and it is clearly so – an organisms DNA also contains this kind of coding as well that switches on and off sequences, but it also seems to be true that epigenetic factors – that is factors that are external to the DNA itself can also control the expressed sequence.
Given the vagueness of things like "stress" it's hard to see how they can be factors distinguishable from random effects like cosmic rays. Are there more epigenetic effects in Denver and Mexico City?
Given the subtlety in which it operates epigenetic effects are for the most part being discerned using statistical means to find correlations between expressed phenotypes and common conditions. For example the recent study that showed that there are inherited epigenetic effects on the grandchildren of grandmothers who smoked tobacco while their children were developing in their wombs.
Time will tell… eventually (and perhaps soon) I believe we will crack this code operating over the code. That I believe provides life with a key ability to respond – in a genetic manner to rapidly mutating environments. It is an extra mechanism that works hand I hand with DNA switching expression on and off… selecting from alternate exressions.
Implying there are alternate expressions already coded in that 750Mb.
>>> The same strand of DNA, depending on the dynamic action of the large number of transcription factors
>> A transcription factors is just a protein that binds to specific DNA sequences. And where did the information come from to know what sequence of amino acids will build that very important protein? From the original 750 Meg of course.
> From that original bundle of genetic code + environmental influences.
>>I don't know what you're talking about.
I am talking about epigenetic environmentally driven processes both acting to control – to a degree -- which regions of DNA get expressed, and how these regions finally get transcribed into mRNA, in what is a highly dynamic process occurring within the cell’s nucleus -- with much snipping and splicing taking place on the underlying original copy of the DNA being transcribed. Out of this process occurring within the nucleus emerges the resulting mRNA that ultimately is sent out to the ribosomes (where further front line editing may be taking place,)
What a protein can do is a function of it's shape, and the shape of a transcription factor, just like any other protein, is entirely determined by its amino acid sequence, and that is entirely determined by the Messenger RNA sequence, and that is entirely determined by the DNA sequence in the genome. Proteins with the same amino acid sequence always fold up in exactly the same way, at least under all environmental conditions found inside living cells. Yes if environmental conditions are very extreme, if things are very hot or the pH is super high or super low the protein can become denatured and fold up into weird useless shapes, but such conditions are always fatal to life so it's irrelevant. Under all lifelike conditions proteins always fold up in the exact same way.
> 90% of the living things in a human body DO NOT have human DNA not by weight of course but by census
Our primary interest around here is the brain and what the brain does, mind; and I don't see the relevance bacteria have to that. But if you want to include the genome of E coli that's fine, there's plenty of unused space on that CD for it.
There are a heck of lot more species inhabiting our guts than just one or two species of E coli. They perform many services, including it is being discovered working very closely with our own immune systems to warn their human host of the presence of pathogens.
Yet "bubble boys" that are born with dysfunctional immune systems and are kept in sterile environments seem perfectly human.
And die soon after they leave their bubble. Survival of the fittest does not work in binary terms – yes/no. Say a randomly distributed group A has just a 1% survival advantage over another group B; they begin with a 50/50 distribution in the population, but over many generations selective pressure will favor group A and it will begin to spread and become predominant.
A human with a healthy biotic meta-immune system in their gut has a higher chance of surviving than a human with a ravaged and parasite infested gut micro biotic flora & fauna. Candida leads to cancer (statistically speaking).
> The kind of flora and fauna we have in our guts in many ways determines who we are, what we think and what we desire.
So the key to consciousness and the factor that determines our personal identity lies in our poo?
If you want to characterize your digestive process by what is defecated out as waste I think you must not have a good grasp of what the digestive process is all about. It is our primary interface with the external world. It is the interface where we absorb the external world into our bodies internal world. It even has its own tiny frontline brain – the enteric nervous system.
You think that the cravings for sugary foods, that the depression that often occurs in sugar addicted people when they do not feed their habit is purely human in origin and that the candida yeast that such persons are often infested with has absolutely no role in this? There are numerous amazing animal studies that prove that parasite species can control the behavior of their hosts – even to the extent of making their hosts engage in behavior that is designed to get them eaten as certain parasitic species do to insects they have infected (in the Amazon I believe) making the host insects climb to the exposed tops of the leaves where they become easy prey for birds of the species that is the next host species in that parasites life cycle.
Just because a thought pops up in the brain does not mean that the mind is the executive actor at the root of the desire or emotion. Parasites have evolved very sophisticated chemical signaling that they use to influence their hosts.
> It affects out well-being
So would an inflamed toenail, but I don't think a investigation of that affliction will bring much enlightenment on the nature of intelligence or consciousness.
Apples and oranges. The internal chemical signaling that parasites engage in to harness a hosts immune system or affect its mental state is the evolved mechanism by which these parasitic species have learned to control their hosts. An inflamed toenail is a wound and the pain is the organisms own nervous system response.
As I said apples and oranges.
> I do not see a single human (or other eukaryote) only in terms of its own DNA + epigenetic meta-programming over the DNA base, but also in terms of the ecosystem that exists within.
That is where we differ and I think that is your fundamental error, you believe you must understand everything before you can understand anything, in other words you do what is becoming increasingly fashionable these days, you reject reductionism in spite of it having worked so spectacularly well during the last 400 years. I don't.
John K Clark
If you need to saw a piece of lumber don’t use a hammer. Just because one tool – reductionism has had spectacular success in increasing our understanding (and I am not denying that it has) does not mean that it is always the appropriate tool to use for the job.
In understanding the workings of complex multi-actor systems reductionist approach has not produced spectacular results. A systems approach is required as well – to complement the understanding of the parts with a different kind of understanding of the dynamic working of the whole.
A systems approach is not a holistic approach. It's still reduction plus synthesis. I'd say holism has never produced any results. What people sometimes cite as holistic is really abstracting the parts of a system in a different way, e.g. thermodynamics just worked with controllable variables and neglected molecules.
I am an advocate of use the best tool for the job. A systems approach does make use of reductionism, but it adds something different, a different optic perhaps. It looks at the dynamic functioning whole (while also relying on the best understanding of the fundamental parts). So yes, I agree with you, the systems approach is not antithetical to the reductionist approach. It is a different focus and viewpoint… a stepping back to study the dynamic processes as they interact within the system being studied.
Surely this is important for something like understanding consciousness and self-aware intelligence.
Yet, on Bruno's theory, consciousness is a binary attribute, all-or-nothing. Intelligence has degrees and is no doubt relative environment and context, but not consciousness (Although I disagree with Bruno on this, I think it may be semantic difference since we seem to agree that there are qualitatively different kinds of consciousness).
Brent
Consciousness seems more like a fuzzy emergent phenomena to me that has no hard binary line between not being present and being present. For example, for the sake of argument, suppose it is absent in a single ant; however when one steps back to look at the ant colony as a whole and how adaptive and intelligent its behavior can be, the ant colony as an entity seems rather more conscious.
Consciousness seems very much to be an emergent phenomena – IMO.
John Clark
> on Bruno's theory, consciousness is a binary attribute, all-or-nothing. Intelligence has degrees
Quentin Anciaux
On Wed, Sep 3, 2014 at 7:54 AM, meekerdb <meek...@verizon.net> wrote:
> on Bruno's theory, consciousness is a binary attribute, all-or-nothing. Intelligence has degreesIf that is true (and I'm not saying it is) then we can immediately conclude that Bruno's theory is wrong because we know for a fact
from personal experience that consciousness does come in degrees just as intelligence does.
John K Clark
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John Clark
>a human baby is a plastic template for the individual to emerge in
And those 1000 lines of Lisp are a plastic template for the Jupiter Brain to emerge in.
> All of that living experience and cultural learning is not contained inside that DNA bundle.
> I disagree with your conclusion that epigenetic effects are of minor consequence.
> The very rapid unfolding sequence of DNA choreographed events that occurs during embryogenesis will unfold in a different manner in each instance.
> It is an extra mechanism that works hand I hand with DNA switching expression on and off… selecting from alternate exressions.
> how these regions finally get transcribed into mRNA, in what is a highly dynamic process
> If you want to characterize your digestive process by what is defecated out as waste I think you must not have a good grasp of what the digestive process is all about. It is our primary interface with the external world. It is the interface where we absorb the external world into our bodies internal world. It even has its own tiny frontline brain – the enteric nervous system.>> So the key to consciousness and the factor that determines our personal identity lies in our poo?
>>> It affects out well-being
>> So would an inflamed toenail, but I don't think a investigation of that affliction will bring much enlightenment on the nature of intelligence or consciousness.
> Apples and oranges
> Just because one tool – reductionism has had spectacular success in increasing our understanding (and I am not denying that it has) does not mean that it is always the appropriate tool to use for the job.